Cristal is the prestige cuvée of Champagne house Louis Roederer. While its popularity among celebrities and the Jetset serves to deliver an aura of bling and ostentation, Cristal’s superlative quality is irrefutable. Yet one cannot always pick and choose each and every member of an audience. Given the preponderance of fine wine drinkers increasingly spanning a multitude of cultures and demographics newer to the scene, it is unwise to even think of doing so. Roederer’s owner Frédéric Rouzaud, the seventh generation of the family, knows this only too well.

 

When Rouzaud made a statement condemning his brand’s popularity among the hip-hop community (‘What can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it.’), rapper and mogul Jay Z perceived the comment as racist and established rival house Armand de Brignac in retaliation. Seen through a lens on qualitative terms, there is no comparison. Cristal remains the tsunami to a shore break, leaving other Champagne in its wake, while consistently delivering the most compelling drinking experience of any. Let’s take a closer look at the paradox of appearance and intrinsics of excellence that define Cristal, perhaps the most misunderstood of any Champagne.

To truly understand Cristal, one must examine the culture at Louis Roederer. Roederer is a family-owned house going back seven generations. Founded in 1776 as Dubois Père et Fils, it acquired its present name in 1833, when Louis Roederer himself took charge. From the 1870s, under the reins of Louis Roederer II, the house began exporting its wines to the United States and Russia, then the largest market in the world for Champagne. Tsar Alexandre II found the wine fetching, and Roederer designed Cristal, Champagne’s first prestige cuvée, in his honour. The bottles were then made of lead crystal, thus the name. As legend has it, the transparent bottle without any tint or punt was designed to be aesthetically pleasing, but to also ensure that any explosive hidden within by anti-royalist factions could be easily spotted. Cristal became available to the public in 1945. Today, volume is just north of 400,000 bottles, a drop in the ocean compared to the several million bottles of Dom Pérignon produced each year.

According to Peter Liem, possibly the finest commentator on Champagne, Roederer is today the greatest producer in the region and ‘a model 21st Century Champagne’. Guided by Rouzaud and his fellow emissaries, the house strives for a better future. It is the largest biodynamic vineyard holder in all of Champagne, placing it amidst vocal proponents, largely in the fashionable récoltant-manipulant (or ‘grower’) category. These include sommelier darlings Larmandier-Bernier, David Léclepart and Vouette et Sorbée.

It is no secret that Roederer is officially a negociant like the other Grandes Marques, supplementing the fruit from the vineyards it owns with purchased grapes to ensure stylistic consistency while driving volume. And yet the only cuvée that this applies to is the non-vintage Brut Premier. Every other cuvée, Cristal included, is hewn of grapes from Roederer’s own vineyards, ensuring maximum control over the practice and quality of viticulture. It is better to consider Roederer a large estate above anything else.

Roederer aggressively seeks vineyard acquisitions, with current holdings at 240 hectares of vines, all in grand and premier cru villages. Its holdings are responsible for in excess of 65 percent of its total production. Moreover, Roederer is experimental, flamboyant and, more often than not, one step ahead of the pack. Witness its Brut Nature cuvée and strategies to combat a warming climate, including lower dosage levels, an increasing—albeit judicious—use of oak, and the house’s holistic approach to sustainability with biodynamics at its core.

Biodynamic trials were commenced in 2000, initiating a seven year ‘cleaning period’ of the soils, according to cellar master Jean-Baptise Lécaillon, before a full conversion of the first vineyards in 2007. In excess of 75 hectares of Roederer’s holdings are biodynamic. Call it maniacal, but during the trial period, each biodynamic plot was neighboured by an organic plot, with experimental wines made from each. Comparative tastings consistently supported the quality of the former. Today, every grape used for Cristal is biodynamically farmed. Rather than following any recipe or prescribed ordinance in order to achieve formal certification, Lécaillon and team listen to the soil.

For Cristal, as with other cuvées under the Roederer aegis, each parcel of fruit is fermented separately. What makes this fruit truly unique, however, is not merely the splendiferous grands crus sources of Avize, Cramant, le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Verzenay, Verzy, Beaumont-sur-Vesle and Äy, together with the ersatz grand cru, Mareuil-sur-Äy, but the fact that a strict selection of older sub-parcels within these crus—limited to those comprised purely of chalk—determines what goes into Cristal, and what is culled for use in other cuvées farther down the line.

Cristal’s varietal split is invariably around 60 percent pinot noir, the remainder chardonnay. As with all Champagnes at Roederer but for the Brut Premier, malolactic fermentation is eschewed in the pursuit of freshness. Around 30 percent is handled in oak, while lees ageing of circa six-years is comparatively short for a Champagne of this calibre. As the house has historically quipped, this is because Cristal is a ‘vintage wine’ (rather than a vintage Champagne), destined for 20 to 30 years in one’s cellar, depending on the vintage conditions for any given release. Cristal Rosé, too, is the finest expression of the idiom in the region. It is a similar blend of varieties, albeit with a juicy dollop of pinot noir sourced from the renowned single vineyards of Bonotte Pierre Robert and Gargeotte in Äy, and made in the saignée method. These were mentioned by André Julien in his attempt to classify the topography of Champagne—the very first—in 1816.

For the record, 1988 Cristal Rosé, an apotheosis of exotic kaleidoscopic complexities, remains the single greatest Champagne I have ever tasted. As I write this, the memory gives me goosebumps, attesting to its grandeur. Cristal is a confluence of prescient thinking, accreted wisdom and superlative fruit. It is a Champagne of power and eternally spellbinding chalky elegance.