Champagne Maurice Choppin

Maurice Choppin is a family house in Damery, a village on the north bank of the Marne a few kilometres west of Épernay, in the stretch of the Vallée de la Marne where Meunier is the historic grape. The vines are old, many of them massal selections planted in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the parcels sit in Damery itself and the neighbouring villages of Saint-Martin-d’Ablois, Vinay and Binson-et-Orquigny.

The winemaking is the same across the range. Every wine ferments in oak with indigenous yeasts, ages on its lees, and goes through spontaneous malolactic fermentation. The disgorgement liqueurs are made from the house’s own barrel-aged wines and cane sugar, dosage sits between zero and one gram per litre, and nothing is filtered, fined, cold-stabilised or chaptalised. Bottles are closed with cork rather than crown cap during their years in the cellar.

The book splits into two families: the Assemblages (Les Arpents, Les Mi-Côtes, Damery), which blend villages or vintages, and the Lieux-dits, single-parcel wines that each carry the name of the plot they come from.

Placeholder paragraph for Domingo: why this estate is in the book, how you found them, what they taste like on the floor.