How Brisbane-based former teacher Tyson Stelzer became global authority on champagne

Brisbane-based Tyson Stelzer is now regarded as a global authority on champagne across the English-speaking world. His book The Champagne Guide is now in its seventh edition, buyers using it as a catalogue and travel guide.

Queensland’s globetrotting champagne sage and churchgoer Tyson Stelzer has a sore back.

Another two pallets of books arrived from the printers last week, and he had to stack them in the garage of his red brick home at Tarragindi on Brisbane’s southside.

Stelzer, 49, has just published the seventh edition of The Champagne Guide ($120) and it has become an international good seller, if not a bestseller.

It has propelled him into the world of the upper, upper-crusters who don’t blink at paying $3000 or more for a handbag – or a bottle of wine.

Stelzer is now regarded as the global authority of champagne in the English-speaking world.

He has won the trust of the wealthy elites in England and the US who use his book as a buyer’s catalogue-cum-travel guide.

Tyson Stelzer with the guide, which required him to taste 1687 vintages from more than 140 Champagne houses.

The new edition is a gold-embossed opus of 880 pages with longer reviews and more technical details. It has Stelzer’s scorecards and essays and photos of the great champagne houses and the characters who run then.

To complete the book, he had to taste 1687 different vintages from 142 houses.

“I call it the magnum edition because it literally weighs more than a magnum of champagne,” Stelzer said. “I’ve got 10 tonnes of books in my garage in addition to stocks in warehouses in London, Melbourne and Sydney. But we are not selling hundreds of thousands of copies; it is a niche market.”

Stelzer has awarded his best three cuvées the maximum 100 points in this year’s review.

Along the way he has dismissed the also-rans with spiky comments like, “Horrid. You’ve been warned” and, “Faulty. Keep a safe distance”.

Those inferior bottles, he is quick to add, make up less than 1 per cent of all the bubbles flowing from the greatest wine region of them all.

Stelzer said it took decades and many trips to Champagne to win the trust of the major producers and to be invited into the posh inner sanctums, a world of wealthy families, gourmet feasts and the finest wines.

“I’ve kept some notes for two decades,” he said.

As a sideline business, Stelzer turns tour guide and chaperones small groups of Australians, Britons and Americans to Champagne.

He takes them “through the back door” to houses not open to the public. The tours ($21,000 per person, twin share, airfares not included) are booked out until 2026.

Always on the move, Hobart-born Queenslander has also teamed up with Langtons auction house to sell rare vintages of champagne. Sales are expected to exceed $1m.

Steep prices for non-vintage champagne may have dampened demand at the lower end. But the sale of vintage champagne is, paradoxically, soaring despite the price hikes. I guess people who drive Ferraris don’t worry too much about the price of fuel.

Australia’s growth in champagne imports has been impressive, and Stelzer is riding the wave. In 2011 we imported 890,000 bottles. By 2022 that figure had jumped to 10.5 million.

Stelzer has helped ignite Australia’s passion for the ethereal bubbles with his Taste Champagne events in capital cities.

The 49-year-old former teacher jumped into champagne more than two decades ago hosting tastings and writing books.

The price of admission to the world of good champagne is high.

The least expensive of Stelzer’s 100-point wines is Billecart-Salmon Cuvée Nicolas François Billecart 2008 for around $550.

Stelzer quaffed it in Champagne at Mareuil-sur-Aÿ in a tasting hosted by Antoine Roland-Billecart, the 7th generation head of the family estate.

“I spent a full 20 minutes riveted by its evolution in the glass, moving me to tears,” Stelzer writes in his guide.

Tears?

“Absolutely. I am not ashamed of that,” he told me.

“There is an emotional response to greatness. It is a special privilege of my life to have the opportunity to visit these makers when they are releasing wine they have made sometimes 10 or 15 years prior.”

Stelzer said his emotional reaction was heightened as he remembered he was drinking the fruits of the labours of the winemakers’ ancestors stretching back five, seven and even 10 generations.

Stelzer runs tours to the Champagne for small groups of Australians, Britons and Americans. File picture: AAP Image/Steve Pohlner

He is in good company. Champagne is the drink of tzars and emperors. Decanter magazine recently reported that Napoleon Bonepart received a regular allocation of champagne while imprisoned on St Helena Island off the coast of Africa.

“Champagne is in a challenging place right now with global warming, unrest in Europe, and global financial uncertainty. In spite of this they are still able to produce incredible wines,” Stelzer said.

There are 100,000 bottles of the top Billecart left.

“I scored it 100 points because of its incredible freshness and purity and energy.”

“Billecart is a house that has always championed elegance and refinement,” he said.

And his 100-point wines all had amazing “line and length”.

Stelzer said the 2008 vintage was hailed as the best vintage in Champagne in a century.

“It has a lifespan that will outlive anyone of drinking age now.”

His next 100-point wine is already in short supply with only 2000 bottles left.

It is the Bollinger Vielles Vignes Françaises Bland De Noirs 1996. It is prized for its “glorious lusciousness”. Stelzer said it was an extraordinary “vintage of grandeur in a universe all its own”. He told me champagne buffs in Queensland were paying $3000 or more for it and were complaining they were having trouble sourcing it.

Worth every cent, no doubt, with Stelzer praising its “cathedral proportions of depth and intensity”.

Sales of champagne in Queensland are strongest in tourist towns like Noosa and the Gold Coast.

Stelzer suspects the COVID-19 pandemic reminded wealthy people that they only live once and there are luxuries they should not put off buying “while they had the chance”. Unable to travel during the lockdown, the affluent splurged on expensive bubbles.

His third perfect score went to Krug Vintage 1996 which he called “a true legend” and a wine of “glorious allure and mesmerising complexity”.

Stelzer adored the “luscious primary fruit, decadent spice and all the smoky, truffley intrigue of grand old age”.

He lashed out and purchased a bottle through the Wine Emporium some years ago for $800 and says it was “still one of the favourite wines of my life”.

“It is a ridiculous amount to pay on a bottle of wine but there are limited production wines that represent the very best of their kind in the world.”

He will never forget its “remarkable energy” and “deep, resonating complexity”.