JamesSuckling.com has published the Top 100 Wines of the World and the Wine of the Year 2023!

Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle, Grande Cuvée N.26 scored 100 points!

JamesSuckling.com

"We are celebrating this year’s JamesSuckling.com Top 100 Wines of the Year with a bottle of Champagne. It’s not just an incredible bottle of  Champagne, it’s the best wine we rated this year out of the almost 39,000 reviewed by myself and my team of seven tasters/editors. It is the largest number of wines we have ever reviewed in a year, beating last year’s record of about 32,000.

A significant amount of wines were rated in our office in Hong Kong, but most were tasted on the road during visits to countries and regions throughout the world, from France, Spain, and Italy to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, not to mention Argentina and Chile. We lost count of how many miles we racked up on flights or the literally hundreds of vineyards and winemakers we visited. It was hard work but we all loved it – learning, discovering, and tasting.

However, it was a July tasting in Champagne of the newest release of Laurent-Perrier’s Champagne Grand Siècle Grande Cuvée N.26 that inspired us the most in 2023. It is a sensational-quality bottle showing incredible texture, depth, and complexity. Its great structure will keep it fresh and vivid for a very long time, yet it is equally energetic and intense, highlighting its beauty now. Champagne producers have always said that their bottles are first great wines and then great Champagnes, and this is certainly the case with the Grand Siècle Grande Cuvée N.26.

It also highlights how the region of Champagne may be one of the most exciting in France, and Europe at the moment. Climate change may have benefited the region, with Champagnes in most vintages now being richer and drier with slightly more alcohol – about 12 percent on average. It also has increased the production of table wines in the area, with pinot noirs and chardonnays now comparing to the best of Burgundy. Stay tuned for more about this in the coming reports.

Meanwhile, what makes the Laurent-Perrier Champagne Grand Siècle Grande Cuvée N.26 so magical is its exceptional blend of vintages,  three beautiful years with the uniquely powerful 2008 vintage giving it the edge. It’s a perfectly harmonized blend of 65 percent 2012, 25 percent 2008, and 10 percent 2007. The 2012 gives the Grand Siècle Cuvée N.26 its balance and form, with subtle and bright fruit, while the 2008 gives it a vertical depth and focused energy with a subtle phenolic tension that frames the wine gorgeously. Finally, the touch of 2007 delivers more liveliness and vivacity. It comes from eight Grand Cru vineyards, and it’s 58 percent Chardonnay and 42 percent Pinot Noir. It’s released after about 10 years on the lees in the bottle. This is the last Grand Siècle Cuvée to include the magnificent 2008 vintage, which was used for its predecessors, including No. 25 and No. 24.

“The 2008 vintage was not that easy,” Maximilien Bernardeau, the cellar master of Laurent-Perrier, admitted during our visit to their cellar in July. “It was sunny but also cloudy, and the temperature was not so high. We had the rain when we needed, and 15 days before the harvest the skin of the grapes became thin so it was easy to press the juice out. We had very low phenolics and good sugars but It was just  9.5 percent potential alcohol and the acidity was about 3 pH.”

Those metrics sound more like the top years in Champagne from the 1980s and 1990s before alcohols rose to about 12 percent and acidities dropped, giving higher pHs because of the rise in temperatures during the growing season. This gives an even more unique quality to our Wine of the Year.

The only drawback with the Laurent-Perrier Champagne Grand Siècle Grande Cuvée N.26  is that it costs about $235 a bottle. Granted, this is not outrageously expensive for a prestige cuvee or any other world-class wine, considering its phenomenal quality and exorbitant prices for wines in regions such as Burgundy and Napa Valley. But I must admit that I was slightly surprised by the price of nearly all of our top-rated wines in 2023. A hundred dollars doesn’t go very far these days to buy the best wines in the world. The average price per bottle of our Top 100 is about $140. I didn’t consider any wine for our Top 100 that costs more than $400 a bottle."

Laurent Perrier in 1959 introduced the concept of Grande Cuvée Champagne different from Vintage Champagne.

The vision behind Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle, Grande Cuvée!

Seventy years ago, Bernard de Nonancourt decided to look beyond the notion of vintage, with the aim of creating the "perfect year", the one that nature cannot provide on its own. In Champagne, vintages show great variation in style, expression, and quality. Bernard de Nonancourt noticed that he could not rely on the expression of each year to create the Prestige Cuvée he dreamed of. He was looking for a perfection that none of these vintages offered him individually.

The champagne house has worked to recreate, through each iteration, the perfect year. Each iteration requires patience, time, and skill before it is revealed: patience to wait for the right exceptional years and the time and skill required to achieve the desired harmony and aromatic complexity. This additional maturation leads to an additional expression of Grand Siècle that exhibits greater aromatic depth, density, and a silkier texture.

"It takes time to become an icon"

Due to its difference in conception, it took a long time for Grand Siècle to be considered one of the best champagnes in the world. Since 1959, Grand Siècle has only been made 26 times in 0.75l bottle format and 23 times in magnum format.

Recreating the Perfect Year:

The idea of Grand Siècle was born from a simple observation: that nature will never provide the perfect oenological year, but thanks to the art of assembly, Laurent Perrier was able to create it. Grand Siècle was first released in 1959 as an assemblage of 1952, 1953, and 1955. Since then Grand Siècle has maintained its recipe of having three exceptional vintages that complement each other perfectly. One year is chosen for structure, one for finesse, and one for freshness, creating a unique combination of power and balance, from wines from the best vintages. The wine for these champagnes must have a long aging potential and over time, develop depth, intensity, and aromatic complexity, but at the same time, retain its freshness and vitality.

Since June 2019, Laurent Perrier has introduced the term "Iterations" to identify the assembly of wines that make up the Grand Siécle. The iteration is a blend that can be made from grapes harvested from a maximum of 11 Grands Crus. In the 2023 assemblage, there are only 8 Grand Crus: 58% Chardonnay from Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Oger, Cramant, Avize, and 42% Pinot Noir from Tours-sur-Marne, Ambonnay, Bouzy, Verzy.

Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle, Grande Cuvée N.26 has achieved the recognition of the most renowned wine critics and is a reference within premium champagnes.

Laurent-Perrier is imported into Romania by BDG Import srl and distributed by Tribeca srl.