Istanbul’s Golden Horn at dusk, Jan. 23, 2013, just before the Dom Pérignon launch
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t was one of the most spectacular wine invitations of my life—and it turned out to be one of the most spectacular wine parties as well.
I left New York this Monday for Istanbul, a guest of Dom Pérignon champagne. Why? Because they are launching just now a much-awaited wine—their “dark jewel,” as they call it—the 2002 Dom Pérignon Rosé. Both the wine and the city, the French say, are “rich and vivacious, mineral and sensual, ample and precise, inviting and mysterious…one legend calls for another.”
So they created an extraordinary Kubrick-esque environment in an Ottoman princess’ palace right on the Bosporus (she was the daughter of nineteenth-century Sultan Abdulaziz I), flooded it with waves of pulsing light, summoned a mesmerizing whirling dervish to pull us all into the trance, and flew in one of France’s greatest chefs, Jean-François Piège (along with 20 pounds of black truffles in his bags) to prepare a feast that would accompany the highly byzantine global debut of…2002 Dom Pérignon Rosé.
Overkill? Yes. And worth absolutely every Turkish lira they spent. No debutante, liquid or solid, has ever had a coming-out party as thrilling as this one.
And the boule of the ball?
The 2002 Dom Pérignon Rosé, debuting on the banks of the Bosporus
I can tell you this: we have here a historic, sui generis bottle of wine, a fascinating leap into the great unknown.
You may adore it, as most at the party did. You may respect it greatly, as I do. You may find it more odd than delicious, as a grumpy few did. But you will have to admit that this taste of history is worth the price—even though the price at retail is $330 a bottle (750 ML).
The first thing that strikes you, as the DP pros have well anticipated, is the extraordinary color. I have never seen a rosé Champagne this dark, a bizarre amber-orange-red, suggestive of top-flight Tavel rosé after a good bleed, or even the Italian apéritif Aperol.
In a long conversation at the Ciragan Palace with the ebullient, fascinating, enigmatic chief winemaker of Dom Pérignon, Richard Geoffroy, we could not pry out of him the secret of the color. Yes, we learned 2002 was a kind of miracle vintage—a dismal late summer followed by a completely unexpected Indian summer. This made the grapes “even riper in some ways” than the grapes of the famously hot vintage that followed in 2003. Did the skins of 2002 turn dark, we asked? Was there a longer maceration of the red-wine grapes, perhaps? From Geoffroy, no direct answers were forthcoming.
Richard Geoffroy, Dom Pérignon’s Chief Winemaker, teases us at a Ciragan Palace press conference
Geoffroy did let on that since 2000 there has been an increase in the percentage of Pinot Noir grapes in the Dom Pérignon blend. I’d say there’s reason to believe that the Pinot increase—along with global warming—is leading, at least, to heavier Dom Pérignon Rosé today than ever before.
And Exhibit A is the 2002.
The bouquet is what you’d call ample: complex, vibrant, perfume-intense, with fleeting scents of vanilla, white chocolate, violet, watermelon, citrus, and celery seed. The wine is over a decade old, and there’s nary a trace of oxidation—reflecting the Champagne ethos of Geoffroy. “I’d much rather have my Champagne taste like a great evolved wine,” Geoffroy has told me before, “than like a product of oxidation.” Not everyone agrees—I actually like some oxidation in aged Champagne—but his position is a good way to define Dom Pérignon in general, an excellent point of difference.
On the palate, the wine is heady, even a little hot. It is not exactly what you’d call “creamy”—a certain way Champagne bubbles have of creaming over your palate—but it makes up for that with its weight. Best of all, for me, is the way that it glides into elegance in the finish: passing through a brief point of bitterness, the wine goes on to a long and magnificent ever-so-slightly off-dry coda, tingling with appley acidity.
I love elegance in Champagne above all; others worship power. For me, this wine is a gorgeous compromise—an elegant version of power, a full army of soldiers dressed in velvet. It is a paradox in real liquid time.
And it is, incontrovertibly, a oner. Utterly unconventional. “Conventional beauty in wine…” Geoffroy opined in Turkey “…doesn’t mean anything. Wine should be all about singularity—towards which we push very hard. This wine is as far from archetypal as you can get.”
And suddenly, a hundred wine-lovers flown into Byzantium in the dead of winter to celebrate a bevy of beautiful bubbles, doesn’t seem so crazy after all.
