Fabulous aromas of minerals, pear pie, nuts with bread dough and apple character. Full-bodied, lively and wonderful with bright fruit and a clean finish. Very layered and juicy. This was a very hot year for Champagne and a year for pinot noir. But this is so fresh and complex. 60% pinot noir and 40% chardonnay. 10% of the pinot is fermented in barrel. Drink now.

Very elegant, ethereal in texture and well-knit, offering flavors of poached pear, black licorice, lemon pâte de fruit, pastry and ground ginger. Shows fine balance and integration, with a fresh, lasting finish of ripe fruit and saline minerality. Drink now through 2027. –AN

The Cuvée Nicolas François Billecart is produced solely from fruit from grand cruranked villages, with the 1999 vintage hailing from a blend of sixty percent pinot noir and forty percent chardonnay. The dosage this year is a very low five grams per liter and twenty percent of the vins clairs for this wine were barrel-fermented. The bouquet is deep, classy and quite concentrated, as it delivers a superb mélange of apple, tangerine, toasted nuts, a superb base of soil, smoky overtones and a gentle touch of leesiness in the upper register. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, complex and has real weight and authority of flavor in the mid-palate, with crisp acids, utterly refined mousse, excellent complexity and a very long, well-balanced and classy finish. The wine is currently wide open structurally and drinking with great style, and yet one can sense that it is still a very young wine and more complexity will emerge if one has the patience to defer gratification for a bit and leave the wine in the cellar for more bottle age. 2014- 2035+. 94+

A complex and dynamic Champagne, this layers the cinnamon scent of oak over white chalk and fresh pear, all deepened by an umami richness (a portion of the blend was aged in neutral oak barrels). It has the light grandeur of the 1999 vintage and appears to be at an optimal moment for drinking right now.

The Billecart-Salmon 1999 Brut Nicolas Francois Billecart – its Pinot predictably from the Montagne de Reims and Chardonnay from the Cote des Blancs – accompanies aromatic overtones of yeast and baked goods with an almost doughy sense of substantiality and plushness, yet features as well the buoyancy and the bright lemony and crabapple-y acidity with attendant cut and freshness that are hallmarks of this house’s style. The understatement to this cuvee’s melange of herbs ranging from lemon verbena to blond tobacco as well as its subtly alkaline and chalky undertone are also characteristics I associate with the name Billecart-Salmon; and nutty hints of evolution are quite discrete, suggesting a younger wine. Metaphorically cooling; laid-back and soothing; yet offering stimulating refreshment and intrigue, this will probably be well worth following for another 4-6 years. - David Schildknecht