THE CUVÉES & THEIR TERROIRS
Four Expressions of One Philosophy
The Cuvées
Guiborat’s range is deliberately compact: four cuvées, each with a distinct identity, each expressing a different facet of the domaine’s terroirs. The naming choices are deliberate: each carries a geological, historical, or poetic reference.
Téthys Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut
Blend: 100% Chardonnay – Blanc de Blancs – 2/3 Base vintage 1/3 Reserve wines – Cuvées + Tailles
Vineyards: Blend of 3 Grands Crus – Chouilly, Cramant, Oiry
Classification: Non-Vintaged – Grand Cru
Dosage: <3 g/L – Extra Brut
Malolactic: Full malolactic fermentation
Production: 12,000–15,000 bottles
Ageing: 24–30 months sur lattes then min. 10 months post-disgorgement
In many critics’ views, one of the finest entry points into grower Champagne. Named after the ancient Tethys Sea (Téthys in French), the shallow inland ocean that covered this region during the Cretaceous period and whose skeletal marine deposits form the chalk beneath Cramant’s vines today. Versatile and generous, with the depth of a much more serious wine, Téthys is designed for earlier approachability than the other cuvées – a real “4x4 cuvée” and the wine in the range they wanted to keep accessible, in price as much as in style. The blend draws partly from younger vines across Cramant, Chouilly and Oiry, with the precise parcel selection shifting from year to year rather than following a fixed recipe. It incorporates both cuvées and tailles and is the only cuvée of the house to go through full malolactic fermentation. With around half the blend coming from the tailles and their higher pH, letting malolactic fermentation run is the more stable choice oenologically, and gives Téthys a clear identity: softer acidity, a fruitier register, and a rounder, more enveloping texture that frames the Grand Cru chalk character beautifully.
Prisme Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut
Blend: 100% Chardonnay – Blanc de Blancs – Cuvées Only
Vineyards: Selected plantings from 4 Grand Cru plots – Cramant: Bergerie (1984); Chouilly: Les Caurés (1946, 1998 & 2005), Mont-Aigu (1970); Oiry: Gros Monts, previously called Les Briquettes (1969).
Classification: Millésime (since 2020) – Grand Cru
Dosage: <3 g/L – Extra Brut
Malolactic: No malolactic fermentation (since 2013)
Production: 10,000 bottles + 500 magnums
Ageing: 42–48 months sur lattes then min. 6 months post-disgorgement – 120+ months sur lattes for magnums.
If there is one wine that tells you what Champagne Guiborat is really about, it is this one. Richard describes Prisme as “le prisme du sol; on décompose la matière comme un arc-en-ciel; le vin est le prisme du terroir, des vignes avec du caractère” – the prism of the soil, decomposing matter like a rainbow, the wine itself becoming the prism of the terroir, made from vines with real character. The selection is exacting: older vines on the finest soils, drawn from three Grand Cru sites in Cramant, Chouilly and Oiry, picked for the tension and minerality they bring to the glass.
Where Téthys is built to invite, Prisme is built to reveal. The last decade gave Richard the licence to make wines less designed for universal appeal, and Prisme is what that confidence sounds like in a glass. The winemaking follows the same uncompromising logic: cuvées only, no tailles, with malolactic fermentation blocked since 2013. Reserve wines were abandoned from the 2019 assemblage, and from the 2020 vintage Prisme is released as a millésimé.
A small magnum programme runs alongside, given a minimum of 120 months sur lattes, in a limited run of approximately 500 magnums per year. An Echo version, the house’s equivalent of a dégorgement tardif that allows the terroir to resonate further, is also released in very small quantities.
De Caurés à Mont-Aigu Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut
Blend: 100% Chardonnay – Blanc de Blancs – Cuvées Only
Vineyards: Blend of 2 Grands Crus old-vine plots in Chouilly – Les Caurés (1946) and Mont-Aigu (1970).
Classification: Millésime – Grand Cru
Dosage: <3 g/L – Extra Brut
Malolactic: No malolactic fermentation
Production: 4,000 bottles
Ageing: 60–72 months sur lattes then min. 6 months post-disgorgement
Two parcels in Chouilly, two opposing exposures, one bottle. De Caurés à Mont-Aigu is the prestige cuvée of the house, a vintage wine drawn from two contrasting lieux-dits: the richness of Mont-Aigu, south-facing and earlier-ripening, planted in 1970, and the saline austerity of Les Caurés, north-west-facing and rooted in 1946 vines that are now among the oldest the family farms. The blending of these two parcels is, in a sense, the founding gesture of the modern house. After two years of malolactic trials on Mont-Aigu, Richard committed in 2006 to vinifying the two together without malolactic fermentation, balancing the southern warmth of Mont-Aigu against the northern tension of Caurés. He has stuck with it ever since, and the cuvée’s character flows directly from that choice.
From 2022, Caurés has made up the majority of the blend, reflecting its growing importance as the climate warms and the value of its later ripening, cooler exposure becomes ever more apparent. In cooler years, when Mont-Aigu achieves perfect balance rather than exuberance, the parcel is occasionally bottled alone as Le Mont-Aigu (2008, 2010, 2013 and 2024). Both incarnations are made entirely from cuvées, with no malolactic fermentation, and released only in the years that earn it.
Prohibition Blanc de Noirs
Blend: 100% Pinot Meunier – Blanc de Noirs – Cuvées Only
Vineyards: Blend of 2 old-vine plots in Mardeuil – Les Chataigniers (1954) and Les Carrés du Midi (1960)
Classification: Millésime
Dosage: 0 g/L – Extra Brut (1.5 g/L in 2021 – first and only time)
Malolactic: No malolactic fermentation
Production: 4,000 bottles
Ageing: 30–36 months sur lattes then min. 6 months post-disgorgement
There is nothing else quite like Prohibition in the Guiborat range. It is made from 100% Pinot Meunier, drawn from two parcels in Mardeuil in the Vallée de la Marne, in the Guiborat family for generations. The site is unusual: chalk lies almost at the surface, but it isn’t the pure chalk of the Côte des Blancs – here it is mingled with limons and free of clay, a true rarity in the Marne, where Meunier is almost invariably planted on clay. It is precisely that absence of clay that gives the wine its tension and lift, and rules out the heavier vinosity Meunier so often carries.
Its existence as a cuvée is something of a homecoming. When Richard committed fully to grands blancs in 2012, Meunier looked, for a time, like a chapter closed. It would return, but only on his own terms. In March 2016, a tasting of remarkable 1980s-era 100% Meunier Champagnes left him with the realisation that he had never properly understood his own Mardeuil Meunier as a single-variety wine. The first harvest of Prohibition followed that autumn.
The winemaking is uncompromising: cuvées only, no malolactic, preserving the saline, floral character Richard prizes in this Meunier rather than tilting it toward vinosity. A small proportion sees oak, in one of the estate’s three foudres, lending texture without pulling the wine away from its essential transparency. The result is a Pinot Meunier you have probably never tasted before.
A fifth cuvée, Caurés Vieilles Vignes, from the 1946 plantings in Les Caurés, has been produced in very limited quantities since 2013 and is not yet commercially available.
Places & Terroirs - The Chalk That Defines Everything
To understand Guiborat, it is necessary to first understand Cramant and the extraordinary geological accident that makes the Côte des Blancs one of the most singular wine-growing environments on Earth.
Cramant was classified as Grand Cru in the very first “échelle des crus” in 1911, one of only two villages on the Côte des Blancs originally classified Grand Cru (the other being Avize). Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, Oger, Chouilly and Oiry were promoted only in 1985. The village’s name is thought to derive from “craie montée”, meaning chalk mount, a label that could scarcely be more accurate. Beneath a thin layer of topsoil lies a vast deposit of Campanian chalk: pure, porous, brilliant white, formed some 65 to 70 million years ago from the accumulated skeletal remains of microscopic marine organisms. This is not merely a geological curiosity; it is the source of everything that makes Côte des Blancs Chardonnay so distinctive. The chalk drains freely yet retains moisture at depth, allowing roots to penetrate far into the subsoil in search of water and trace minerals. It also regulates temperature with unusual precision, storing daytime warmth and releasing it at night, a crucial advantage at Champagne’s northerly location on the 49th parallel. The high calcium content creates the structural backbone, the tension and saline minerality, that distinguishes a great Blanc de Blancs from all others.
The Guiborat parcels sit across four distinct communes, each contributing a different dimension to the wines. Crucially, Richard has always managed these as a complementary palette rather than as a portfolio of separate sites, choosing to blend, in the classic Champenois tradition, to achieve greater balance and complexity than any single parcel could provide. Only if a specific parcel is deemed exceptional in a specific vintage does it justify a single-vineyard release.
Mont-Aigu - Chouilly Grand Cru
Côte des Blancs - South/South-East Exposure - 47 ares planted in 1970
About the Parcel: Historically the prestige parcel of the domaine, south-facing and earlier-ripening, though the warming climate now pushes it close to its limit. The pure white chalk lies fine and deep, rich in coccoliths, acting as a sponge that holds rain and feeds the vine its remarkable minerality.
Role in the Range: The backbone of De Caurés à Mont-Aigu and bottled alone in cooler years (2008, 2010, 2013, 2024). Its south to south-east exposure brings earlier ripeness than Caurés, giving the cuvée its milieu de bouche – the mid-palate that coats and lingers.
Les Caurés - Chouilly Grand Cru
Côte des Blancs - North/North-West Exposure - 2 hectares, planted in 1946, 1986, 1998, 2005 and 2011
About the Parcel: The largest and oldest parcel of the domaine. Homogeneous chalk, easily fractured and friable, allowing the roots to descend with ease. The cooler, north-westerly exposure produces wines of natural austerity that age with grace, with the “windmill wing” effect of opposing exposures within the parcel demanding plot-by-plot management.
Role in the Range: A core component of Téthys and Prisme, and the structural counterpart to Mont-Aigu in De Caurés à Mont-Aigu. Increasingly the dominant partner in that cuvée as the climate warms, it brings the length and tension that Mont-Aigu can no longer provide alone.
Les Bergeries - Cramant Grand Cru
Côte des Blancs - Flat with light north exposure - 40 ares planted in 1984
About the Parcel: A topsoil layer over chalk mingled with limons washed down from the upper slopes. Karine speaks of these vines as lending body to the assemblages, the parcel that supplies width where others bring length or precision. 40 ares planted in 1984.
Role in the Range: A component of Téthys and Prisme. Les Bergeries provides the gentle roundness on the attack that softens the entry before the chalk-driven tension and length of the other parcels takes over.
Gros Monts (or Les Briquettes) - Oiry Grand Cru
Côte des Blancs - North exposure - 25 ares planted in 1969
About the Parcel: A soil profile close to that of Mont-Aigu, but with a more northerly exposure that brings real freshness to the fruit. The most chameleon parcel of the domaine, its character shifts with the vintage, sometimes leaning towards Chouilly, sometimes towards Cramant, always bridging the two.
Role in the Range: A component of Téthys and Prisme, where Gros Monts plays the connecting role: lending freshness, smoothing the joins between parcels, and giving the assemblages the textural continuity that holds the more characterful sites together.
Les Chataigniers & Les Carrés du Midi - Mardeuil
Vallée de la Marne - North Exposure - Planted respectively in 1954 and 1960
About the Parcel: Valley-floor parcels with a north-facing exposure, planted to Pinot Meunier, a family inheritance from Richard’s Guiborat grandfather. Chalk lies almost at the surface here, mingled with limons and entirely free of clay – the absence of clay being precisely what gives the wine its tension and lift.
Role in the Range: The sole source of Prohibition, never blended into the Blanc de Blancs range. Always released at zero dosage (with the single exception of 2021). The fruit was sold to the négoce between 2012 and 2015, before earning its return as a single-variety wine in 2016.
A final note on vineyard age: Richard’s estate vines were planted between 1946 and the early 2000s, with an average age of around 40 years. The Caurés 1946 vines, now approaching 80 years of age, are among the oldest vines in Chouilly. Old vines produce less fruit but more intensely mineral and structured juice, their deep root systems accessing chalk reserves unavailable to younger plants. This is not a marginal benefit; it is, in the context of no-malo, Extra-Brut, low-sulphur winemaking, absolutely central to the wines’ ability to carry their structure with such finesse.
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