Bollinger, La Grande Annee 2008
CRITIC REVIEWS
William Kelley
Bollingers 2008 La Grande Année is superb, wafting from the glass with aromas of crisp orchard fruit, ripe lemons, honeycomb, warm biscuits, dried white flowers and a delicate top note of walnuts and fino sherry. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, broad and vinous, with a beautifully refined mousse, superb concentration at the tightly wound core, incisive acids and a supremely elegant intermingling of Bollingers oxidative stylistic signatures with fresh, vibrant fruit. The finish is long, precise and chalky. This is a Grande Année built for the cellar—the real excitement will come with a bit more bottle age—but this is already a thrilling Champagne in the making. Finished with eight grams per liter dosage, it was disgorged by hand in July 2018. This is also the first vintage of Grande Année to be bottled in Bollingers new narrower-necked 1846 bottle, which should make for a slower evolving wine.
Jancis Robinson
This of course was a more considered tasting, at the London launch of the wine, than during the blind tasting described below. Dense nose with some of the really dry Bollinger savour on the palate. This is a wine, like so many Bollingers, that really needs time in the glass to open out – and indeed time in the bottle to develop to its full potential. This is an extremely dry-tasting wine, even though the dosage was 8 g/l, higher than usual because of the extremely low pH, 2.92. Very Bollinger but, for the moment, by no means a charmer. Initially (and in the blind tasting on 29 March 2019) I thought the wine lacked a bit of persistence, but in fact it is a particularly slow burner and developed a sort of peacocks tail effect long after swallowing. This encourages me to think it will eventually be a fine wine but I would cellar it for quite a while. At the London launch at The Ledbury, we were given a chance to taste the wine from bottle, then magnum, then jeroboam with successive courses, the two bigger formats having been disgorged in November 2018. Each time the wine seemed ever crisper and tauter, with the magnum sample (perhaps poured from a just-opened magnum?) so powerfully fumy that it had a whiff of cordite. As chef de cave Gilles Descôtes observed, if hed been served the jeroboam blind, he might have taken the wine for a Blanc de Blancs
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