Larmandier-Bernier

Pierre Larmandier came home to Vertus in 1988, after business school in Nantes, to work alongside his mother after his father's early death. The same year he married Sophie, an engineer by training, from Avize. Together they took the estate down a path that ran against the way Champagne was farmed at the time.

The families behind the name have worked vines since 1765. Pierre's great-grandfather Jules, and then Jules's son Philippe Allyre, supplied Paris restaurants such as La Tour d'Argent and Taillevent from the 1950s. The house as it is named today dates to 1971, when Pierre's parents, Philippe Larmandier and Elisabeth Bernier, who owned vineyards in Vertus, founded Larmandier-Bernier and built their cellar in Vertus.

Pierre gave up herbicides, and in 1999 the whole estate went over to biodynamic farming, with fermentations on indigenous yeasts and the first wines made in oak. Today the family farms about 19 hectares, more than 90% Chardonnay with some Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, with vines 35 years old on average. The vineyards are in Vertus, a premier cru, and in grand crus to the north, among them Cramant, Avize and Oger. No grapes are bought in.

In the cellar, each cru and each plot is vinified separately in Stockinger casks and wooden vats. The wines spend about eleven months on their lees without racking or filtration, which the family sums up as making wine before making bubbles. A chai built in 2010 lets the whole harvest mature in wood, and a new one in 2025 allows longer ageing in oak. Dosage stays at a few grams at most.

Their sons have joined: Arthur in 2017, and Georges in 2021, after three years as an aeronautical engineer.

More than two centuries of vines came before Pierre. What changed in 1988 was not the address but the attitude.