Brigandat Champagne

Pierre Brigandat didn’t originally come from a winemaking background. The Brigandat family had a small farm in the village of Channes, in the Aube’s Bar-sur-Seine, tending crops and livestock for self-sufficiency but not for commercial purposes. Pierre became a banker, and eventually the head of the Crédit Agricole in the nearby town of Les Riceys. However, he also had an interest in vineyards, and between 1961 and 1985 he assembled a collection of seven hectares of vines in Les Riceys, Channes and Buxeuil. He quit the bank in 1985 to focus full-time on the wine estate, and began to increase his commercial production of champagne. His son Bertrand completed his oenological studies in 1993 and joined him at the estate, and since 2001 Bertrand has taken over the reins full-time. Brigandat has become increasingly focused on more natural viticulture, and in fact in 2001 he even began some trials with biodynamics. He eventually stopped these as his father didn’t approve, but he continues to plant cover crops in all of his vineyards, using a minimum amount of chemical treatments, and he also works with the lunar calendar when undertaking winery operations such as racking or bottling. His goal is to eliminate chemical herbicides completely in another three years, and has left open the possibility of exploring biodynamic viticulture again one day in the future. Brigandat’s champagnes express the full, generous fruitiness common to this area of the Aube, and over the last few years the wines seem to have become noticeably finer in tone and texture.