Richard Juhlin went to two world-class tastings in the Nordic countries. [ read the full champagne story ]
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
It is very fascinating that some of the largest and most exclusive wine tastings that take place globally are held in the Nordic countries. On the last weekend of August 2025, the two giants, Danish Björn Leisner and Finnish Pekka Nuikki’s world-class events collided. Luckily, Pekka’s three-day tasting had its crescendo on Sunday when Björn Leisner‘s annual champagne clash took up the entire Saturday.
For the 20th year in a row, the fantastic enthusiast Björn Leisner arranged his annual gigantic champagne tasting at the increasingly perfect Sölleröd Kro just north of Copenhagen. 20 years ago, he gathered a group of local champagne lovers and let me join him in a corner and I can now proudly state that it is only me and the organizing couple who have not missed a single time since we started. This event has become so sacred. A kind of wonderfully recurring time marker. An August dream that makes the inevitable arrival of autumn more bearable. A last breath of a warmed-up Scandinavia with flamboyant roses, Admiral butterflies and protein-hungry sluggish wasps around the last portions of food that are partly enjoyed outdoors before we lock ourselves in for six months.
IN MEMORY OF JAN RESTORFF
Sölleröd is also a fantastic place in itself. A place that is one of the few where I myself feel I would like to live. In quiet Sölleröd, beautiful classic villas in the HC Andersen style are located around a small, picturesque lake surrounded by an ancient stately beech forest where I always take a walk the last hour before the tasting at the old church, the cemetery before I join the inn.
Sölleröd Kro is a cozy retreat with a wonderful courtyard for aperitifs and a thatched-roof manor house and a fashionable interior with white, green and golden accents. Low ceilings but high in atmosphere and level. Strangely enough, the sun always shines when the first blind tasting bottle is uncorked in the courtyard, and we meet again after a year. Only once has it rained outside our window.
We eat our way through an incomparable 6-course lunch and an equally sumptuous 5-course dinner with a couple of hours’ break at a Michelin restaurant that every year becomes more perfect and elegant and absolutely deserves 2 stars. Nowadays, the classic ingredients are beautifully lightened and flowers and vegetables take up more and more space without sacrificing the intensity of taste and the loving flirtation with French star gastronomy. In recent years, also with several world-class Japanese and locally produced elements. Unfortunately, this year we had to start with a minute’s silence in memory of Mr. Sölleröd himself, Jan Restorff, who left us far too soon this year. His warm revelation and constantly curious face will always be for me the very essence of the best Danish restaurant life has to offer. He was a social genius, and always had an updated and interested eye on which projects I was working on at the time.
Jan, who had a huge interest in wine, was always with Björn and created dishes that would go perfectly with the wines. The tradition they started together began in 2006 with an impressive line-up of around thirty Dom Pérignon vintages between 1934 and 1998. Unfortunately, I was anything but satisfied as the condition of the bottles was really poor. By next year’s competition, Björn had already learned the lesson that prominence is everything when it comes to older champagnes.
Today, Björn’s tastings are world class and are only surpassed by the rare occasions when the tasting consists of Vinothèque wines directly from the houses. The highlight was our 10th anniversary year, which you have probably read about before as it was unique in the world as it was the first time that all vintages of Krug ‘Clos du Mesnil’ were gathered in one tasting. 1979, 1985, 1988, 1985, 1982 and 1996 were all pretty much perfect champagnes in their own stages of maturity. Without a doubt Björn’s most fantastic tasting.
Last year was also extra memorable with legendary champagnes that one of the guests, Jan Werner, picked from his private cellar after studying my top lists. But despite several potential 99 and 98 pointers, there was one champagne I had never tasted before, but which I still managed to identify from hearsay, Moët & Chandon ‘Esprit du Siècle‘, a multi-vintage on magnum produced for the turn of the millennium with 1900 as the starting vintage, which was the best of them all. Absolutely outstanding. This year I managed to almost miss a point on every single one of the half-blindly served champagnes, even though the somewhat unfocused tasting format with fantastic food and convivial Danish conversation makes it more difficult to get it right than during more strict conventional tasting formats.
SENSUAL DOM PÉRIGNON ROSÉ
On this year’s 20th anniversary, the turn had come for Dom Pérignon Rosé. What unfolded was, to my knowledge, the most complete DPR tasting the world has ever seen.
Dom Pérignon Rosé is undeniably one of the truly great rosé champagnes, but what is your relationship with rosé wines in general and the color pink in particular? Hand on heart, would you let your newborn son be dressed in pink? Would you proudly show up with a bouquet of pink roses on his graduation day? Hardly! No color is as strongly valued and gender driven as the romantic and softly creamy color pink. I just need to go to myself. I have never ever bought a pink item, but have always been overwhelmed by rosy-cheeked blondes dressed in pink creations. There is also nothing more sensual than pink lips. I also get a tingly, expectant feeling in my stomach when the Japanese cherry trees are in full spring bloom. The pink leader’s jersey in the Giro d’Italia is anything but silly and Sicilian tanned macho men in Palermo have the Italian league’s best-looking jerseys in light cream cake pink. The Pink Panther is one of my favorite films and overall, I have to reluctantly admit that I like the color pink after all, which for a real man, even in explicitly feminist Sweden, is anything but politically correct.
Rosé champagne then? Is it also girly and politically incorrect for us men? It took a while before we understood why they stared at us, but my photographer Pål Allan and I were often seen as a suspicious couple when, during our first trips to Champagne, we ordered a rosé champagne for dinner after our tough working days. So even in Champagne there are persistent prejudices about the charged symbolic value of this wine.
First of all, we must state that rosé champagne is hardly in reality a creamy pink with a predominance of white. Most rosé champagnes instead have a base of various red shades with hints of brown, blue or yellow against orange. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but true lipstick pink champagne does not exist. Recently, several completely red rosé champagnes have instead appeared. Champagnes that, in all honesty, should be classified as sparkling red wines.
I have always loved rosé champagne and it has always been my choice as a seductress drink and unbeatable with its supple color shifts in the sunset. Marketta and my engagement champagne in Hawaii was 1985 Cuvée William Deutz Rosé and Saras and mine at Spendido in Portofino was 1979 Comtes de Champagne Rosé, incidentally the only champagne we drank this weekend that was not a DPR and which still stands well among the pink legends. Countless are the occasions when my closest friends and I have sought out an alpine slope or a sea cliff with a well-chilled prestige rosé and watched the sun set through the glass in fascination. At the end of the natural spectacle when the gas ball is the color of fire, the champagne burns and the persistent bubbles sparkle with a golden energy that creates more euphoria than any other visual impression in the world of wine. Just look at how deliciously Dom Pérignon Rosé stands out in the Champagne Hiking book with the red shape of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
ROMANTIC, RARE, BEAUTIFUL AND PAINFULLY EXPENSIVE
If we leave the subjective reflections aside for a while and look at how it all began, we can see that most still wines from Champagne were reddish before Dom Pérignon’s time. It was only he and his contemporaries who came to control the pressing of Pinot grapes and managed to create clear white wines. You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating. The coloring was always considered a negative side effect and it was not until 1775 that Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin had the first rosé champagne made. For more than a hundred years, it was a very rare drink mainly intended for courtesans and royalty. In the luxury brothels of Paris, drinking rosé champagne straight from the ladies’ shoes as foreplay was common. A dubious ritual for us wine lovers but definitely preferable to today’s pointless washing up.
Rosé champagne still has to be described as beautiful, romantic, rare and expensive. Only a little over three percent of all champagne produced is rosé and the first vintage of the first prestige rosé. Dom Pérignon Rosé 1959 is still the second most expensive champagne sold at auction. The very vintage that was produced for the Shah of Iran’s Persian jubilee and the first editions from the 60s were actually the only ones we didn’t have on this fine late summer day in the Zealand oasis.
I started the gathering with a little informative speech about what I assumed we had to look forward to. I described the wine style as extremely sophisticated with many similarities to the white Dom Pérignon where roasted coffee beans, pine nuts, gunpowder smoke, brioche, apricot, mushroom cream etc. are aromatic accents with the silky seamlessness and balanced harmony on the palate as other common features. The main difference is that the rosé is even denser, fuller and more concentrated, less roasted with a greater depth of fruit with new notes of orange chocolate, raspberries and strawberries. It is also less characterized by vintage variations as they make vanishingly small quantities. The last time I got insight into the secret numbers, the rosé made up about 2% of the volume of the white Dom Pérignon. This of course means that you can be even more selective and during difficult vintages you can go a little extra with the red wine which between 1959-1982 only came from Bouzy, but since 1985, when the red wine came exclusively from Aÿ, the wonderful Grand Cru village is always included in the red wine base. Some vintages also include red wine from Hautvillers in the composition. For historical reasons, Hautvillers is the only village that is not a Grand Cru in the white DP. When I went through my database before the tasting, as I am one of the few, probably the only one, who has tested all the vintages since the start, I realized that my scores were extremely close to each other without any overlaps. It is therefore much easier to identify the wine variety than the vintage in this case.
The color scale has also been kept almost identical over the years with the help of the added red wine. If I’m going to be really elitist and sound reluctantly snobbish, I’ll state that DPR is always between the top 5-10 among the world’s rosé champagnes except for the times when you get them in magnum or in the form of P2 or P3 when they reach the medal position. So a bit of a sliver above its white brother in the respective category, but characterized by the same phenomenon. Unfortunately, P3 in magnum, which is the ultimate form of enjoying DPR, is so expensive that Château Petrus and Romanée-Conti have a match. It was hardly surprising that Pål Allans and my extraterrestrial Champagne Hiking with a freshly disgorged magnum 1988 that Richard Geoffroy sent with us to Versailles, then with a P2 label, today with a P3 label, became the winner of the whole weekend. Excitingly, we also had the exact same wine in a regular bottle and then it ended up in the middle rather than at the top of the 28 different DPRs we opened at Sölleröd. The spaciousness and crystal-clear purity in both minerality, toastiness and youthful raspberry-dominated fruitiness that the Oenothèque wines with the Plentidude label have is something quite extraordinary. Among the regular bottles, one of my previous favorites, which I have only previously tested in magnum with Richard Geoffroy a couple of times, won, the aforementioned Aÿ-dominated 1985. Here the balance is perfect and the level of maturity is exemplary right now. Truffle, leather and red burgundy aromas are added here to the usual aroma profile. Actually very similar to a sparkling La Tâche purely aromatically. The group disagreed on whether the 1996 P2 or the 1995 P2 was the tastiest. I hold the slightly more shelf-friendly 96 a nose ahead regardless of whether it comes in P1 or P2 version.
The young vintages, which will be stored for many more years, are very interesting because since 2003 Richard Geoffroy and Vincent Chaperon have dared to leave the role model, the white Dom Pérignon, more and more and are pushing hard with high phenolic maturity and treating DPR more and more like a great red wine, even if it carries a risk that those who consume DPR in Florida or Saint-Tropez will find them a bit demanding. Buy 2008 and 2003 by the bottle and 2009 by the magnum, but wait a decade if you have time before enjoying these milestones of wine giants. We really only had one “disappointment” as the Danes call disappointments. In two variants we tested the 1993 vintage. A vintage that the whole of LVMH has had major cork problems with, so avoid them completely. The recently deceased and forever missing Fred Panaiotïs told me during our last meeting that he had measured TCA in every bottle of Dom Ruinart from 1993. Towards midnight, my entire wonderful Danish group of friends remained sitting out on the terrace drinking 2010 Château Trotanoy while, with a full stomach and a smile on my face, I got in the taxi to the Kastrup airport hotel where I had a wake-up call at 6am.
But that’s another story to be told …
// RJ
