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brand’s signature, most houses produce single-vintage bottlings in years that are at least theoretically exceptional. These inevitably cost more, and whether they’re worth it or not is strictly a matter of taste and budget. At the top of the Champagne hierarchy are the luxury cuvées—vintage bottlings from the best vineyards and the best lots, usually, packaged in exotic-looking bottles, Dom Pérignon being unquestionably the most famous. If you can afford it, it’s extraordinarily good, although there is significant vintage variation. Cristal, Dom Ruinart, Veuve Clicquot’s La Grande Dame, Pol Roger’s Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, and Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne are all very good and tend to get better with age. They also make a big statement whenever one is required. If you really need to impress somebody, choose DP because it speaks the lingua franca.
    For those more interested in quality than image, and whose budgets aren’t unlimited, the real excitement these days comes from “grower Champagnes”—what the importer Terry Theise calls “farmer fizz.” The grapes that go into the vats of the big houses come largely from thousands of small individually owned vineyards throughout the region. In recent years more and more of these growers have begun to bottle their own wine, and several astute American importers have been scouring the rolling hills around Reims and Épernay to discover the best of them.
    Visiting Francis Egly in the village of Ambonnay is a very different experience from visiting the grandee’s corporate offices. When Mrs. Egly finally answers the door of the small Tudor house in the middle of a vineyard, she kicks aside baby toys to clear my path into the living room. It takes her some time to locate her husband, Francis, who’s out on his tractor, and when I shakehis hand, he apologizes for the dirt on his fingers. I tell him dirty hands are a good sign on anybody growing grapes. But his winery, in a new concrete-and-steel barn out back, is spotless, and his wines are among the most distinctive in all of Champagne. You’ll find them on some of the best wine lists from Paris to Napa and beyond.
    The guru of the grower movement is Anselme Selosse, another proud farmer with dirty hands who studied in Burgundy and brought back to his father’s domaine in Avize all kinds of new ideas, including the basic insight that everything begins in the vineyards. In Champagne, however, this was a radical idea—the big houses bought grapes in bulk from growers who had little incentive for meticulous viticulture.
    Smaller is not always better, but it’s not unlikely that a guy making his own wine with his own grapes is going to take better care of them than someone who sells them by the pound to a corporation. Another argument in their favor is that almost everywhere else, specificity of origin is considered essential to any wine’s character. In a (French) word,
terroir:
the concept that wine reflects the weather, soil, geology, and topography of the land on which the grapes are grown, and that the most unique and exceptional wines come from a single exceptional vineyard. In Burgundy, for instance, grapes grown in the vineyard of Romanée-Conti produce the most prized reds in the world, while those grown only a few hundred feet away in different soil and at different elevations sell for thousands less. Not all these Champagnes come from a single vineyard—some growers own different patches of land—but most come from specific villages, and experienced tasters distinguish between one from Mesnil and another from Bouzy. “Single vineyards are the future,” says Selosse, whose wines you’re likely to find only on the finest restaurant lists.
    The $3,500 release from Krug is from a single vineyard called Clos d’Ambonnay. While the virtues of blending are evident in thecompany’s superb multi-vintage Grand Cuvée (it’s called “multi” instead of “non” presumably to distinguish it