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Vintage Dom raises a glass to class

Champagne flutes are pushed aside as a legendary winemaker uncorks his latest 'harmonious' vintage.

Jeni Port

Taste test: Master blender Richard Geoffroy is maintaining the traditions of his Benedictine forebear Brother Pierre Perignon.
Taste test: Master blender Richard Geoffroy is maintaining the traditions of his Benedictine forebear Brother Pierre Perignon.Supplied

Richard Geoffroy, the man behind Dom Perignon, is nicknamed ''the monk''. As the person responsible for the making of Dom Perignon these past 23 years, Geoffroy has taken on the habits, so to speak, of the great Benedictine monk Brother Pierre Perignon, who toiled so obsessively establishing the reputation for the great champagne in the 1670s.

Perignon was a master blender. So, too, is Geoffroy. Perignon is said to have had almost superhuman olfactory abilities - or at least that's the story handed down with three centuries of public-relations licence.

Geoffroy, too, has a fantastic nose, very Gallic and very astute, but importantly - remarkably - he also has a photographic memory.

He never makes a note while tasting, retasting and then re-re-tasting 100 base wines of pinot noir and chardonnay to drill down to the central core of between 30 and 50 wines that will form the basis of each vintage release of Dom. He says he doesn't need tasting notes to keep tabs on individual wines, arguing words don't come close to describing his feelings.

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''A word is already a translation of something, so you have already lost the process,'' he says cryptically. ''It's better to have it totally mental.

''It's the way I work. Many winemakers see wine as two-dimensional; I see it as three-dimensional.''

Memories of every vintage he has been responsible for are securely embedded behind his forehead, deep inside, and when information is called upon, it is ''unloaded''. If it takes any form, it more than likely resembles a diagram. You'd have to say this is not your usual garden-variety winemaker, even for France.

Indeed, Geoffroy's brain could be a celebration in itself. His first degree was in medicine before he turned to winemaking. He says he should have been an architect. At 59, he can probably still fit it in. As the face of Dom Perignon, he travels the world working with superstar chefs and artists - he recently collaborated with American artist Jeff Koons to design a limited-release bottle of Dom Perignon '03 - raising the wine's already high-end exclusivity profile to that of something nearing a French national hero. It's an astounding feat of salesmanship, not that he admits to being a seller of anything. That would be declasse.

On the new-release 2004 Dom Perignon, for which he recently scheduled a flying visit to Melbourne and dinner at Vue de Monde to celebrate, Geoffroy flicks through his memory index to download a picture of a relatively easygoing vintage. Easygoing, that is, compared with the previous year.

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The heat of 2003 was problematic: so much so there was some surprise when Dom declared the vintage worthy of a release.

Dom is only made as a vintage champagne; there is no non-vintage, and a list of the past decades of Dom Perignon vintages shows holes where 2001, 1997 and 1994 just weren't up to Geoffroy's standards.

The 2003 harvest proved to be very ripe, producing a fuller version of Dom, and to some, it's just a little forward. It is far from my favourite Dom and so very far from the sublime 2002. The 2004 brings a return to a finer, more graceful expression of Dom with a youthful raciness that drives the wine through the mouth and layer after layer of flavour.

It's a stunning achievement for a nine-year-old, and its life is just beginning.

''The beauty of '04 is that it was naturally coherent and harmonious,'' the winemaker says. ''In '03 I had to work harder, you understand: voila; whereas, you know, '04 was a case of stepping back.''

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Geoffroy believes in climate change. He says he's seeing it first hand in Champagne. Vintages such as 2003, he believes, will be coming along more often in the future and he intends not to fight them.

''When you are that marginal in climate to the growing of grapes, you know, the warming tends to be tolerable, even positive,'' he says.

''If I am offered a greater potential for ripeness, I'm just going for it instead of being really uptight and trying to restrain the whole thing. I'm not afraid of ripeness.''

Riper fruit generally translates into lower acidity, which dominoes down to a champagne's structure and then potential ageing ability. Under-ripeness has the opposite effect.

Still, with a vintage wine we want the vintage to show through. The debate ends there. But Geoffroy isn't finished. If he's relaxed about the effect of climate change, he is far from comfortable when it comes to the traditional flute-shaped glass for champagne. He detests it.

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For the launch of the '04 Dom he requested a wide-mouthed, big-bowled burgundy-style glass. The lively mousse of '04, so energetic and straight, died quickly but still he insists champagne isn't just about the bubble.

He argues if it's to be taken seriously, and here I suggest there are some people who don't always take champagne too seriously (such as winning Formula One drivers), it has to be put in a serious wine glass.

To Geoffroy, we taste what we see. ''If you see a wine in a narrow glass, it will taste narrow,'' he says. Yes, it might taste narrow but, in a wide burgundy glass, it also risks losing a pulse. A chat with sommeliers would suggest the Riedel chianti glass is a better bet. But the soundness of Geoffroy's argument still stands.

The whole of Dom Perignon is by far greater than the sum of its parts.

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