Essi Avellan: Deep and peach-hued yellow color. Rich, honeyed nose, with cedarwood, red-apple, and baking-spice notes. The pungent, powerful, tart, red-fruit aroma is accentuated on the sharp and powerful palate. A chewy, structured palate is lacking. 14

Michael Edwards: First bottle: color not completely clear and star-bright; very strange, unnatural nose; acidulous, impure palate. Imperfect bottle: no score. The second bottle was completely different and much better: star-bright yellow gold, persistent mousse; a touch of menthol to the nose; a well-balanced, linear mouthfeel, clean, and focused. 16

Tom Stevenson: There is something very high-toned about this Champagne that I come across occasionally and have never been able to pin down. Being an anomaly, it has nothing to do with the house style, and I suspect that it is not a winemaking technique but is probably something to do with the harvest, resulting in an odd biochemical pathway to this end. Anyway, I don’t like it! The second bottle of this wine is totally different, very brut dry, crisp, with absolutely no hint of anything high-toned. Perhaps these wines undergo second fermentation on cork rather than crown cap, which could suggest an environment that is not 100 percent surgically clean, possibly leading to the microbiological contamination of an odd bottle, which would make me rethink this high-tone anomaly. Scored on the second bottle. 14