Champagne Dosnon Recolte Blanche

When Davy Dosnon founded his micro-négociant house in 2007, he made a single defining decision: every wine in the range — including the non-vintage blends — would be fermented and aged exclusively in old Burgundian oak barrels with indigenous yeasts, treating Champagne as a vin first and a sparkling wine second. The Récolte Blanche is the purest expression of that conviction.

The fruit comes from Avirey-Lingey in the Côte des Bar, roughly 40 km north of Chablis, where the subsoil is Kimmeridgian and Portlandian clay-marl packed with fossilized Exogyra Virgula oysters — geologically identical to Chablis premier cru, and entirely unlike the chalk of Reims or Épernay. That fossil-dense limestone drives the saline, oyster-shell tension that defines this wine.

Vinification begins with basket-press cuvée only (the taille is sold off), followed by full alcoholic and malolactic fermentation in 228-litre, 500-litre, and 600-litre Burgundian barrels — all minimum five years old, sourced via Coquard cooperage from Puligny-Montrachet producers. The barrel phase runs approximately ten months; the wine then ages on lees in bottle for two to three years. Dosage is held to 3–7 g/L. The wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered.

What separates this Blanc de Blancs from virtually every peer is the full-range barrel program: no stainless steel touches this wine at any stage, yet no new oak either — micro-oxygenation without wood flavor, a tightrope almost no Champagne house attempts across its entire lineup.

Reserve wines (~30% of the blend) anchor each disgorgement to house style while the base harvest year's character remains legible. Drink now through five-plus years from disgorgement.