Concept
Millésime
Vintage Champagne from a single harvest year. Minimum 36 months on the lees required. The counterpart of non-vintage (NV), which blends across years.
What it is
Millésime is the French term for vintage: a Champagne made from grapes of one specific harvest year. The year is shown on the label (2012, 2015, 2018). The opposite is non-vintage or NV: a blend from multiple years, usually built around a base year plus reserve wines.
Under Comité Champagne rules a vintage can contain at most 80 percent juice from the named year. Between 80 and 100 percent there is room for blending with reserve wines, although in practice many houses use 100 percent to show the vintage character cleanly.
When
Not every year becomes a vintage. A house only declares a millésime when the harvest is good enough to either transcend or fully represent the house style. Weak or inconsistent years go entirely into the NV blend.
For example: Krug declared 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2006. Bollinger made La Grande Année in 1996, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2012, 2014. Salon (vintage only) bottles two or three times per decade.
Required ageing
The Comité Champagne sets minimum lees ageing times:
- Non-vintage: 15 months total ageing, 12 of which on the lees
- Vintage: 36 months on the lees (three full years)
Top producers go substantially longer. Dom Pérignon 2013 sits eight to ten years on the lees before release. Bollinger R.D. (“Récemment Dégorgé”) often twelve to fifteen.
In the glass
A vintage Champagne shows the harvest in its purest form: ripeness, acidity, climate pattern of that specific year. No house style smoothing everything across years. Hot years (2003, 2018, 2020) yield riper, fuller wines; cooler years (2008, 2014) offer more tension and longer cellaring.
Vintage calendar per house
Some houses declare nearly every year (Vilmart). Others deliberately selective (Krug, Bollinger, Salon). The rarity of a declaration tells you something about the philosophy: house style above vintage versus vintage above house style.