Dear friends,

Fellow Champagne fans have no doubt noticed that in the case of a nonvintage (multi-vintage) wine there’s no way to tell, just from looking at the bottle, what was the base year and what is/are the other year(s) in the blend. Turns out the reason why there’s no way to tell is not just the secretiveness of Champagne producers – it’s the American government.

Peter Liem reports in today’s blog post that the Champagne grower-producer Pascal Doquet “took the time to design a [back] label that could fit all of the necessary information [pictured in the blog; the label indicated the bottle contained a 1999-98-96 blend, as well as bottling and disgorgement dates and dosage, plus don’t drink when pregnant and other warnings required by law], printed it up and sent it off to his American importer. Looks great, right? Wouldn’t you be thrilled if all champagnes had this level of detail on the label? Well, you’re not going to see this label on any of [Doquet’s] bottles, as it was rejected by the American authorities. The reason is that in the United States, indications of years are not allowed on non-vintage wines, meaning that telling you exactly what’s in the bottle is somehow less good than not telling you anything at all. Presumably Doquet will try again, but he’ll have to use a system of codes or some other less transparent (and more complicated) way of conveying this information.”

Aren’t you glad the TTB and Homeland Security are keeping you safe from learning too much?

Cheers,

Russ