VILMART & CIE – THE LATEST

If the best idea is held in the tenderest hand, these Champagnes couldn’t possibly be more convincing.

I was reading a catalogue for a retreat center offering various wellness/vedic/meditation/spirituality stuff, and at the end they printed a letter from a “satisfied customer” that gave me a feeling adjacent to an ice cream headache. The luckless author of said document made reference to “walking mindfully” or some such thing. I was surprised, because I couldn’t fathom how one could walk in nature mindlessly. It seemed sad to me, to have to tell someone “Notice your surroundings. That will be $799, yoga mats not included…” I bring it up not to throw snark, enjoyable though that is, but to suggest that immersion takes more than one form (e.g., some definition of “mindfulness”) and among those forms is calm and reverie and simply breathing it in un-self consciously. The world certainly rewards your attention, richly and at times profoundly, but it never insists upon it.

And so to Vilmart. I’ve written some version of these things each time I’ve tried to describe the wines. It doesn’t suffice merely to describe “how they taste.” What is salient about Vilmart is the particular air they carry with them, inviting you to breathe it too. After a little while you feel a calm you can’t explain, and a repose you didn’t need to “cultivate.” You may find yourself wondering, why isn’t there more of this in my life?

Every writer is admonished (or simply advised) to pay attention, but that doesn’t necessarily mean to catalogue the different shades of green on your woodland amble. You can also pay attention to the feeling of notpaying attention, and then you may ask, what brings this about, and what use can be made of it? Those are productive questions, regardless of whether they can be answered.

Vilmart’s Champagnes ask precisely those productive questions. They invite you into a somatic environment where questions like these show up naturally, without having to summon them with “spiritual practices.” It is more an agreement to receive than a choice to pursue. Beauty seeks a willing host, and will arrive in all its fine caprice though the door you have left unlocked. Wines like these can show us the value of being lambent, trusting, and grateful. They are kin with bubbles.

There are seven of them. I’ll taste four one day and three the next. No need to rush. I’ll list them in the conventional sequence but I didn’t taste them that way. Please scroll up to earlier reports for details on assemblage and vinification.