Louis Roederer Cristal Brut (1.5 Liter Magnum) 2012

Professional Ratings

• 98 Wine Enthusiast
  As the first 100% biodynamic Cristal, entirely from Roederer-owned vineyards, this is an important milestone. This latest incarnation is a great Champagne with its density, elegance and poise. Still impressively young, the wine is taut, tightly wound and textured. At the same time, it has pure, ripe white and citrus fruits that are perfumed, and an important part of this wine’s long-term future. Drink at the earliest from 2023.
  Cellar Selection
• 97 Wine Spectator
  A classic beauty, fresh-faced and focused today but with a harmonious grace of form suggesting a long career ahead. There's a creamy, viscous quality to the mousse that swathes the palate, carrying finely detailed flavors of poached quince, Mandarin orange preserves, toasted almond and pickled ginger. Mouthwatering throughout, with a pleasing, soft zestiness to the mineral-laced finish. Drink now through 2035.
• 97 Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
  Aromas of clear honey, crisp green orchard fruit, white peach, pastry cream and dried white flowers introduce the 2012 Cristal, a full-bodied, concentrated and powerful wine that's built for the cellar. Broader, more textural and more muscular than the 2008 Cristal, with seemingly even greater reserves of structuring dry extract, the 2012 is incisive and searingly chalky. This is the first Cristal produced exclusively from organically farmed fruit, and it marks the opening of a new chapter for Louis Roderer. The blend is 60% Pinot Noir and 40% Chardonnay, vinified without malolactic fermentation and disgorged with 7.5 grams per liter dosage. Chef de Caves Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon has once again excelled himself. Rating: 97+
• 95 James Suckling

  The second bottle of this that was opened was more expressive than the first one. Fragrant nose of lime zest, dried flowers, fresh almonds and flint. Bright and juicy on the quite firm, medium- to full-bodied palate. This is now in the no-man’s-land between youthful vitality and mature patina, and this really expanded after some aeration in the glass. Layered structure at the long, linear finish. From the first vintage in which the vineyards were cultivated biodynamically. Tasted at the Cristal vertical tasting at the champagne house on July 6th, 2023.

• 95 Wine & Spirits

  Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon reports that 2012 was the first vin- tage for Cristal in which he and his team had converted all of the vineyards to biodynamics, having achieved that goal for Cristal Rosé in 2007. The purity of this wine sustains the crisp- ness and freshness of a late-summer apple picked directly off the tree. Its layered concentration of chalk and fruit starts out as a tense buzz before it opens to a racy and ethereal flavor, a delicious complex of energy and matter with a long life ahead.