2023 Champagne Vintage

The Comite Champagne's own account of the season is clear about its two halves. From the beginning of the year to the end of July the vine season was particularly serene, with very few bouts of frost, hail, mildew and powdery mildew. The one concern was water in the soil after a particularly dry winter. That climate favoured what Maxime Toubart, president of the winegrowers and co-president of the Comite Champagne, called the exceptional weight of the bunches, more than 220 grams on average, a figure he said had never been seen before in Champagne. Ripening was the difficult part. Vincent Chaperon, then cellar master at Dom Perignon, described hot and humid conditions running until mid-August that brought on early disease and rot and weakened the ripeness of the grapes, followed by a cold and humid period and then one further heatwave. He described July 2023 as suffocating, the hottest month on record. Picking commenced on Saturday 2 September, with some sectors starting immediately and the majority of the vineyard following within days. The entire 34,000-hectare harvest is picked by hand and needed between 100,000 and 120,000 workers. The available yield was set at 11,400 kg per hectare, and David Chatillon, president of the houses and co-president of the Comite Champagne, said the sheer number of bunches meant that even after sorting to retain only the best, all professionals should reach it easily. Decanter, writing the following year, described 2023 as the gigantic, botrytis-affected vintage and quoted Louis Roederer cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon on the amount of fruit the vines had been asked to ripen.

• January to end of July was unusually calm, with very little frost, hail, mildew or powdery mildew; soil water after a dry winter was the only early concern
• Average bunch weight above 220 grams, described by the Comite Champagne as never before seen in the region
• Hot, humid conditions to mid-August encouraged early disease and rot, followed by a cold humid spell and a further heatwave
• Harvest commenced Saturday 2 September, fully by hand across 34,000 hectares with 100,000 to 120,000 pickers
• Available yield set at 11,400 kg per hectare, reachable even after strict sorting because of the volume of fruit

The Comite Champagne framed the harvest around selection rather than volume. Toubart's point about the exceptional bunch weights was not simply that there was a lot of fruit, but that the abundance made it possible to select only those bunches in perfect sanitary state. Chatillon confirmed that growers and houses would organise their picking circuits specifically to bring in high-quality grapes, and that the available yield would still be met after sorting. That is a very particular kind of vintage: the quality ceiling was set not by the season's ripeness but by how ruthlessly a given picking team was willing to leave fruit behind. Decanter's Tom Hewson, reporting on the following harvest, noted that organic viticulture had coped well in skilled hands in 2023, and that Charles Philipponnat considered 2024 the healthier of the two years.

• Toubart: the volume of generous bunches made it possible to select only fruit in perfect sanitary state
• Chatillon: picking circuits were organised around quality, and the 11,400 kg/ha yield was still reachable after sorting
• Sorting discipline, not seasonal ripeness, set the quality ceiling for any given grower or house
• Organic viticulture coped well in skilled hands in 2023, according to Decanter's reporting the following year

Champagne has no collective vintage declaration. There is no single call from the Comite Champagne that makes a year a vintage year; each house decides independently whether to bottle a millesime, and those decisions are made over the years that follow the harvest as the vins clairs and base wines are assessed. For 2023 the picture is mixed. Trade coverage at the time described widespread early enthusiasm across the region, on the back of a large crop of healthy, well-sorted fruit. Against that, Dom Perignon, a house that releases nothing but vintage Champagne, walked away from the year entirely. A comprehensive list of which houses did and did not declare a 2023 millesime is not available in the sources consulted here, and this article does not assert one.

• There is no collective Comite Champagne vintage declaration; each house decides for itself, house by house and year by year
• Trade coverage at harvest described broad enthusiasm for 2023 across the region
• Dom Perignon, which releases only vintage Champagne, declined 2023 and scrapped the year
• No verified house-by-house declaration list for 2023 exists in the sources used for this article

Dom Perignon is the exception in Champagne: it makes no non-vintage wine, so a year the house rejects is a year with no Dom Perignon at all. In 2023, after months of ripening, a full harvest, and primary fermentation in tank, cellar master Vincent Chaperon judged that the wine did not meet the house's standard and rejected the entire cellar of base wine. He did not make the call until a test assemblage had been made from the best plots, telling Robb Report that he never shares his doubts with the team until the final results are in. The house starts each year with the potential of around 1,000 plots sourced from the best climats across 15 grand crus and 10 premier crus, with the final blend decided by a small inner circle of five and the last word Chaperon's. It was the fourth scrapped vintage this century for the house, after 2001, 2011 and 2014. Rather than simply absorbing the loss, the team commissioned an exhibition at Barcelona's Palau Martorell titled Trace: Pre-Assemblages 2023, documenting the steps that went into a Champagne that would never be released. It opened for several days in July, timed to the release of Dom Perignon 2015 and Plenitude 2 2006.

• Dom Perignon releases only vintage Champagne, so rejecting a year means no wine from that harvest at all
• Chaperon rejected the entire 2023 cellar of base wine after primary fermentation, once a test assemblage from the best plots confirmed his doubts
• The fourth Dom Perignon vintage scrapped this century, following 2001, 2011 and 2014
• The lost year was marked with an exhibition, Trace: Pre-Assemblages 2023, at Barcelona's Palau Martorell

This is a vintage best judged bottle by bottle rather than by its headline. The raw material was abundant and, where selection was rigorous, clean and ripe. Where it was not, the disease and rot that developed under the hot, humid conditions before mid-August had the chance to reach the press. That spread is wider than in a straightforward year, which makes producer track record the most useful guide. The Dom Perignon decision is the clearest available marker of how demanding the year was at the very top, but it is a statement about one house's threshold rather than a verdict on the region. Buyers should also note the knock-on effect into later years: the size of the 2023 crop shaped reserve wine decisions, and Decanter reported that growers who had put weaker 2023 wines into reserve faced a difficult choice about whether to use them when 2024 came in short.

• Quality spread in 2023 is unusually wide, so producer track record and sorting discipline matter more than the vintage label
• The Dom Perignon rejection reflects one house's threshold rather than a regional verdict
• The size of the 2023 crop shaped reserve wine decisions that carried into the short 2024 harvest
• Growers who reserved weaker 2023 wine faced a hard call on whether to draw on it after 2024's low yields