Jacques Lassaigne, Les Vignes De Montgueux, NV

Emmanuel Lassaigne owns a small holding (3.5ha) of old vine chardonnay, in the isolated village of Montgueux to the west of Troyes, also complementing this by buying grapes from trusted sources – 2.5ha of old vines planted on the slopes where he doesn’t own vineyards in the village. Here there is a Cretaceous strata of chalk, 15 million years older than in the Côte des Blancs. Back in the 1970s his father Jacques, together with three brothers, became only the second family in Montgueux to own a press (Champagne Beaugrand, still in operation today, was the first). The estate sold both grapes and bottles of champagne before running into financial difficulties in the late 1990s. At this point in 1999 Manu ditched a successful job with an international manufacturing company and came home to help his parents, motivated both by the prospect of his family losing the estate and also by a sense of frustration he felt at the lack of recognition for Montgueux. In the vineyards biodiversity and healthy soils are paramount for Manu. Grass is allowed to grow and then pinned down with a rolofaca to create a mulch, the soils are lightly worked by hand only, and a good proportion of the vines are weaved as opposed to trimmed. He works only with old vines and in the winery each parcel of grapes is kept separate, sulphur is added only at the press