Jacquart Cuvée Alpha 2005 at the Atelier Brancusi
On a balmy Tuesday evening in Paris, Jacquart launched the much-anticipated 2005 vintage of its prestige cuvée, Alpha, and chose a venue that, as it turned out, had a story or two of its own.
The Atelier Brancusi sits next door to the Pompidou Centre, and the sculptures inside are striking in their simplicity, which is a little ironic given that Brancusi’s life was anything but simple. He left his peasant family in Romania and made his way across Europe to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When his sculpture Bird in Space arrived in the United States, customs officers refused to believe it was art and wanted to charge duty on it as a manufactured metal object, which led to the court case that helped settle the legal definition of modern art. The Romanian government, meanwhile, declined to recognise him during his lifetime, so he left his studio to the French state when he died. Today his smooth, beautiful forms rank among the finest sculpture of the twentieth century, but the photographs of him at work in his studio make it clear there was no overnight success, only a great deal of hard graft behind those seamless surfaces.
Champagne houses certainly know how to throw a party, and the secret, as far as I can tell, lies in getting the small details right. Jacquart had thought of everything, right down to the ice buckets, which combined wood and glass as a nod to the atelier and to the house philosophy of “bringing together different components” in its Champagne, an idea that, I’m assured, sounds much better in French. The canapés even came with flecks of gold leaf.
From growers to glamour
It hasn’t always been this glamorous for Jacquart, though. The house grew out of a collective of hard-working grower families, who in the 1960s formed a cooperative so they could make their own Champagne instead of selling their grapes to the big houses for less than they felt they were worth.
Cuvée Alpha 2005 marks the next step for the house, made with the benefit of an excellent vintage. It’s an even blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, very dry, with good weight and real intensity on the palate, and the grapes come from four villages in the Montagne de Reims: Mailly and Verzenay, both known for their Pinot Noir, and Villers-Marmery and Trépail, which are better known for Chardonnay. That generous share of Pinot Noir makes it a natural partner for food, and the exquisite canapés proved the point. Where Jacquart’s Mosaïque is light and fruity, Alpha has considerably more depth and seriousness, and yet out in the garden, with the temperature at 32 degrees, it worked beautifully as an aperitif too.
I like to think Brancusi would have been pleasantly surprised, had he stepped out of his studio on such a hot day, to be handed a golden glass of Jacquart Cuvée Alpha 2005.
“How is life?”
“Ça va bien.”
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