Larmandier-Bernier

The Free Bacchus Story

Pierre Larmandier’s father died suddenly in 1982, while Pierre was finishing school. His mother ran the estate through his studies and he took it over in 1988, at an age when most people in Champagne are still working for somebody else.

What he runs is a grower, not a house. A Champagne house buys fruit off hundreds of hectares and blends towards a consistent style; a grower farms his own chalk and bottles his own harvest, so the wine tastes of a place rather than of a recipe. The vines sit in the grand cru villages of Cramant, Oger and Avize and the premier cru of Vertus, and one mid-slope parcel there, Les Barillers, has been vinified on its own since 1995.

The farming went biodynamic well before the paperwork did. Demeter biodynamic and EU organic certification have both been held since 2004.

Dosage is the giveaway. Very little sugar goes in at the end and Terre de Vertus goes in with none at all, which only works if the fruit ripened properly in the first place. There is nothing left to hide behind.

Around eight per cent of Champagne is certified organic. In a region that sells consistency, a fully biodynamic grower is a structural outlier rather than a stylistic preference.