CHAMPAGNE BENOIT MUNIER

Our story begins in 1914 when Constant, my maternal great-grandfather, arrives from the Mayenne region on the Eastern front, near Reims. After the war, he settled in Bouzy and bought a small piece of land on which he planted Chardonnay vines. During the Second World War, my maternal grandmother, Emilienne, arrived with her meager suitcase from Boulogne sur Mer because of the exodus. She found work in Bouzy and married André, Constant's son. In 1957, the family with its four children (including Marie-Claude) moved to Cramant because André found work there. Little by little, the couple bought small parcels of vineyards in Cramant. A few years later, my mother, Marie-Claude, met Patrice, my father, a native of Cramant. They both worked in a champagne house and got married in 1972 in Cramant. My parents devoted their lives to building up our estate by buying small parcels in the Côte des Blancs in the terroirs of Cramant, Avize, Chouilly, Oger and Cuis. At the end of the 90's, I gradually took over from my parents with the firm intention of making my own way.

Our story

In 2015, we are switching our entire operation to a sustainable culture without herbicides or insecticides and our Bouzy plot to a chemical-free culture. We continue to give priority to manual work, giving specific attention to each of our plots as if they were our children with their own character and differences. Each new viticultural season allows us to experiment with new practices, to question ourselves, to adjust the experiences of previous years. Even after 20 years in the business, we continue to learn because the vine and nature never behave in the same way. Today, we cultivate 1/3 of our vineyard without chemicals, following the precepts of organic and biodynamic agriculture. I don't claim any label but I believe in a responsible, ecological and respectful viticulture of our environment. Part of our wines are vinified in stainless steel tanks and the other part in barrels. In both cases, our wines are low in dosage and low in sulfites.

For the past 8 years, we have been experimenting with parcel-based vinification by blending our parcels in the vineyard, shortly before the harvest, according to the maturity of the grapes and the particularities of each parcel linked to the subsoil and the exposure in particular. For these cuvées, we have abandoned chaptalization, enzyming, racking, filtration and chilling with the objective of elaborating expressive and complex champagnes while respecting and adapting to the potential of the wine. We believe that the quality of a champagne is played out in the vineyard. Our philosophy is to harvest very ripe, healthy and sanitary grapes. "We pick only the grapes that we would like to eat. Our role then is simply to accompany the must to allow it to express all its potential. Of course, we do not intend to stop there and hope to be able to perpetuate our exploitation in the next years and to continue our way towards a cleaner, healthier, more natural viticulture, for us, for you and for the future generations.