Billecart-Salmon NV Brut Rose Gift Boxed

Tyson Stelzer, The Champagne Guide

Billecart's non-vintage rosé is an exceedingly elegant style, built on a very different blend to its Brut Réserve. The restraint and minerality of chardonnay takes the lead (40%), with each of the pinots comprising 30%. Just seven to eight percent pinot noir red wine from Mareuil-sur-Aÿ adds more aromatic effect than colour, producing a wine that Antoine likes to refer to as "champagne rosé" rather than "rosé champagne." He takes delight in recalling a tasting in which he poured the wine for sommeliers in black glasses. Not one identified it as a rosé. Billecart's classic, pale salmon hue introduces a wine of gorgeous aromatic purity, the perfume of rose petals and subtlety of strawberry hull (where the strawberry meets the stalk). The palate adds a suggestion of fresh raspberry, carrying forward long and linear with lingering, fine, chalky minerality.