A CLOSER LOOK
Michel Bettane - The 20 Champagnes of his life
Michel Bettane, one of the most celebrated French wine critics of his generation, once set down a personal list: the twenty Champagnes that had given him his greatest emotions across a lifetime of tasting. It gathers some of the most famous bottlings in the region’s history:
Pol Roger 1921
Bollinger R.D. 1959
Krug 1961
Krug Clos du Mesnil 1979
Dom Pérignon 1983
Salon 1985
Egly-Ouriet Blanc de Noirs Grand Cru
Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 1995
Philipponnat Les Cintres 2008
and, closing the list,
Guiborat, De Caurés à Mont-Aigu 2014.
Bettane had long kept a soft spot for Cramant, whose still wines he admired in the cellars of Roederer and Dom Pérignon before blending, yet he was often left disappointed by the finished Champagnes of the cru.
He credits a younger generation, farming with more precision and lower yields, with restoring the village to its full stature, and he puts Richard Fouquet at the head of it. Of the 2014, a blend of the estate’s two Chouilly lieux-dits (Caurés et Mont-Aigu), he writes:
“The crystalline quality of this 2014, a blend of the two lieux-dits, is truly irresistible and places the Guiborat brand, named after Richard’s grandmother, at the top of the elite of the Côte des Blancs growers.”
Michel Bettane
He adds that even the entry-level wines carry the same transparency. Bettane returned to the subject in December 2025, in a memoir of the moments that shaped his fifty years in Champagne. Alongside chapters on Selosse, Bollinger and Roederer’s Cristal, he gives one to the renaissance of Cramant, and names Fouquet as the vigneron who led it. Richard was the first, he writes, to rethink the estate’s viticulture and cellar work with Karine, lengthening the élevage sur pointe (ageing on the lees before disgorgement) and halting malolactic fermentation in the still wines, and so reaching a clarity he calls disarming, the sublime De Caurés à Mont-Aigu above all.
That a wine from Richard Fouquet’s three-hectare domaine should occupy the same list as such legendary Champagne bottlings is not a footnote. It is a tribute to Richard and Karine’s unwavering commitment to precision and excellence.
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