Quince and green apple, backed by a chalky, wet-stone minerality and a faint brioche note from extended lees contact. The palate is bone dry with racy acidity carrying orchard fruit and a saline, flinty edge through a long, mineral finish.
Every bottle of this cuvée is disgorged sur commande, to order, at the point of sale, rather than in a single batch ahead of release. That means the wine you're pouring came off its lees days before it reached the glass, not months. It's a level of handling almost no producer bothers with at this price point, and it's the reason the mousse stays this fine and the fruit this fresh. The base wine comes from Chenin planted behind the village on ground Christophe Pichot farms organically, with cover crops between rows to check vigor and yields held to roughly 25 hectoliters per hectare, low enough to concentrate fruit without pushing ripeness past what the sparkling wants. The Pichot family has worked this ground since 1770, making theirs arguably the oldest continuously farmed domaine in the appellation; the modern estate wasn't formalized until 1996, when Jean-Claude and Christophe folded three family holdings into one.
