SommSelect – Wine Shop – Fran\u00e7ois Lecompte, Premier Cru Brut Mill\u00e9sime Rilly-la-Montagne, Champagne, France 2013<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cSourced from Premier Cru Rilly-la-Montagne and aged on lees for over seven years before release, Lecompte\u2019s luxurious 2013 mill\u00e9sime is a stunning achievement with a seemingly impossible $50 price tag.\u201d
\nIan Cauble, Master Sommelier<\/p>\n
There are more than 15,000 grape growers in the Champagne region, a majority of whom sell their grapes to cooperatives or the larger \u201cGrandes Marques\u201d which produce over two-thirds of all champagne. As I\u2019ve noted before, grower champagnes are catnip to sommeliers, the Davids to the Goliaths. Lecompte is the ultimate example of \u201cgrower champagne\u201d and the antithesis of mass-produced, big-ticket Champagne: Founded back in 1876 in the Montagne de Reims village of Rilly, this small estate has been farmed\/owned by the Lecompte family since day one. Today, proprietor Fran\u00e7ois Lecompte works in a cellar hand dug by his grandfather, producing a small, incredibly value-driven lineup of Premier Cru wines.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, Lecompte focuses on sustainable farming in his vineyards and exceptionally long aging in the cellar before releasing his wines. Today\u2019s 2013 Brut Mill\u00e9sime is a roughly equal blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Meunier, all culled from family-owned vines in Rilly-la-Montagne\u2014a top Premier Cru village in the midst of several Grand Crus. The first-press juice underwent a spontaneous alcoholic and malolactic fermentation before spending over seven years aging in Lecompte\u2019s chalky caves. It was disgorged with a six-gram dosage.<\/p>\n
The result is the kind of brioche-y, creamily textured Champagne you\u2019d expect from such a prestigious terroir and time-consuming process. This energetic, yellow-gold elixir releases a generous outpouring of quince, white peach, Meyer lemon, ripe yellow apples, toasted hazelnut, acacia, honeysuckle, toasted bread, heaps of crushed-stone minerality, and hints of tropical fruit. It truly is a generous, toasty Champagne designed to delight hedonists now and over the next 3-5 years. Just imagine: When you pull the cork on a bottle in 2025, this dozen-year-old Premier Cru will be spilling out ultra-savory, luxurious layers, and then you\u2019ll remember it was only $50\u2014now that\u2019s hard to beat!<\/p>\n
Country France RegionChampagne \/ Montagne de Reims Sub-Region Rilly-la-Montagne Soil Limestone & Chalk Farming Sustainable\u00a0 DrinkingNow-2028<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
La presse am\u00e9ricaine honore le Champagne Fran\u00e7ois Lecompte BRUT Mill\u00e9sime 2013 D\u00e9couvrez l’article du tr\u00e8s influent SommSelect en Californie, USA : SommSelect – Wine Shop – Fran\u00e7ois…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11177"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11208,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11177\/revisions\/11208"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.champagne-lecompte.fr\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}