Pigeons learn quicker.

How on earth did I not realise? Honestly, I just thought that everyone saw images of people, food, and places, or heard music when they tasted wine. Then I just thought that I was weird, which I am, but that is by the by. In the end, it took several tastings with the winemaker of Cristal, a wine I have been acquainted with for over 20 years, for me to realise that there was something fun and weird going on.

My love affair with Louis Roederer Cristal goes back to 2000 when I worked at Teatro in Leeds, a private members’ bar and restaurant. I had the glorious task of compiling the wine list, so, unsurprisingly, the bubbles selection was on point. The then-manager of Leeds United FC, David O’Leary used to leave us a third of a bottle of Cristal as a tip. It was a glorious time for vintage champagne, with an abundance of 1988, 1990, and 1992 vintages lurking around, as well as exceptional wines and years.

Cristal, to me, tastes like dancing and couture. Structured and magical. I have been fortunate enough for several years to spend time tasting with Roederer’s Cellar Master J-B Lecaillon talking about his wines and Cristal in particular. Listening to him talk made me think about the world beyond the technical. Since moving to Australia, it has taken time to adjust to the focus being so strongly on the technical and production side of it, but here was a fellow European speaking so poetically about wine. He had every technical detail covered, J-B knew every inch of the vineyards and every moment of the production process but there was magic in his words.

It took a few of these tastings for me to realise that not everyone sees pictures and images of tasting wine, but J-B was describing the things that I see when I taste Cristal. If you read my reviews on Wine Front, they lean towards the whimsical with more than a heavy input of haute couture, precision and creativity in one place. To me, the 2015 Cristal looks like this;

And it tastes like this:

Very lively on the nose, with fresh lemon juice, peach blossom, rose, sherbet, freshly sliced green apple and uncooked flaky pastry. 

This wine is such a baby but has a sheer elegance on the palate, showing fresh, nectarines, hazelnuts, clean acidity, and youthful with a tickle of oak that ties it all together. The salinity of this is glorious and for such a youthful wine, there is a moreishness that hints of the almost perfect balance, a lively yet serious wine. This is definitely one of the best Cristal I’ve had in my memory and seems to have achieved the balance of freshness, precision, purity and complexity that J-B strives for. The wine has what seems like incredibly high acidity but the secret of Cristal is the low pH and only 5.2 bars of pressure. Any higher and the integration starts to become disjointed.

2015 was a challenging vintage, incredibly dry but the deep roots of the vines ear marked for Cristal were a lifesaver. J-B referred to this as being very similar to the 1952 Cristal Rosé in its beauty, harvest even started on exactly the same day. Embracing an array of winemaking approaches, there is no malolactic fermentation, a stint on lees and the wine was racked very young to keep the lightness and finesse in the wine, no sulphur in the Chardonnay, it is kept oxidative, doing this with the Pinot Noir leads to rich, caramelised flavours in the final wine.

Roederer have put aside 70 plots for the production of Cristal, 25 of these are under 20 years old and not yet ready to be a Cristal vineyard. Of the remaining 45 plots, all of them were last used in the infamous 2002 vintage and again in 2015, a full estate of Cristal is present in this wine.

58% Pinot Noir, 42% Chardonnay 25% in oak, 7gl dosage. 

You can read the legendary Mike Bennie’s review of Louis Roederer Cristal 2015 over on The Wine Front,(paywall), you can also enjoy the Sparkling & Couture Pinterest board that I have been adding dresses to for years without realising that they look like wines I have tasted.

I’ve only just started working with the amazing Dr Lila Landowski, to learn more about synesthesia and the brain. I am not sure what it all means yet, but Cristal has been the beginning of my understanding that synesthesia explains an element of alchemy in wine for me. A Venn diagram overlap of art and science that becomes a third magical thing. Come with me on this journey, it’s going to be delicious, fun and very, very interesting.