Dom Pérignon cellar master: ‘blends have a sense of place too’

Dom Pérignon cellar master Vincent Chaperon argued for the value of blending across different vineyard sites in Champagne while presenting the latest vintage of the prestige cuvée in London earlier this month.

Before showing the latest release of Dom Pérignon – which hails from the 2017 harvest – he was asked about the recently-completed 2025 vintage. Ahead of giving his opinion, Chaperon described the challenge of assembling wines that are still young but intended for long ageing. “We have just finished the blend of 2025 in advance of most of our colleagues because we like to go fast, which is not easy as we are tasting wines that are quite tight, but we think that going fast is good for quality,” he said. Dom Pérignon’s white and rosé Champagnes from the 2025 harvest were blended in the first week of March.

Then he expressed his delight with the vintage overall. “In 2025, mother nature gave us a fantastic playground,” he said, referring to the range of high-quality base wines available. The harvest was notable for its quality despite limited yields, which, as previously reported by db, were capped at 9,000kg/ha – the equivalent of 255-258 million bottles – when 10,000-12,000kg/ha is the norm.

Resilient fruit

Chaperon also highlighted the condition of the fruit. “I am very happy, because, for the first time in 25 years [of working in Champagne], I could eat very good fruit, and more than it being good, it was resilient.”

He explained that, unlike typical years in Champagne, the grapes retained their integrity: “Normally in Champagne there is a fragility; the fruit can degrade very fast, but in 2025, the weather conditions were so good that we were able to push, and the fruit was intact, which was very new for me.”

Some Pinot Noir parcels used making red wine for creating Dom Pérignon rosé were harvested at 13.8% potential alcohol. “They were balanced, with no oxidation, no over-ripeness,” he noted. For context, he added that average potential alcohol levels have risen from around 10% a decade ago to approximately 11% today.

Elevating the soul

Chaperon spent particular time discussing blending itself. Reflecting on the legacy of Dom Pierre Pérignon – the French Benedictine monk who made such an enormous contribution to the development of the Champagne making process – he said, “The more I study Dom Pierre Pérignon… the more I realise that it was he who really invented the blend.” He linked this idea to monastic practice: “The art of living as a Benedictine monk was to elevate each person through a collective approach, and I think it was the same with blending grapes: to elevate the soul of each place through the act of assembling.”

He described blending across different sites as a defining tension in Champagne. While the growing prominence of individual growers has strengthened the discussion of terroir, he maintained that blending can also express origin. “In a blend, you can have a sense of place too,” he said.

An orchestra of wines

To illustrate this, Chaperon compared blending to music: “Like an orchestra, if you are an expert, you can listen to each instrument; it’s not a dilution, but having each individual plot add something to the final result that you, the consumer, can feel.”

He added that achieving this requires careful handling throughout the process. Each parcel should be kept separate until the final stage: “to respect the juice and the vats”, and to keep the wine from each plot “as an individual until the last moment, which is when you make the blend”.

Summing up the process, he said that he had identified a “core vineyard” of 350 hectares that consistently produce grapes good enough for the Dom Pérignon blend, describing such sites as “the best of the best”.

With these, he said, “We create a blend, a signature that is true to the place.”

Finally, he noted the run of recent high-quality vintages in Champagne. “We have ’19, ’20, ’21, ’22, ’24 and ’25, which are all different, but  fantastic things,” he said, having previously commented that there was “a debate” as to which of the two latest harvests were better: ’24 or ’25.

As for 2023, he confirmed that the year was not good enough to create a Dom Pérignon blend for releasing on to the market. However, he said that it was now his policy to always bottle a small amount of Champagne, whatever the vintage quality, as a record of the harvest.

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