Perrier Jouët
Belle Epoque
Champagne
1996

The producer

Perrier-Jouet is a house with over half of their nearly 70ha of estate vineyards in the Grand Crus of Cramant, Avize and Chouilly and with holdings in the top Montaigne de Reims Pinot Grand Crus of Mailly, Verzy and Verzenay providing the base for their renowned prestige cuvee – Belle Epoque.

The estate vineyards along with purchased fruit provides quality material for their range of nonvintage and vintage wines produced in a softer, more accessible style. Despite the dominance of estate vineyards being Chardonnay, the range is mostly an even split.

The wine

One of the most instantly recognizable bottles with the embossed Art Nouveau-style Japanese anemones, Belle Epoque evokes the purity of Chardonnay from the heart of the Cote des Blancs despite it usually only being 50% of the blend. Belle Epoque coats this core of fine minerality with a beautiful creamy softness of texture that may belie its ability to age beautifully.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.