Pierre Peters L'Esprit de Millésime 2009

Dosage : 4 to 5,5 g / L, depending on the vintage and maturity.

As with the non-vintage wines, Péters’s vintage brut is blended from the four grand cru villages of Le Mesnil, Oger, Avize and Cramant, although Le Mesnil always accounts for the highest proportion, at around 40 to 45 percent. Péters uses the same parcels each year for this wine, selecting them for their classic, archetypal characters: Mesnil being "mineral and lemony", Oger showing "white flowers, white fruits", Avize "generally more fruity, with yellow citrus flavors", and Cramant providing "complexity, dried flowers, spice, licorice". It usually spends about five years on the lees, and is dosed very low, around five grams. The same blend is used to make the Extra Brut, which is released slightly earlier than the standard vintage brut and finished with only one to two grams per liter of dosage. While the Extra Brut doesn't carry a vintage date on the label, it always comes from a single year (since it's the same wine as the vintage blend, after all). The intrinsic richness that Péters obtains in his grapes is made evident by this wine, as despite containing hardly any dosage, it never feels aggressive or imbalanced.