For ten years I have arranged an annual blind themed tasting with the 12 best champagne tasters in the Champagne Club in my villa outside Stockholm. The tasting has been named The Juhlin Champagne Tasting or The Real Sthlm Marathon and has included evaluation of both vintages and champagne categories. This year, the turn had come for the three vintages of 2011, 2012 and 2013. Due to the Corona crisis, many champagne producers had a hard time sending their wines on time, but in the end the surprisingly few were missing and we finally got together an impressive collection of 138 various champagnes that were tried devoutly from 10 o’clock in the morning until midnight on a beautiful June day.
If you want to do a complete analysis of these three vintages, you should preferably wait a few more years because few of the real cannons have been released yet. We still thought it was a relevant deep dive into the styles and character of the vintages, not least as a quick look at what the crystal ball says about the future. In short, I note that the vintages were very different and easily identified and at the same time easily analyzed. The general advice is to drink the soft 11s now, store some nice crispy champagnes from 2013, but above all you should invest in 2012 for the cellar and slowly start drinking them for a decade starting in a couple of years.
