Jean Velut

In the late 1960’s, Jean Velut & his wife, Huguette, had to give up their farming land near Troyes as the city expanded. The family had some land in the nearby village of Montgueux. They decided to work towards developing a viable vineyard there. They started planting and farming some small vine parcels: their first harvest was only 639 kg.

Nowadays, their son, Denis, is responsible for the vineyard. He farms about 7.5 hectares (18.5 acre). We sell some of our harvest to a vintner; we store the remainder in our purpose built cellars, to make your favourite beverage.

The hill of Montgueux borders the Paris basin. The soil has a calcareous nature: about 600 meters deep in chalk. In summer, this keeps freshness and moisture, the heat is stored between seasons, and the rain is well drained in winter: the vines thrive best in the southerly and east -southerly sunny slopes where they are planted.

Within a couple of hours of being picked whole grapes are poured into a modern press. The air chamber within this cylinder is inflated and the grapes are slowly pressed.

The pressing produces ‘must’ which over a period of 24 hours naturally decants and clarifies: (operation called “must settling”). The alcoholic (grapes’ sugar is naturally transformed into alcohol) and malolactic fermentations take place in tanks. At each step, we move the wine from one tank to another, in order to air it and to clarify it (known as “racking”).

In Springtime clear wines from the previous harvest are ready. Why wines? We have to reveal our secret: we separately turn to wine the grapes from each of our parcels of land; one tank for each. And, believe us, wines are bruised by the slope and the subsoil of our different “climes”. It is also time to check on how wines from older vintages and promising “reserve wines” are doing. Samples from the different wines and vintages are used for the “blending ceremony”: our experienced tasters and champagne makers decide the composition of the next cuvées.

Once the blending composition is decided we start to make the wine on a large scale. Then, we set up the bottling chain: wines are bottled and then natural yeasts and their food (sugar) are added. The bottles are temporarily closed and are piled on traditional laths. There “on lath” the yeasts eat the sugars (like you and I love to do!) and produce carbonic gas (the bubbles): this is known as “bottle fermentation”.

Then we store the bottles in a “silence kingdom”, our cellar, for a long time. They are held in the dark and at constant temperature. Champagne acquires all its aromas in 3, 4, 6, 8…years!

We will later wake up those sleeping beauties. The deposit, made of yeasts, has to be removed! But how? First of all, we make it slide to the neck by riddling. On traditional sloping racks or with modern “gyropallet”, the movement is unchanged: a slow rotation with a slow straightening up, that aims at having a bottle “on tip”. The next step is disgorgement. After freezing the deposit (thank you, progress!), each bottle is quickly re-opened and the deposit is expulsed.

We take advantage of this moment to add a little touch of sweet liqueur, very small for our Brut Tradition, a little bit more for the “Demi sec”. Then we hurry to permanently close the bottles with cork and put the wire cap to prevent any leak of champagne and gas.

After a careful labelling, the bottles are ready to be sent to our clients.

We feel this vintage 2014 sooo good!! We really appreciate it, especially after the stressfull 2013. The grapes are pretty abundant, with absolutely NO trace of disease...it's almost a dream ! Only the weed control takes us quite a lot of time...driving at 3km/h, we need 4 full days to cover all our surface. It's almost 3 times more than destroying it chemically, but the impact on water is not really the same...

The sprayers are running (for the last time for us) those days, just before the storm of tomorrow. After this stage, the vine is strong enough to resist alone until the harvest, that should take place at the early beginning of september.

So early? Yes ! It will be 3 weeks earlier than 2013...it's day and night! Compared to the decenal middle, we are 10 days late.

The only big threat remains this damage called hail that hurt our colleagues and friends from the Côte de Beaune for the 3rd consecutive year...Big thought for them. I don't wish anybody to see his work destroyed in 2 minutes, especially for the third time.