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LEBRUN-SEVERNAY

OVERVIEW

To a certain kind of wine lover, Champagne is not champagne, the Côte des Blancs is champagne. Nowhere else with the exception of Chablis and the Mosel are white wines made that are so consistently energetic, striking – literally violent at times – mineral, tart, precise, and suspenseful. The Côte des Blancs is where the cliffhangers grow.

Le Brun Servenay is located in the grand cru Avize, one of the most gifted and assertive terroirs of the Côte des Blancs. In addition to vineyards there, there are holdings in two other brilliant grand crus, Oger and Cramant, as well as in Mancy,and Grauves, the latter a little known premier cru where Richard Juhlin’s all time favorite champagne, Pol Roger’s 1928 Grauves, was grown.

Patrick Le Brun who has been running the domaine since 1991, is a great winemaker and in many ways a contrarian. This makes Le Brun Servenay one of the most special domaines we represent.

Whereas many of the new and highly exciting stars in champagne have chosen to use techniques that showcase their great winemaking talents, full malo, elevage in wood, late picking, marked autolysis, Patrick has chosen the opposite. Prefering freshness over ripeness he does not pick late. He never allows his wines to go through malolactic fermentation. He doesn’t like oxidative characters. And except for the pinot that is vinified like still red wine by his father, part of which ends up in the domaine’s stunning rosé, Patrick absolutely abhors wood. You will not find a white wine of his anywhere near a barrel.

Consequently, if you have never had Le Brun Servenay’s wines, it would probably be best to start with the forewarning that they are, and this absolutely by design, nothing like the wines of other luminaries in Avize such as Selosse, Agrapart or De Sousa. In the Côte des Blancs, where the cliffhangers grow, Patrick produces the most nail-biting of them all. On days when structure shows, his wines are violent. On days when wines are shy, his wines have a saltiness, minimalism and precision reminiscent of Seltzer water. On days when wines are relaxed, they are breathtakingly beautiful. They are the archer to the rest of champagne’s artillery.

HISTORY

On the paternal side, the Le Bruns have been grape growers in Avize for four generations. On Patrick’s mother’s side, the Servenays, there have been five generations of growers in the village of Mancy. Grandpa Le Brun worked other people’s vineyards while he built up his own holdings, and the Servenay grandparents derived their main source of income from their small grocery shop. In 1955, after Patrick parents married, they created the Le Brun Servenay label. They were the first generation in Patrick’s family to make a living solely from growing their own grapes.

It was a little easier for the Le Bruns than the Servenays, however. There is always a buyer to be found when your vineyards are in Avize and Cramant,. But even though Mancy is only 4.5 miles down the road from Avize, it is an entirely different economic story there. It was because of adversity that the Servernays began to bottle their champagne. “Between the two wars”, says Patrick, “the négoce bought when the harvest was abundant and prices were low. When they didn’t buy, there were barrels of wine left in the cellar, and when the following harvest came those barrels were needed for the new wine, and my grandparents had no choice but to bottle. That’s how it started. My grandfather had family in the Vosges, in Remiremont. So he would hitch a small trailer to his motorbike, pile fifty bottles in it and drive the 175 miles to Remiremont. You imagine? With the bike and the roads of the times?
And the private customer base grew from word to mouth. We recently had a couple who told us they were married with Le Brun Servenay champagne and had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with Le Brun Servenay champagne. And all the important family events, their children’s weddings, their grandchildren’s baptisms, were celebrated with Le Brun Servenay champagne. Until the 1990s, we barely exported”, adds Patrick, “we didn’t have to.”


PATRICK LE BRUN

Though Patrick was born on the first of November, there were grapes in the press that day. It was 1962, one of the latest harvests on record, and according to Patrick a rotten year in champagne. In 1983 he attended the lycée viticole in Mâcon, but to the great despair of his parents, he came home after just one year. The Le Brun Servenay estate was then comprised of 4 ½ hectares to which Patrick added a couple of hectares, some rented, some purchased, some as far as the Sézannais. In 1992 he officially took over the family estate, but he had already vinified the 1991 vintage on his own, literally by accident, since his father fell off a tank and ended up in the hospital, missing harvest for the first time since he was 15 years old. In 2002 Patrick took over 4 more hectares, some in Mancy, some in the Vallée de la Marne. Later Patrick had a divorce, and it pruned the estate back to the 7 ½ hectares it is today.

Patrick looks straight into your eyes, speaks frankly, tells good stories, and laughs regularly and self-deprecatingly. He has the ease of someone who is used to campaigning and explaining, and he has done more than his fair share of both.

In 2008, the French government awarded him the title of Knight of the National Order of Agricultural Merit for his work as president of the SGV, the Union of Champagne Growers, a position he held from 2004 until 2009. Patrick was elected to the presidency twice, but only five months after his reelection he was booted by the union’s board of administrators. Officially this was for being despotic. Unofficially it was for refusing to drop charges of theft and embezzlement involving the previous director of the union as well as for brokering a deal between the big houses and the growers that opened the door for those who ousted him to claim that he had been too amenable to the interests of the big houses. But the deal Patrick had struck was merely a complicated compromise at the time the true depth of the post recession slump in champagne sales was felt. As a British champagne agent put it: “I have spoken to many people in the industry on both sides of the fence, I am yet to find anyone who is satisfied with the result, which has rather led me to believe that a reasonable compromise was perhaps found.” After a few minutes spent with Patrick, one gets the sense that if even though he is highly opinionated, if ever he was despotic, it would have been for the right reasons.


VINEYARDS AND WINES

There are 3 hectares in the grand cru communes of Avize, Cramant and Oger, 1 hectare is in the premier cru commune of Grauves (where Richard Juhlin’s favorite champagne came from, Pol Roger 1928 Grauves), and the balance, 3 hectares, are located in Mancy. The vineyards are managed en lutte raisonnée.

Stylistically Patrick never put his wines through malolactic fermentation, does not like to pick super ripe grapes, never ages in wood except for the red that is used for the rosé. Dosages are usually between 6 and 8 g/l but one needs to bear in mind that on wines that do not go through malo this results in an extra brut style.

The Sélection is a non-vintage blanc de blancs, blended from four different years and sourced exclusively from the grand cru villages of Avize, Oger and Cramant where Patrick’s average vine age is an impressive average of 40 years old. The dosage is habitually around 7g/l.

The Brut Millésimmé is 100% Grand Cru Chardonnay. The core of the cuvée is made up of three vineyards with very old vines in Cramant and Avize. The first is a parcel of 50 ares in Avize, part of which is 30 years old and part of which is more than century old, and was planted by the grandfather of the 81 years old gentleman Patrick purchased the vineyard from in 1989. The second parcel is in Cramant and was planted in 1937 and belonged to Patrick’s paternal grandfather. A third parcel is on the border of Cramant and Avize. Cramant and Avize are two of the most assertive terroirs in the Cote des Blancs,, very saline and mineral. The cuvée is usually bottled with a dosage of 8g/l, but on such assertive Chardonnay that sees no malo, it tastes extra brut.

The Exhilarante used to be Patrick’s Special Club selection. He wanted a cuvee representative of the estate and along with an identical core to the Brut Millésimmé, the old vine parcels in Cramant and Avize, it includes 10% each of Patrick’s best Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir. Since the Pinots are not grown in Grand Cru communes, Exhilarante is not a grand cru. Nevertheless it is undoubtedly Patrick’s most complex wine. Because of the Pinots add just a little roundness it is usually bottled with 1g less dosage than the Brut Millésimmé.

Le Brun's rosé is made from a base of chardonnay, to which is added roughly 10 to 15% percent of red wine. Both pinot noir and meunier are used to make the red wine, half of which is vinified in oak barrels. Despite the oak, this rosé is actually on the delicate side, emphasizing light, lively red-fruit flavors—admittedly. It is one of the few rosés made with 90% Chardonnay from the Cote des Blancs.

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