A suitable name for a biodynamic Champagne – between heaven and earth or Entre Ciel et Terre comes from vineyards planted on calcareous clay soils and is a blend of roughly equal parts Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir. It is aged 5 years sur latte and bottled with a modest dosage of 4.55g/L.
Françoise Bedel, a single mother of two sons and a new winery found herself in a tight spot. Her oldest son was very sick and she could find no doctor or hospital that could cure him. There were many weeks and months searching for an answer. As a last desperate measure, she took him to see an older couple in a nearby village who practiced homeopathic medicine. Under their guidance, Vincent, Françoise’s son and current winemaker at the estate, was on the mend. She swore off modern medicine and within months had removed every chemical or synthetic material from her tiny winery, Françoise became a biodynamic winemaker before virtually anyone in the wine trade had ever heard of the term.
Champagne Françoise Bedel is trending now. First it was their embrace of biodynamics which in a region so bound by conventional over-farming that the worst thing the CIVC could arrange would be a vineyard tour of blasted, compacted soils flecked with bits of rubbish from Paris. Following in the footsteps of other early adopters, and inspired by a visit with Jean-Pierre Fleury, Françoise Bedel began the conversion to biodynamics in 1996 at a time when there was still a sense of tin-foil haberdashery surrounding the whole topic and long before it became vogue to discuss what you were doing with cow horns.
Then there is the recent ascendant popularity of Pinot Meunier, certainly a trend that has a whiff of fad about it, but there is no mistaking that Françoise makes darn good examples of Meunier-based Champagne, as does her son, Vincent Deseaubeau now that he runs the estate under his mother’s watchful eye.
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