Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Champagne & Sushi.


Taking advantage of the visit of our importer from Japan, Marie-Noëlle proposed to set up a tasting in order to detect the most beautiful matching beetween champagne and sushi.

You can easily imagine that it was not possible to offer sushi with mediocre quality to these specialist. Only the best. The challenge was not the champagne this time. To select the best Sushi, Marie-Noëlle had the invaluable assistance of Masako (our  contact in France for the Japanese market). As a first step, they have created a list of a dozen of Sushi to have samples for every tastes and every flavours.

After a first test "incognito" at a dinner at the restaurant, the realisation of the Sushi was entrusted to Jean-Pierre Guyard and his team (Sushi Shop in Reims) which has done a superb job, offering very nice and colorfull Suhi, but also very good, and in the delay. The story tell that our fine Japanese tasters, specialist in the matter says taht some of the French Sushi were better than the Japanese ones ! It is to say.

At the end of more than 2 hours of tasting, 9 cuvées of Champagne Henriet Bazin have shown attraction for some sushi, offering superb association, and gorgeous weddings.

The results are confidential for the moment, but we will tell you more very soon.

Selection of the buds.

The selection of the buds come approximatly 1 month after the opening of the buds. It is again a manual task that need to go in each vines, and to take care about each branch of each cep to remove some of the new shoots. With 9 000 vines per hectare for our estate which has 7.5. It's not less than 67 500 cep which will be shecked one by one.


But why do we have to remove future branches ?

To be fruitfull (bear fruit) shoots that grows this year must come from a but established on a branch of last year. If the new branch is a coming from one of 2 years or more, it will not carry grappes, but will consume the sap. It is therefore necessary to eliminate those new shoots to prevent it taking too much sap unnecessarily. So, we remove new shoots from the bottom of the cep or from buds of old branches.