Bérêche et Fils

That’s how we felt in March 2010, wandering through the Salon des Vignerons Indépendants in Bordeaux. About 200 producers had come from every corner of France to pitch their wares to a well-heeled clientele. Our technique was as simple as our clothes: thrust a glass through each little throng and ask the producer in the middle for a taste of his cheapest wine. If that one’s good, it’s a great sign for the rest of his lineup. 

But the thing about requesting the cheap stuff is, well, usually you get what you ask for. And so it went as we made our way through the hall: no nuggets in sight.

Whether it was frustration or just plain fatigue, by the time we reached Raphaël Bérêche we were like robots going through motions. No sooner had this improbably young vigneron poured us some bubbles than we were already walking away, not even bothering to sniff until we reached the nearest spittoon. And then, bam! It was like a blast of wind bottled from a forgotten season! Frothy and creamy, roses and lindens, so fresh and so present. Where had this come from? And who had coaxed it under a cork?

Reversing course, we waved to the young man we’d scarcely registered before. This grower was still in his 20s and looked like he still might be learning how to use a comb. The scene was altogether too hectic, so we proposed visiting his home base in Ludes later in the week. Whether he actually took us seriously mattered less than his breezy reply: “Well, see you next Saturday,” he smiled, and so our relationship began with the Bérêche family—Raphaël, his brother Vincent, and their parents.

Now that every sommelier from the 8^th Arrondissement to the East Village has spent the last decade wrestling each other for allocations, Bérêche & Fils is among the most en vogue names in grower Champagne. But their fame matters far less than the creative drive that shattered the region’s complacent status quo. As we learned back in 2010, two factors were foundational to this pathbreaking project. 

One was the estate’s pedigree: the domaine was founded in the mid-1800s, so the Bérêches weren’t farming some obscure patch of Champagne’s outskirts but right in its historic heart in the Montagne de Reims and the Vallée de la Marne. And the family’s fifth generation had kept the holdings amazingly intact. “We never divided the estate,” Raphaël explains. “Each sister and brother keeps the vineyards for the Bérêche et Fils brand. We are very lucky, because like this we have large plots—so we can focus on the historic terroir, and the old vineyards. We have a clear view of each terroir.”

The second element, though, was a radical willingness to break with the past. “We’re part of a generation that learned some things at school, but we didn’t necessarily listen to what we learned,” Raphaël laughs, “because there was a disconnect between the terrain and what was being taught at school by 50-year-old professors.” Raphaël and Vincent—who replaced pesticides and herbicides with biodynamic methods in the vineyards—weren’t interested in the sort of formulaic blending that aimed for a monolithic house style. They wanted each of their parcels to sing its own song.

“The harvest is the last signature of the grower—and also for a winemaker,” Raphaël insists. “I really want the customer to smell and understand each terroir separately—each grand cru and premiere cru.”

With Vincent overseeing viticulture and Raphaël focusing on the cellar—each having spent years learning from their father, Jean-Pierre—the Bérêches chose Le Cran for their first single-vineyard vintage. Drawing Chardonnay from an eastern exposure and Pinot Noir from a western exposure across 1.3 hectares on the northern flank of the Montagne de Reims, they laid down a marker for the ultra-focused micro-cuvées to come. Perched at 220 meters on a 9 percent grade, Le Cran’s signature is its altitude. The late-ripening slope “means delicate freshness and delicate alcohol—it’s like stone and water,” in Raphaël’s apt description. Yet a full 78 months of élevage under cork give it a depth that distinguishes it from, say, the chiseled chalkiness of Les Beaux Regards, a 100% Chardonnay Ludes premiere cru whose 170-meter fruit gets a 36-month treatment; or the sotto voce florality and autumnal undertones of the unconventional 100% Pinot Meunier Rive Gauche. 

Across nearly a dozen bottlings, Bérêche & Fils expresses its distinctive sites with singular precision. Insofar as there’s a house style, it’s an emphasis on retaining the energy and purity of their impeccably farmed fruit by means of a few key decisions in the cellar. For most of the wines Raphaël prefers 300-liter barrels—purchased new, then washed with the last juice of the Chardonnay press before mellowing for a year—for the clean profile and maximal lees contact. (The cellar also sports enamel-lined cement tanks.) Malolactic fermentation is completely blocked, preserving bright beams of acidity while foregrounding minerality. No strangers to manual labor, they age en tirage under cork to enhance aromatic complexity, painstakingly disgorge each bottle by hand, and minimize dosage levels to preserve the character of each terroir.   

Yet for all the site-specific focus, there’s tremendous creativity at play as well. Perhaps the most riveting instance can be found in the Reflet d’Antan. Equal parts Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay from four lieux-dits across la Montagne de Reims and the Vallée de la Marne, this cuvée is also a kind of time machine. It begins with a “perpetual reserve” of 600-liter barrels begun in 1985 by Jean-Pierre. Each year his sons bottle two-thirds of the volume, and replace it with wine from the latest vintage. The richly layered result is a seamless combination of racy acids, spicy depths and saline length.

The Brut Réserve melds fruit from many of the same terroirs into a larger-production cuvée that’s compelling in its own right, especially given its relative accessibility. It blends the rich savoriness of Vallée de la Marne parcels (including from the recently purchased Aÿ Grand Cru) with the fine minerality that marks their Montagne de Reims holdings, achieving a nuanced wine full of energy and tension.

And their holdings have grown in recent years with the acquisition of several new terroirs. The largest among them are in Aÿ, where steeply sloped, southwest-oriented Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines are rooted in poor and shallow Campanian chalk. A gentle barrel fermentation followed by 6 and a half years sous liège results in liquid stone and wild berry aromatics with a formidably rich texture and spiced complexity that underscore a fusion of altitude and exposure. Forty-five-year-old vines in Cramant express a soft chalkiness exemplary of the Côte de Blancs. A 110-meter-high Ambonnay Grand Cru parcel delivers broad-shouldered yet lithe muscularity from 100% Pinot Noir. Three higher-elevation plots in Mailly-Champagne produce small-berried Pinot Noir of intense concentration; the Bérêche brothers channel that cool, late-ripening site into cuvée of bracing tautness and tang. Including 1.5 sunny, calcareous hectares in Trépail, the Bérêches have added 4.1 hectares across five Grand Cru and Premier Cru classifications since we first met Raphaël.

A rare combination of historical backbone and free-thinking mentality come together to distinguish this domaine. Fifteen years after we had the good fortune to catch the Bérêche brothers on the upswing, we can’t help feeling like the luckiest kind of prospectors of all: the ones who discover a pair of honest-to-god alchemists.