Decanter

• By Georgina Hindle
  Top Crémants, 4/20/2021 (link)

  (NV Gilles & Romain Collet, Crémant de Bourgogne, Burgundy, France, White) Subscribe to see review text.

Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Bubble Bubble, 7/16/2018

  (NV Gilles Romain Collet Cremant de Bourgogne Brut) Hello friends. It has been *ages* since I’ve written a mixed bubbly offer. Dylan has been crushing the bubbles lately, and she’d probably be crushing this offer too, but for the fact that she happened to be on vacation when I tasted three out of these four wines. A good excuse for me to swoop back in and re-tell Full Pull’s bubble-flecked origin story. As the legend goes, when Full Pull started back in 2009, my wife and I developed a simple agreement. Her responsibility: supply several years of steady income and health insurance. My responsibility: keep at least a case of sparkling wine on hand at all times. Bubbly was good for celebrating the small victories, for drowning the sorrows of the small losses, and as much as our palate preferences have changed over the subsequent decade, sparkling wine has never gone out of fashion in our house (I just checked; six out of the nine bottles in our fridge at the moment are semi- to fully-sparkling). Today I want to feature a quartet of bubbly bottlings that have recently charmed: a pair from the PacNW, and a pair from Europe:I tasted this, absolutely loved it, and immediately set about figuring out why it was so damned good. Cremant de Bourgogne is a broad appellation, and likewise offers a broad range of quality, but this was spectacular. And as it turns out, the answer, as it often seems to be, was in the vineyards. The Collet family has been making wine in Chablis since 1792. So when they set out to make a sparkling wine, where do you think they sourced their Chardonnay. If you guessed estate fruit entirely from within the Chablis appellation, then ding-ding-ding! Because of French labeling laws, this can’t be labeled as Chablis, so it has to get the more generic Cremant label. But yes, this is all estate-grown Chardonnay from within Chablis, the wonderful, chalky, cool northern outpost of Burgundy. After 18 months on lees, this is disgorged with 6 g/L dosage. Right away, the nose betrays the origins, all lemony chalky-minerally goodness. That insistent minerality continues on the palate, which dazzles with its intensity, fruit impact, and palate saturation. Imagine a tensile Chablis ratcheted up another notch with the addition of bubbles, and you have this wine. It’s a new house favorite, and a recent pairing with porcini risotto is one of my better food-wine combos in recent memory.