2002 Bruno Paillard Nec Plus Ultra Extra Brut, Cote des Blancs, Reims, Champagne

This 32-hectare house is rising and rising and belongs to the best addresses in Champagne even though it's not located on a representative road or villa. It's a factory of great, handcrafted Champagnes whose complexity is based on terroir as well as on the reserve wines, which come from a solera that was installed 1985. Readers shouldn't miss checking out the NPU 2002—it's a legend.

A 50/50 blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir exclusively from grand cru villages, has a golden colour and opens with a beautifully complex and refined bouquet of matured fruit and iodine flavours. Fermented and aged entirely in small oak barrels (pièces) for ten months and then ten years on the lees in bottle, this has lovely oxidation, ripeness and depth. Very pure and fine but wide, highly complex and elegant on the palate, the 2002 NPU combines the famous freshness of the vintage with the complexity of the composition and the bottle aging. The finish is very long, tight, rich and complex but stimulatingly dry, pure and mineral. This is a great Champagne to be enjoyed today or over the next few decades. Total production: 6,200 bottles, plus 300 magnums. The wine I tasted in October 2017 in Hamburg with Bruno Paillard was disgorged in September 2014 and aged another two years in the cellar before it went into the markets.'