Our Work in Champagne
Radically terroir-driven Grand Cru Champagne, fermented and aged in barrel in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger.
One village, and one conviction.
00 Wines has worked in Champagne since 2016 alongside Julien and Sarah Launois of Champagne Paul Launois, a grower house in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger.
The partnership was built on a single conviction: that Champagne of this caliber belongs in barrel. Every wine is fermented and aged in wood in the Launois cellars, in small lots, aged on the lees, with low dosage.
Le Mesnil-sur-Oger is one of the seventeen Grand Cru villages of Champagne and the heart of the Côte des Blancs. Chardonnay only.
First vintage of the partnership
Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Côte des Blancs
Every wine fermented and aged in wood
Why chalk asks for patience.
Le Mesnil-sur-Oger is one of Champagne’s defining Grand Cru villages for Chardonnay. Its chalk and limestone soils give Blanc de Blancs a rare combination of acidity, salinity, mineral drive, and longevity.
Those are not qualities that show themselves early. Chalk gives a wine its line and its length before it gives anything comfortable, which is why the wines from this village reward time in bottle more than almost anywhere else in Champagne.
It is the same argument we make on volcanic soil in the Willamette Valley and on limestone in Burgundy, asked in a third language.
Barrel, not tank.
Every 00 Wines Champagne is fermented and aged in wood, in small lots, on the lees, with low dosage. The barrel is there for texture and breadth, not for oak flavour.
Le Mesnil-sur-Oger
The chalk heart of Chardonnay.
Seventeen villages in Champagne hold Grand Cru status. Le Mesnil is the one most closely identified with Chardonnay alone, and its reputation rests on a narrow band of chalk that runs under the village and its named plots.
Haut d’Aillerand is one of those plots, and the source of the first Single Barrel release under the collaboration. Working at plot level here is the same discipline we apply bottling vineyard by vineyard in Oregon: the differences are real, and the work is not to smooth them away.
The Single Barrel Project
One plot, one vintage, one barrel.
The Single Barrel wines are the most intimate Champagnes in the 00 Wines portfolio. Each release isolates a single plot, a single vintage, and a single barrel, and is bottled without blending it into anything larger.
SB1705 comes from Haut d’Aillerand, vinified with malolactic fermentation and aged eleven months in a medium-toast barrel: chalk precision, with added texture and breadth. The inaugural release was the 2016 vintage.
Quantities are what one barrel gives. They run out.
Featured wine
Single Barrel Blanc de Blancs
Grand Cru Chardonnay from a single plot in Le Mesnil, shaped by chalk, barrel, acidity and time, and released one barrel at a time.
Four ways into the same chalk.
The range runs from the non-vintage Blanc de Blancs, the house expression of Le Mesnil, through the vintage bottlings, which are made only in years that earn it and are released first to the people who have followed the work.
Above them sit the Single Barrels and the large formats. All of it is Chardonnay from Grand Cru fruit, all of it fermented and aged in wood, all of it made in quantities that are decided by the cellar rather than by demand.
Champagne of this caliber belongs in barrel.
Grand Cru Chardonnay from Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, made in small lots with Julien and Sarah Launois of Champagne Paul Launois.