Gosset

Gosset is the oldest wine house in Champagne, established by Pierre Gosset in 1584, and one of the smallest of the Grande Marque producers. It stayed in family hands throughout, the Gosset family selling to the Cointreau family in 1994; Jean-Pierre Cointreau is president today and Odilon de Varine makes the wines.

The house owns barely a hectare of vineyard and instead works with more than 200 growers across some seventy villages, giving the cellar an unusually wide palette of chalk-grown fruit to blend from. Around seventy individual parcels are fermented separately in small stainless steel tanks, and, the signature decision here, malolactic conversion is never allowed. That is what gives Gosset its particular tension and vinosity.

Ageing is long by any standard. The Grande Réserve spends more than four years on lees rather than the three the region requires, then a further six months in the cellars after bottling before it is released; the prestige cuvées can sit for fifteen years or more. The bottles themselves are distinctive, heavy, dark and antique in shape, unique to the house. Production is about 90,000 dozen.