Every Friday The no1 Champagne expert in the world will taste new & old Champagne s to give You a tip or two for the weekend. This week Richard Juhlin & Björnstierne tasted à la volée Thierry Perrion Rosé by Jessica. [read the full champagne story]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Thierry Perrion
★★★
Jessica Perrion is the only Swedish winemaker in Champagne, and one of the few winemakers who has been to my home in Sweden. Together with her husband Thierry, she runs this small firm in the grand cru village of Verzenay. With some artistic talent, Jessica designs the Champagne labels herself. Thierry and Jessica do everything themselves on this little property, and 75 percent of the grapes are sold to established Champagne houses. The quality goes up every year and I wait with excitement to see if they will vinify Verzenay’s oldest vineyard in a separate cuvée. I hoped for a long time that Jessica could convince Thierry that a few hundred bottles can be worth so much trouble. I succeeded in convincing her, at least, over a bottle of 1938 La Tâche. The result is stunning. The latest edition tastes like a Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill withour dosage and gave him a third star.
2020 Thierry Perrion ‘Rosé by Jessica Millésime Brut‘
100PN
95(93)p
TASTING NOTE Champagne Club by Richard Juhlin – ‘Jessica Perrion, our Swedish champagne bride in Verzenay, has had the upper hand over 1500 bottles and the result is sensational! Together with some vintages of Michel Arnould Mémoire de Vignes, this is the most elegant pure wine I have tasted from the iconic village of Verzenay. This is the kind of wine that will elude the general public, who will stand wondering like birdhouses when they hear me rave about its greatness. Why is that? Well, because everything is so faintly and finely tuned. All the beauty is painted with light brushstrokes and the aromatic profile is very shy in all its beauty.From my experienced perspective, a champagne appears so similar to the very backbone of Roederer’s finest rosés. Here, above all, there is the stony minerality and chalky elegance found in young vintages of Cristal Rosé. The fruit is lighter and less expressive than Roederer Rosé Millésime, but the chalk, the cream puffs, the frozen raspberries, the small tart strawberries that only ripen every other year on a few bright summer days in Lofoten are all there together with the classic blood orange note in the taste. Sweetly beautiful and euphoric like a June night in the kingdom of the midnight sun.’
2020 Thierry Perrion ‘Rosé Œil de Perdrix Brut Nature’
100PN
95(93)p
TASTING NOTE Champagne Club by Richard Juhlin – ‘Jessica Perrion, our Swedish champagne bride in Verzenay, has had the upper hand over a couple of hundred examples and the result is sensational! Here we had to disgorge it ourselves on Lidingö because we wanted to film it together with the rosé variants of the same wine.
Björnstierne did a brilliant job as you can see in the film. The same wine is a truth with modification. Here as partridge eye, so shorter maceration and perhaps a little more bronze than rosé color. Longer aging time with the yeast because this variant is made without malolactic fermentation and will remain in Verzenay for a couple more years. We were most struck by the fact that the wine had a powdery reductive roasting that was reminiscent of a magnum effect. Oh my God, what elegant wines Jessica has created.’
