Laherte Freres

About

Aurelien Laherte returned to his family’s estate in 2005, the seventh generation of Laherte to take up the mantle of vigneron encaveur in the small village of Chavot, south of Epernay. The Laherte family is passionately devoted to organic practices and biodynamic methods, farming each of their 75 plots in tune to the rhythms of nature and respect for the environment. Almost all of the vins clairs are fermented in wooden barrels, spend time on the lees before tirage, and are disgorged with minimal addition of sugar or dosage. The estate has considerable expertise in the Meunier grape, giving it a spotlight in an long-lived, old vine bottling known as Les Vignes d’Autrefois, as well as in two different mono-varietal rosé bottlings. At his core experimental, Aurelien has expanded the family’s range of wines to include transparent, terroir focused bottlings, a cuvée based on the nearly lost Arbanne grape, as well as more modest non-vintage bottlings for quotidian consumption. Laherte Freres is one of the rare, forward-thinking and boundary-pushing estates in Champagne whose wines merit attention and reward cellaring.