"Remember it is easy for those with memory. Forgetting is hard for those who have a heart." - William Shakespeare Memoire (memory for us) is the name of a cuvée in Huré Frères. Or, as they put it, “a crazy story… a wine. A blend of over 30 vintages stored in solera, including a year in vats to refine aging.”
The name reflects well a peculiar type of Champagne that has gained space in recent years, going by the name Réserve Perpetuelle or the not exactly accurate “Solera”, in reference to the aging system of Jerez. But after all, what is this? What to expect from these wines? Every year the producers reserve part of the wine from the harvested harvest. The great Champagne houses manage to reserve these wines separated by vintage and some even by harvested parcel. Smaller producers, however, either because of less production or less cellar space, cannot afford such a luxury. Thus, some have created a system of blending reserve wines from previous vintages, known there as Réserve Perpetuelle (we'll call it RP from now on for convenience) or Solera, in an almost always inappropriate reference to Jerez.
Through this system, at each harvest, the producer adds the wine of the current vintage to the wine tank or barrel destined for the RP and then removes the amount of reserve wine already mixed to bottle his non-vintage Champagne. Naturally, as the number of vintages added to the blend increases, the RP gains complexity and texture, without losing its freshness, as it normally incorporates a good amount of wine from the vintage itself. A Réserve perpetuelle can be seen as a liquid history. “Time is a vestige of eternity”. - Saint Augustine Most producers that adopt such a system use it in the composition of their nonvintage. Pierre Péters produces an NV “Cuvée de Réserve” champagne by adding 40-50% of its RP to the wine of the vintage in production. Its RP began in 1997. Claude Corbon's Cuvée Prestige, “Brut D'Autrefois” is the result of blending 50% of the base wine of a given year with 50% of its RP. Few producers prefer to make wines exclusively from their Réserves Perpetuelles. In addition to the aforementioned Mémoire, we can mention the Cuvé 38 by Henriot, Reflet d’antan, by Bérêche & Fils and the Cuvée Divine, by Lecrerc Briant. By the way, Divine makes reference on its back label to the term “solera”. But after all, is the use of the term appropriate? That's a topic for another conversation, with a complex reserve perpetuelle in the glass.
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