We exclusively reveal the flavour and composition of a pair of 120 year-old bottles of Pol Roger Champagne that have spent more than a century buried in wet chalk after a cellar collapse in 1900.
As reported on Friday 11 October, db was present as the Champagne house of Pol Roger pulled the first corks from its extraordinary discovery: a set of in-tact bottles from the 1890s, which have been lost underground for more than a century.
If you have missed our previous reports on this treasure-trove of historic fizz, Pol Roger lost as many as 1.5m bottles of Champagne – representing around half its stock at the time – after a period of heavy rain caused its underground cellars to cave in during the night on 23 February 1900, burying the fizz in wet chalk and clay.
However, on 15 January 2018, while Pol Roger was beginning the process of building a new packaging facility above the site of the collapsed cellars, the Champagne producer discovered a void.
Among large amounts of broken glass, over the course of several days of careful digging, Pol Roger found 23 in-tact bottles, which it removed, and sealed with wax.
So what where they? While it’s difficult to give an exact vintage, the Champagne house believes that the bottles hail from harvests from 1887 to 1898, with the two that were opened in db’s presence likely to be from either 1897 or 98, because both wines contained no sugar, suggesting that they were either still wines, or, most likely, Champagnes that were undergoing secondary fermentation at the time of the cellar collapse – which would have meant that they yet to be disgorged and given a dosage (the addition of sugar and wine).
Following analysis of the liquid, Pol Roger can confirm that the bottles contained wine with less than 1 gram per litre of residual sugar, and no malic acid, which meant that the liquid had undergone the malo-lactic conversion.
It was also discovered that the wines had a pH of 3.2, and an abv of 13%. The latter is quite high for Champagne, but could be the result of chaptalisation, which is the addition of sugar to the grape must to increase the alcohol level in the final wine.
As for the grape composition, the wines would have most likely contained around 80% Pinot Noir and 20% Chardonnay, as Champagne at that time was mostly planted with the former red grape.
Also, the fizz made during that period would all have been from a single harvest – as opposed to today’s Champagne, which is most-commonly made as a blend of vintages.
Pol Roger cellar master Damien Cambres described the first Champagne, which had lost its fizz, as containing aromas of spice and vanilla, comparing the nose and flavours in the wine to aged Cognac.
The second, which had also lost its sparkle, seemed to have a bit more “volume” according to Cambres, with “extraordinary freshness, citrus and exotic fruit”.
Both wines amazed the attendees due to their lively character, and, despite their ancient state, the fact they were still pleasant to drink.
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