The Wine Advocate | RP 92
Published: Dec 14, 2023

Based on the 2019 vintage and disgorged this year with three grams per liter dosage, the NV Brut Premier Cru Les Vignes de Vrigny wafts from the glass with aromas of green apple, white flowers, freshly baked bread and crushed mint. Medium to full-bodied, pure and fleshy, it's vinous and precise, with racy acids and a sapid finish.

Far from resting on the considerable and merited laurels that he has accrued over a 30-year career, Francis Egly has continued to refine and improve. The last decade's innovations include refrigerated press pans to immediately cool the must in ever-warmer vintages, a peristaltic pump to handle his wines even more gently and a once-again expanded cellar that gives him the space to work still more precisely. Just like his work in the vineyards, investment in the winery has been incessant. Starting from next to nothing when he began in the 1980s, today Egly holds some 700,000 bottles in reserve wines and wine maturing sur lattes—equivalent to seven times his annual production.

As readers will know, Egly picks ripe grapes and ferments most of his wines in barrel—some 10% to 15% of which are renewed every year, and all of which derive from the cooperage of his friend, Dominique Laurent—before subjecting them to lengthy sur lattes maturation, typically disgorging with less than three grams per liter dosage these days. But the devil is in the details; no winemaker in Champagne is more precise or meticulous, from vineyard to cellar. These latest releases once again come warmly recommended.

Drink Date: 2023 - 2033