The 2006 Brut literally jumps from the glass with rich layers of deep, resonant fruit. A big, broad-shouldered wine, the 2006 impresses for its sheer volume and size, but at the same time it retains the characteristic Roederer finesse. The elegant and sheer polish of the finish is more than enough to make it impossible to resist a second taste. This is an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous wine from Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon and his team. The 2006 is mostly Pinot from the north-facing Verzenay, which gives the wine much of its tension and sheer energy.

Voluminous deep, nutty and chocolate saturated from the start. Juicy and impressively dense champagne to drink life in all its stages.

Orange zest, bruised apple skin, coriander seed, and hedge flowers rise from the glass of Roederer 2006 Brut, a 70-30 Pinot-Chardonnay blend a third of which was aged in cask with weekly lees-stirring. The palate impression here is at once richly expansive and tactilely pungent, with apple and peach fruit sappy and ripe but prominently marked by the piquancy of pips and pit. A roughly ten gram dosage emphasizes the impression of fresh ripe apple in a long, juicy finish, if with a result that some may find a tad divisively sweet-tart. It would certainly be interesting to follow bottles for a couple of years to see whether further depth emerges. Owners of vast vineyards (totally some 500 acres) that supply the majority of their fruit, Roederer also presides – by design as well as due to that vastness – over a mind-bending number of micro-vinifications, divided entirely between tanks and foudres, supplemented by a concomitantly deep and diverse range of reserve wines. But for all of the variety that these phenomena entail, scarcely any lots undergo malo-lactic transformation.