Just about as good as it gets, the 2012 Cristal Champagne Rosé is a magical effort based on 56% Pinot Noir and 44% Chardonnay. It’s a powerful, medium to full-bodied, incredibly textured rosé offering a huge amount of salty, chalky minerality as well as awesome notes of white cherries, orange blossom, caramelized apples, and toasted bread. It shows the ripe, rounded richness of the 2012 vintage yet has bright, racy acidity, perfect balance, and a great, great finish. It opens up nicely with air and will ideally be given 2-4 years of bottle age, and it should evolve for 2-3 decades.

This is a great vintage for Cristal Rosé. The pinot noir finds a band of power and expressiveness. The power here is impressive, very assertive and rich, really mouth-filling and super deep. This is exceptional and has intense, chalky and fresh, white-peach and nectarine aromas, underpinning red flowers and pink fruit. The palate has a scintillating blend of flesh and mineral cut, packed with such sweet, pristine, white-strawberry flavor and texture. This has such incredible potential. So exciting. Will take another two or threw years to resolve. Look out for this! Drink from 2025.

In this setting, the 2012 Cristal Rosé is a cut above the 2012 Cristal. The Rosé’s explosive energy and vibrancy are both compelling, and also a very fine match for the food. Time in the glass brings out the breadth and creaminess of the year. The blend is 55% Pinot Noir from Aÿ and 45% Chardonnay from Mesnil and Avize. This is a terrific showing. We are off to the races.

The 2012 Cristal Rosé is showing brilliantly, unwinding in the glass with a beautiful bouquet of fresh peach, bergamot, strawberries, tangerine and blanched almonds that's still quite reserved. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, deep and strikingly complete, its vinous attack segueing into a multidimensional core that exemplifies the ideal of power without weight, built around a racy but integrated spine of animating acidity and complemented by an exquisitely refined mousse. All the concentration of the 2012 vintage is on display, but it's rendered with terrific finesse. Decidedly youthful and introverted—indeed, I spent several hours with a bottle to compose this note—the 2012 will really come into its own with five or six years in the cellar and displays all the attributes necessary for considerable longevity. It's a blend of 56% Pinot Noir and 44% Chardonnay that saw no malolactic fermentation, and it was disgorged with eight grams per liter dosage.

Next to 2013's serene beauty, 2012 is a notably more immediate wine, showing some of the fruit maturity and generosity of the year held in stunning restraint by saline, lightly pithy structure and tangy acids. There's a sense of charry succulence to it, with pure, ultra-fresh strawberry, juicy apricot and Amalfi lemon, the zippy energy of the magnum format proving a perfect foil to the year's natural tendency towards overtness. It's now in a bit of an in-between phase in magnum, and will offer even more with five years plus on cork.

According to technical director Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, from 2008 onwards when he had his 'system' in place, all Pinot Noir grapes now spend the night after picking in a cold room at -4 °C before a gentle, 'infusing' fermentation lasting 7–10 days with no mechanical punching down. For the first four days the must is covered with dry ice and then nitrogen when the temperature has risen to about 9 °C. Dosage 7 g/l, as for the 2013. (It used to be 12 g/l.) Magnum. Notably deeper-coloured than the 2013 served alongside – positively golden in fact! With a really rich nose and a certain salinity. Very ripe and round thanks to its greater reliance on Pinot Noir than the 2013. (JR)