Bloomberg’s wine columnist Elin McCoy shared her 10 most memorable wines she tasted in 2021, including a rare bottling of Champagne Bollinger R.D. 1976. She explained that she had the opportunity to taste this wine as part of an online launch experience for “Bollinger’s lush, creamy textured, superb” R.D. 2007, whereby participants also “sipped two mystery vintages.”
Before delving into the specifics of the wine, she provides readers with some important background explaining that “R.D. stands for recently disgorged, the process of removing the yeast sediment in Champagne. A quick explainer: Champagne starts with a bottled base wine to which sugar and yeast are added to create a second fermentation in the bottle, which in turn creates the bubbles.” Continuing, she says, “Bollinger typically ages its R.D. in the bottle with the dead yeast cells (called lees) for more than a decade to gain richness before disgorging and re-corking. The longer the wine ages with the lees, the more brioche-y flavors and texture it gains.”
She explains the fun part next! “To my surprise, both mystery bottles turned out to be R.D. cuvées from 1976, the oldest vintage of R.D. I’d ever tried. Why did they taste so different when both were bottled at the same time? One was aged on the lees until it was disgorged six years ago; the other was aged even longer, and disgorged only six months ago.” Read the full story HERE
