All producers
Jacques Selosse
Côte des Blancs, France5 wines4.4 avg
41
Anselme Selosse's Avize domaine, about 8 ha of Chardonnay farmed and vinified like Burgundy since 1974; the grower who changed what a grower's Champagne was supposed to be, now in the hands of his son Guillaume.
Anselme Selosse came home to Avize from his studies in Burgundy and made his first harvest in 1974 with a heresy in his luggage: that a Champagne grower should think about terroir, ripeness and oak the way a Burgundian does, and that quantity was never the point. He was not the first grower to bottle his own wine, plenty had before him; he was the one who changed what a grower's wine was supposed to be. Fifty years on, half the region's growers owe him something.
The estate is close to 8 ha in and around Avize, on the Côte des Blancs, nearly all Chardonnay. The farming moved by trial and error, from agro-biology to biodynamics to a system of his own, shaped by the idea of non-action he took from Masanobu Fukuoka: watch, wait, intervene as little as the vineyard allows. He picks later than his neighbours so the fruit is ripe enough to need no chaptalisation, ferments with indigenous yeasts and raises the wines in small oak barrels, and the result is vinous and concentrated where the region's habit was light and neutral.
Alongside the Champagnes he keeps a quieter hobby: fortified grape musts in the old ratafia manner, left in cask for years, from Il était une fois in 1997 to L'Autre Même, the second one, bottled in 2022 with his son Guillaume. Guillaume now carries the domaine, and Anselme's influence has long since left the cellar; a generation of growers broke with the region's conventions after tasting what he had done with his.
