Champagne JM Sélèque, Pierry


Champagne J-M Sélèque label

Country & RegionFrance, Champagne, Pierry
Appellation(s)Champagne
ProducerJean-Marc Sélèque
Founded1965
Websitejmseleque.fr/

Jean-Marc Sélèque is one of the brightest young stars in Champagne!
         –John Gilman, A View from the Cellar, issue 69, July 2017

As I’ve written before, Jean-Marc Sélèque is one of Champagne’s most exciting and dynamic young producers. Based in Pierry in the Coteaux Sud d’Epernay, Sélèque returned to the family domaine in 2008 and immediately stopped the use of herbicides; but he dates his realization that the raw materials for greatness are to be found in agronomy and not in the cellar to 2012…Everything here comes recommended, and I warmly encourage readers to acquaint themselves with these wines.
         –William Kelley, The Wine Advocate, December 2023

Il faut déjà vinifier un vin avant de vinifier un champagne. [You have to vinify a wine before you vinify a champagne.]
         –Jean-Marc Sélèque in 2023

Jean-Marc Sélèque (say-lek) returned to Pierry in 2008 after internships at Chandon’s facilities in Napa Valley and in Australia’s Yarra Valley with a vision of what he wanted to do, and didn’t want to do at Champagne JM Sélèque. The latter was reinforced by his experiences at those two large production operations, where vineyard practices resulted in all manner of “corrections” having to be made in the cellar. The positive ideas were simple, but labor intensive: in the vines, shallow plowing of rows by horse or tractor for weed control; reducing yields by careful pruning; organic and biodynamic applications to boost the health of soil and vine.

In the cellar, he moved to much slower and more gentle fermentations, something he considers key for flavor and texture. He did this by lowering the temperature and working more with wild yeast. Initially, many but not all of his ferments were wild, and he wasn’t orthodox about that. By 2018, however, he had isolated one strain of yeast from one of his wild ferments, and these days before each harvest he makes a pied de cuve over a seven day period. He instituted longer ageing on the lees for all the cuvées, both in barrel or tank and subsequently in bottle for the secondary fermentation (that bottling is now done at the end of July following the harvest, which is a long and relaxed élevage, allowing a young wine to come together). Early on, he stopped his father’s systematic introduction of malolactic fermentation, letting the wine decide, but now the bacteria is well present in his cellar and the ML happens naturally to all the wines. He did away with fining, and worked up to completely doing away with filtration in 2015, when his new cellar gave him the measure of control he needed. That same year he introduced a high-tech press with temperature control; in 2017, he outfitted his harvest truck with temperature control; and in 2021, with climate change on the rise, he added temperature controls to his tanks in the underground cellar. Finally, because his farming reforms resulted in better maturity in his grapes, he lowered the level of sugar in the final dosage. Dosage and other specifics are spelled out on his back labels.

Jean-Marc Seleque of Champagne J-M Sélèque

Fundamentally, these ideas evolved from friendships with fellow reform-minded growers, who insisted that the road to authenticity would only be found by working closely with one’s vines, rather than from his enological studies. Currently, Champagne is arguably the most dynamic wine region in France—a country where almost nothing viticulturally is standing still any more—and it would be accurate to view Jean-Marc at the vanguard of this shift toward more artisanal farming and production. What may be most impressive, however, is how he has implemented his ideas with such openness and quiet confidence. He has taken the counsel of a who’s who list of cutting edge growers in Champagne, befriended many of them, and he makes a habit of visiting their ilk in the Loire Valley and in Burgundy. Likewise, he routinely receives fellow growers to his domaine.

The domaine began in 1965, when Jean-Marc’s grandfather started planting vines with the aid of his father-in-law (then the president of the Pierry co-op). Subsequently Jean-Marc’s father joined the domaine in 1974 after acquiring a degree in enology, and he did much to update the winery and augment its vineyard holdings.

When Jean-Marc came on board in 2008, he turned the domaine toward the organic viticulture he envisioned. In 2010, he started working biodynamically, and now all of his parcels are farmed organically and receive some biodynamic preparations, a fact that he doesn’t make much fuss about because for him it’s not about the label so much as it is about making better wine. (He has not gone for certification because he doesn’t want to be straitjacketed into using copper sulfites when, under certain conditions, a synthetic fungicide might be more benign.) Separately, he stopped his father’s practice of selling some grapes to négociants, and he began to acquire more oak vessels for fermentation and ageing on the lees. Today the ratio of oak to steel in the cellar is roughly 60/40, with the steel tanks being used primarily for the younger, fruitier Solessence and Solessence Rosé. He is, however, moving more toward oak every vintage. Since 2015, he’s been selling off his 228-liter barrels of late in favor of 350 and 600-liter barrels for fermentation and barrel aging. He buys barrels from over a half dozen top coopers, and typically the percentage of new oak for a given élevage is 5-10%.  For certain younger vineyard parcels, he uses 20-hectoliter foudres, plus he’s experimenting with amphora and cigar barrels of various sizes (so-called because of their elongated shape). He’s played with a concrete egg but that vessel hasn’t impressed him.

The domaine has 22 acres of vines which grow in 45 parcels and lie across 7 different villages. The average vine age is a notable 40 years of age (positively wizened by Champagne standards!). Most of the vines grow in the communes of Pierry and then Moussy, followed by Epernay, Mardeuil, Dizy, Vertus, and Boursault. Some 50% of the vines are Chardonnay; 40% are Pinot Meunier; and 10% are Pinot Noir.

Those 22 acres supported an average production of 5,500 cases per year. In 2018 Jean-Marc traded in his RM license for a Négociant-Manipulant license so that he could buy grapes from like-minded growers. There are four such organic growers, all farming in one or more of the seven villages where Jean-Marc has vines. Jean-Marc chooses the parcels, and his team does the harvesting for the one grower who sells him the most fruit. All of these grapes go into the Solessence range, enabling Jean-Marc to devote more of his estate fruit to his top cuvées. Today, the domaine’s production averages 9,500 cases.

Champagne J-M Sélèque vineyards

Pierry, with Moussy, is in Les Côteaux Sud d’Epernay, a zone delimited in 1996 and located just south and southwest of Epernay. It’s a small, branching valley with thirteen villages tucked between the Marne Valley to the north and the Côtes des Blancs to the east. The Côtes des Blancs is known, of course, for Chardonnay; Aÿ, to the northeast in the Marne, is known for Pinot Noir; and Mardeuil, to the northwest in the Marne, is known for Pinot Meunier. The Côteaux Sud has all three varieties, with Chardonnay predominating, followed closely by Meunier, and then Pinot Noir (Epernay and Pierry have the most significant plantings of Pinot Noir). Expositions are to the south and southeast, promoting the possibility of good maturity in the grapes, but the valley hillsides fold and twist and give considerable diversity. Then there’s the soil: the chalk here is less dense than on the Côte des Blancs, and it usually has two to three feet of clay topsoil mixed with varying amounts of limestone, schist, flint and marl (although mid-slope in Pierry the topsoil is only 8-12 inches above the chalk, and it’s worth noting that Pierry has seven distinct soil types). The result is Chardonnay that tends to be fuller, softer, and fruitier than that from the Côtes des Blancs, thanks to the clay (but still mineral, thanks to the chalk); Meunier that is ripe yet more elegant and more mineral than that from Mardeuil; and Pinot Noir that veers from fine to full, depending on the site. The vineyards in the Côteaux Sud represent 4% of the total in Champagne.

Historically, Pierry was as noted as Dom Perignon’s village of Hautvillers back in the Dom’s day. This was because of a younger contemporary Benedictine monk, one Brother Oudart, who farmed in Pierry and made his own contributions to the making of Champagne (it was he who standardized the key step of liqueur de tirage).

Today Jean-Marc divides his Champagnes into three ranges. First comes the Solessence range for the base level blends, with the lot number on the back referencing the base vintage. “Solessence” refers to the essence of soil, and there’s an extra-brut, an extra-brut rosé and a brut nature. Next comes the vintage-dated Soliste range: a range that since vintage 2015 is dedicated to unique terroirs within Jean-Marc’s commune of Pierry. Each wine comes from one site, one grape, and one vintage. The third tier is made of two proprietarily-named wines: Quintette and Partition. Quintette is Jean-Marc’s Blanc de Blancs, a Chardonnay from five mature sites. Up to 2014, this was effectively a vintage wine (see lot number), while starting with 2014 the wine has 20-30% reserve wine from a solera aging in foudre; thus the lot number will then refer to the base vintage. Partition is Jean-Marc’s one blended vintage wine.

Champagne JM Sélèque's Jean-Marc in the winter

In 2015, just in time for the harvest, Jean-Marc moved to a brand new cellar on the outskirts of Pierry. The cellar was designed to allow him to transfer wine via gravity, and it has much more room than his previous digs, which in turn allowed him to buy more containers of various sizes, be they steel or wood or concrete, to do specific fermentations of small lots of grapes. And this cellar gave him the opportunity to invest in a new press designed specifically for sparkling wine production and considered by many to be the finest available. It’s a Coquard press, a pressoir automatique à plateau incliné, or PAI. It does the same job as the widely used and much respected traditional vertical press, but more efficiently and with far less exposure to oxygen. Thus in 2015 Jean-Marc was able to lower his additions of SO2 during the pressing and fermentations by a full 25% compared to 2014 (and this is a man who has always used the least possible amounts of SO2). Going forward, total SO2 in the Sélèque wines is 20-30 mg/l.

By the way, in 2023 he got himself a machine to cook up his own sulfur. He says it’s really interesting how the homemade stuff has less of an impact on the taste of the wine. So far, he hasn’t blown himself up.

Thanks to Evan Hansen of Detroit’s Selden Standard for the shot of Jean-Marc in winter and of the sun over his vines in Pierry.

Video of Growing Season 2017 chez Sélèque.

The Wines

WineBlendDescription
Solessence
Blend based on Chardonnay, then Meunier, followed by Pinot NoirSolessence represents nearly half of the total house production, coming in around 4,200 cases. It also roughly mirrors the house plantations, orginating in all seven communes where Jean-Marc grows vines. The grapes for this wine come from the domain’s younger vines, which average 45 years of age (that, it must be said, would constitute the old vine selection for most Champagne properties!) Half the blend comes from a perpetual reserve, so-named because 50% of this older wine goes into the blending tank with the new harvest, and then 50% of that new blend is returned to the 20-hectoliter foudre to replenish the perpetual reserve. The new wine is raised primarily in steel with some in wood, and then time on the lees in bottle depends on the bottle size: the 750mls are aged for 2 years on the lees before disgorging; 4 years for magnums; and 5 years for 3-liter bottles.. The wine is bottled without fining or filtration. The lot number on the back label is the base vintage.

Solessence NatureBlend based on Chardonnay, then Meunier, followed by Pinot NoirThis is the same wine as Solessence NV but aged for three more years for a total of five years on its lees (for the 750mls), and it's bottled with zero dosage. Jean-Marc makes this for shellfish, seafood, and sushi. The aromatics are provocative, the body is broad and creamy, and the finish is decidedly dry. The lot number on the back is the vintage. The wine is aged 5 years on the lees before disgorging, and beginning with the 2019 vintage this aging is done under cork rather than crown (Solessence Nature, along with Partition and the Soliste range, are all aged under cork). No fining or filtration; production averages 400 cases.

Solessence RoséThe Solessence blend with around 10% of the Meunier Infusion plus 5% of still Pinot Noir
An unusually complex rosé made with a blend of reds--Meunier from his parcel of Les Charmes macerated over two days and Pinot Noir still wine from Les Gayères--blended into the Solessence cuvée along with 40% reserve wine. The lot number is the base vintage. The 750mls are aged for 2 years on the lees before disgorging and 4 years for magnums. Production averages 600 cases.
Soliste Chardonnay VintageChardonnayThe 2016 was the first release of this cuvée, completing Jean-Marc's palette of four Pierry single site, single varietal, single vintage wines under the Soliste label. Like all the Soliste wines, this is fermented entirely in oak barrels, and aged under cork (rather than crown cap) on its lees--in this case, for four years before disgorgement. The grapes come from two adjacent south-facing plots named Les Tartières and Les Porgeons, whose current vines were planted in 1990 and 1985 respectively. They grow in the heart of the Pierry slope, right in the middle, with Tartières stretching above Porgeons. The higher site grows in five feet of clay over Campanian chalk, whereas the layer of clay in Porgeons tapers up to a level of less than one foot. This is a great example of what the Côteaux Sud can do with Chardonnay: a wine with ample body and fruit, coupled with superb tension. Production averages 130-150 cases.
Soliste Pinot Noir VintagePinot NoirPinot Noir planted in 1975 from sélection massales in Les Gayères, a mid-slope site on the windy Pierry hillside noted for deep clay and flintstones on top of Campanian chalk. It faces east, veering to the southeast, and is a late ripening site, giving a Pinot Noir with great freshness and minerality. The site is plowed by a horse in the spring. The wine is made in barrel and subsequently aged on its lees in bottle under cork for four years. No fining or filtration. Production averages 100-125 cases.
Soliste Meunier Vintage Pinot MeunierThis blanc de noirs comes from a Pierry premier cru hillside vineyard named Les Gouttes d’Or planted with sélection massales primarily in 1951, with subsequent plantings in 1953, 1968, and 1971. The topsoil is an ochre clay with significant flint deposits on top of the Campanian chalk, elevations are in the lower-slope range of 100-110 meters, and the parcel is plowed by horse. This may be Jean-Marc's finest parcel of Meunier, growing in a site historically known for the varietal, making a wine with great elegance and precision.

This is raised in 300-350 liter barrels without malolactic fermentation, The cold stabilization is completed naturally, and there is neither fining nor filtration. The wine is aged under cork on its lees in bottle for four years before disgorgement. Annual production averages 150 cases.
Soliste Meunier Rosé Vintage

Pinot MeunierThis was formerly called Soliste Infusion Meunier Rosé. It's a rosé of Pinot Meunier from a parcel of Les Charmiers located upslope of Pierry's hillside on a very windy ridge facing southeast. These sélections massales vines were planted in 1964 in topsoil that lays a foot and a half deep on top of the chalk. The grapes were de-stemmed, macerated without crushing for 24 hours (like making tea, Jean-Marc says), then pressed. What goes into this bottle are those vats of the best juice from the pressing. Raised in barrel then put into bottle under cork to age on its lees for five years. This is a rosé for the table. Production is some 100 cases annually.
QuintetteChardonnayJean-Marc’s blended Blanc de Blancs, from five mature plantations in the Marne Valley, the Côte des Blancs, and the Côteaux Sud. Fruit from Pierry gives body and structure; Dizy gives richness and aromatic complexity; Mardeuil gives bright flavors; Epernay gives tension; and Vertus gives purity and finesse.

Approximately 30% of the wine is raised in steel while the rest is raised in barrel. The cold stabilization is completed naturally, and there is neither fining nor filtration. In July, after a long, gentle aging following the harvest, the wine is blended with 20% Chardonnay from a solera (unlike the perpetual cuvée, the solera is replenished strictly with the new harvest) and rests on its lees under cork until it is disgorged. The lot number on the back is the base vintage. The 750mls are aged for 3 years on the lees before disgorging and 5 years for magnums. Annual production averages 420 cases.

Partition Vintage

Blend dominated by Chardonnay, with Meunier and Pinot NoirMusic is central in the Sélèque family; Jean-Marc grew up playing guitar while his father continues to play piano. The treble clef on the Partition label is indeed inverted—to make the S of the family name. With each vintage, the score on the label changes to a different song to reflect something that happened that year. Millésime 2012, for example, has Jimi Hendrix's Changes (different from Bowie's song), because Jean-Marc instituted a series of changes in how he worked that year. The 2013 is Dusty Springfield's Son of a Preacher Man; 2014 is The Animals' House of the Rising Sun.

Partition is Jean-Marc's creation. Seven barrels from seven vineyard sites, always the same sites each year. Les Frileux in Epernay gives Chardonnay; Moque-Bouteille in Dizy gives Chardonnay; La Justice in Vertus gives Chardonnay; Basses Ronces in Mardeuil gives Chardonnay; Les Porgeons, Les Gouttes d'Or, and Les Gayères in Pierry give, respectively, Chardonnay, Meunier, and Pinot Noir. The blend is dominated by Chardonnay, with Meunier and Pinot Noir (specifics for a given year are on the back label).

Ageing on the lees is for five years. Significantly, beginning with the 2010 vintage, this ageing is done in bottle with a cork closure rather than with the typical beer cap closure. A cork allows more of an exchange of oxygen in the beginning before the secondary fermentation begins, but once that begins and the pressure builds up within a bottle, a cork becomes less permeable than a cap. The end result is a more textured and more complex wine.

Partition is bottled without fining or filtration. Production is 150 cases.
Partition 2nd Reading VintageBlend dominated by Chardonnay, with Meunier and Pinot NoirThis is the one late-disgorged wine that Jean-Marc does, and it began with the 2008 vintage of Partition. The 2011 'second reading' saw ten years of aging on its lees under cork before disgorgement in January, 2021. It was given a dosage of 1.5 g/l. Production: 476 bottles.