Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne 2014

It is a radiant Cristal champagne that is emerging, already quite a charmer yet still with such immense potential ahead of it. Of Domaine Cristal’s 45 historical vineyard plots, only 39 were selected to go into the final blend this year, those in which the grapes reflected the true identity of this unique wine: purity of fruit, remarkable finesse and elegant length.

Cristal owes this loyalty to the soil to its permanence. It is a wine that is rooted in the eternal, that of the seasons, a ripening cycle, a heritage and a quest. The quest for excellence, purity and harmony, to create a wine that vibrates in tune with its terroir and mirrors its qualities. All that remains is for the cellar master to adjust this resonance, to give the wine the most fitting ageing process to allow it to vibrate at the highest level.

2014 was a bright and sunny year in which the fruit and finesse were more radiant than we ever thought possible. This sunny vintage gave us a generous and well-ripened harvest of grapes which allowed us to craft a Cristal that is truer than ever to its identity.

The 2014 vintage has given us a more terroir style of wine than ever before, one in which the purity and excellent drainage properties of the chalk enabled us to mitigate the vagaries of the weather over the year. Gentle, increasingly eco-friendly sustainable growing techniques have resulted in a Cristal 2014 that shows us the ultimate balance between maturity and freshness.

The Cristal identity is unique, original and truly unlike any other in the history of the fine wines from the Champagne region. It is a wine of the soil, a wine of depth, a wine of the land yet turned to the light, reaching for the heavens that it almost seems to touch. Cristal is a wine of evolution, a wine that continues to reveal itself to us, slowly and gradually as it ages, to unveil a very different side to itself and the true extent of its unique personality.

Every new vintage reveals the unmistakable Cristal character although through a very different prism each time, a kaleidoscope of flavours and textures, a palette of nuances.