Champagne Palmer is a fairly small cooperative, counted in champagne dimensions. They have around 400 hectares of vineyards. They are known for the long ageing of the wines and their fondness for magnum bottles. Amazone de Palmer is their prestige champagne cuvée, a blend of chardonnay and pinot noir. Palmer’s CEO and (and oenologist) came to Sweden to present the latest version, based in 2012, for BKWine Magazine’s Sven-Olof Johansson.
Dressed in white of the purest cardboard from Swedish Billerud-Korsnäs. More elegant it could not be, but of course compostable. Palmer releases a new “vintage” of its prestige champagne in a completely new packaging design. We open the dazzling white box and taste the contents together with deluxe nibble food at Adam & Albins’ Tvätteriet and listen to Remi Vervier from Palmer & Co.
As the talk of growers’ champagne spreads, it can be challenging to make your voice heard if you talk about a large (in comparison) cooperative. Small-scale gives a down-to-earth feeling, and the smaller the producer, the more fun it is to lay it on about details and features. For who around the dinner table comes with a story from a visit to an industrial-like building with giant tanks?
Given the results in the bottle, it may not be a stupid idea to do just that, to visit the “big” cooperative in Reims. Price is, after all, something of a key to enjoyment. In short, a bottle costing an arm and a leg has a higher opening resistance than a less expensive bottle. Right now, Systembolaget, the Swedish retail monopoly, is awash with champagne for two hundred crowns (~20 euro, rock-bottom price for champagne in Sweden). Unfortunately, many times an uninteresting content devoid of nuances, and the question is whether it is not best to leave the bottles on the shelf.
Palmer & Co is in the segment a bit above this but has always delivered very good value money. It is, on good grounds, a bestseller in Sweden. Note, for instance, that Palmer Blanc de Blanc 2008 was available on magnum for SEK 894 (87 euro). The wine on magnum is also left on its lees for a few extra years.
We can dwell for a moment on the concept of grower champagne. Well, thank you, we can all figure out what a small grower can be in contrast to large champagne houses. But when concepts such as grower style, grower character and big house style find their way into reviews and descriptions, I wonder how many people actually feel the difference.
To make push come to shove, the sharpest wine tasters were invited to a blind tasting with four growers and four large houses. Could they pinpoint which were grower champagnes? Nope, not a chance. However, a unanimous panel guessed that I had sneaked in a good prosecco into the flight, which was, in fact, a Moët. The bestseller, which unfortunately always comes last in blind tastings. It can be added that the same assembly of tasters blind-tasted non-vintage champagnes against vintage champagne where pretty much everyone got it right.
For my own part, Palmer has appeared quite often at invitations at home. It does not break the bank, and it is a well-made wine. I also think that the cooperative is ambitious in its winemaking. Five full-time oenologists work with the products, and they have three soleras running. One solera for chardonnay, one for pinot noir and one for rosé blends. The latter solera has been in operation for 40 years.
Amazone de Palmer is the cooperative’s prestige bottling. They make it approximately every five years. If you manage to find one of the previous releases, with base year 2008, the label was black, but now both the bottle and the carton are nicely styled in white. “It should symbolize chalk and freshness against the previously dark and somewhat plastic packaging,” says Remi Vervier, oenologist and CEO of Palmer.
We can agree, and that it also reflects the contents of the bottle that has base year 2012, 40%, with reserve wine from 2009 and 2010, 30% each. The bottle we tasted was disgorged in 2020 with the grape blend 51% chardonnay and 49% pinot noir, dosage 6 g. I can add that 18% of the wine is chardonnay from solera. An impeccable and beautiful wine for SEK 1,099 (107 euro), which will be launched this December. I recommend putting it immediately on the wish list to send to Santa Claus.
Read
Read more about Champagne in BKWine’s book “Champagne, the wine and the growers”, the only book in Swedish with updated, correct and complete information about the bubbly wine. (But currently only available in Swedish.)
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