Champagne Bruno Paillard

How would you define the Bruno Paillard house of Champagne?
We are a small traditional house ceaselessly trying to produce wines that are at once elegant and complex, built around a tight acidic structure that emanates from the terroir. Our family has long been established in the Champagne region, but my father did not inherit a vineyard and started from scratch. Today our estate is 32 hectares large. It encompasses 90 plots from 16 villages. This means that 60 to 65% of what we produce come from our own vineyard. It is fairly rare for the region.

Tell me about the style of Bruno Paillard Champagnes.
Our wines display the dual characteristics of the region, its northern latitude and its chalky soil. I like to say that they are faithful and true to the region. The Champagne terroir is austere. It is tough on the vine, but it can bring a marvelous energy to the wines, give them tension and vitality. Our wines express this austerity early on. They are not explosive, but rather restrained first. It takes a little time for them to express their full potential.

The reasons for this are to be found in our assemblage and vinification choices. We only use the first press juice and our grapes come mostly from “premier crus” and “grand crus”, so our musts are extremely pure. They will need time to ripen, grow and develop their complexity. It also explains why we use oak barrels. Not new though, only barrels that are at least three years old. 20% of our wines are vinified and matured for eight months in such barrels before we blend them. The wood allows our wines to gently breathe. It helps them gradually express themselves, without affecting their aromas.

You also pay a lot of attention to the ageing process?
You know how the saying goes “time does not respect what does not take time”. The primary material for Champagne has very high acidity and is therefore very demanding. To tame it you have only two options, using time or using sugar. Since day one, our choice at Bruno Paillard has been to seek the greatest possible purity in our wine, which excludes resorting to high dosage. All of our wines are actually extra-brut, and contain less than six grams of sugar per liter. The reason is not dogmatic. We are not obsessed with low dosages. We just do not need to resort to higher dosages because through our long cellar maturations, we give our wines the time they need to soften.

How about the kind of work you conduct in the vineyard?
Everything starts with how you pick your terroirs, and how you approach them in order to capture their personality. We repeatedly plough our vineyards between April and July so as to force the vine roots to dig deeper and come in contact with the chalky subsoil. Then we feed our soil with organic prescriptions so as to promote its microbiological life. We use certified and specifically designed “teas”, made from aired compost. We proceed by steps with recipes that are sometimes new, or that have already been tested … We resort to all the elements that can promote soil life and therefore contribute to the balance of the vine.

Where can we find Bruno Paillard Champagnes ?
In wine shops and in the world’s best restaurants, in fact wherever you find wine connoisseurs. France remains our number one market, with 20% of our total sales. But since we deal exclusively with specialized stores we tend to be present outside France as well. Because of our size and because we are open to the world we do not need to advertise excessively. Next to the wine itself, it is actually the thing I like most about our job: we only deal with people who are as passionate as we are.

Interview by Gérald Olivier

www.champagnebrunopaillard.com