Puckery

Used to describe a wine that is so high in TANNIN that it causes your mouth to pucker with dryness. Most often the wine will have been made from insufficiently ripe grapes.

La Grande Dame, Cristal, and Comtes de Champagne are all examples of:

A. Prestige Cuvées

B. Grand Marques

C. Blanc de Blancs

D. Premier Grand Crus

About 40% of all the Champagne sold this year will be sold over the next three months, so it’s a good time to brush up on Champagne terminology. Proprietary names like La Grande Dame, Cristal and Comtes de Champagne are the names that Champagne Houses give to their very top wines which are known as prestige cuvées. The grapes for a prestige cuvee come from the best (and highest-rated) vineyards the House has access to, and the wines usually spend a very long time on the yeast lees–sometimes as much as ten years. As a result, prestige cuvées are usually both a) exquisite and b) expensive. La Grande Dame, Cristal and Comtes de Champagne are the prestige cuvées of Veuve Clicquot, Roederer and Taittinger respectively.

“Context is wildly underrated when it comes to enjoying wine. Where we are, whom we’re with, what time of year it is, what we are eating, when in the wine’s life—and ours—we are drinking it, and even how we are drinking it all influence our perceptions of wine.”

—Tyler Colman
A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairings, Great Buys, and What to Sip for Each Season

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