Deviation Road shows sparkling wine needn’t be from Champagne

Laurent-Perrier’s new non-vintage offering is great, but the Lauries at Deviation Road make comparable sparkling wine.

The Champenois are the best marketers in the wine world. Have been since they managed to convince the Romanovs to keep on swilling while the Russian Revolution started to ferment all around them.

Champagne is big business and Australia’s steady rise up the league table of fizz drinking nations — at present sixth overall per capita — means the suavely suited army of champagne spruikers are hitting our shores in growing numbers.

It’s almost getting to the point that express lanes will be installed at our airports to ensure they can breeze through with the same ease as diplomats and cabin crew.

Last week a dapper duo from the fine old family house of Laurent-Perrier landed in Australia, working the suit-and-loafers-without-socks look that only a European opening good bottles can get away with.

They arrived a couple of days after one of the champagne giants had thrown a lavish party to launch its latest rare and exclusive bottling for a few hundred society types who had to check their Instagram accounts the next morning to remember which brand they had been so enthusiastically supporting the night before.

What was interesting about Laurent-Perrier’s antipodean sortie was the relative modesty of its purpose.

This wasn’t about some high-end bottling, another escalation in the alcoholic arms race towards rising levels of luxury.

It was to present a reworking of Laurent-Perrier’s non-vintage offering, the anchor of any champagne house, its signature style that subverts the wine truism of vintage variation and replaces it with an attempt at perpetual consistency.

And it’s compelling to see how a great champagne house tweaks the most important wine it makes. It’s easy to produce the fancy baubles that capture all the attention, it’s a lot harder to reinvent the Christmas tree.

Deviation Road Beltana 2011.

The changes are small but significant. The new wine, now known as La Cuvee, has a little more chardonnay in the blend, but when the wine is made with fruit exclusively from grand cru vineyards an additional 5 per cent isn’t exactly easy to find. The wine also has an extra year in bottle, sitting in the all-important dead yeast cells called lees that contribute so much flavour and complexity but also contribute significantly to costs.

Dosage, the small splash of sweetness added at bottling to soften champagne’s strident acidity, has been dropped from 12g a litre to 10g and the label redesigned to reflect the changes within.

This all results in a really delicious, beautifully balanced and quite sumptuous champagne that puts many of the non-vintage wines on the market in the shade.

That these small tweaks require a global rebranding strategy says a lot about the way the champagne industry works.

A couple of days later I went to see Kate and Hamish Laurie at Deviation Road in the Adelaide Hills. The Lauries make what I consider to be Australia’s most precise sparkling wines, a product of Kate’s academic training in the Champagne town of Avize and Hamish’s low-key dedication to careful vineyard management.

They make the wines in an old dairy and every process is done by hand. Each bottle that leaves the property is touched by their hands more than 30 times. Even a small house such as Laurent Perrier spills more in a few days of production than these guys make in a year.

The fact these wines are as handmade to such a great extent means they are not cheap. They sit on a shelf at the same kind of price as a lot of fine French bottlings, and I can’t help worrying that these exceptional wines can sometimes get swamped by the marketing might of the monoliths of Champagne.

Because there is something really special in the sparkling wines from Deviation Road. They’re impeccably and thoughtfully made. They are different from the Champagne wines that sell for similar amounts because they should be — they are distinctively regional expressions and sit comfortably among the best sparkling wines produced anywhere.

They give us some perspective and remind us that not all sparkling gems come from Champagne.

Deviation Road’s 2011 Beltana Blanc de Blancs is pure, precise and incredibly long. Grapefruit pith, oyster shells and chalk. The best sparkling wine in Australia.