As stately as I expected it to be (can one really expect anything less of a wine as legendary as Cristal in one of Champagne’s most celebrated vintages?) glinting pale gold, the color of a freshly-minted coin. The 2002 Champagne Cristal Brut Millésimé is imbued with soaring notes of pear and smoke, brioche and chalk. Disgorged in 2009, this is a precise wine—it has a sort of crystalline weightless density, with fruit buoyed by a fine mousse, and edgy saline-tinged minerality emerging at the finish. 10 grams dosage.
“You must be as precise as a Swiss watchmaker, I tell my team,” our host, M. Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Chef de Caves at Roederer stressed. Precision in spades. Sample
9.5 Points
