Score: 94/100
Amazone is Champagne Palmer & Co’s top cuvée, their Prestige Cuvée in fact receiving the highest level of attention and care in its making.
More than that the wine comes from a special selection of wines from Grand and Premier Crus vineyards, picked out of the more than 400 ha (more than 1000 acres) of vines the winery receives grapes from.
The wine is an even blend of 50% Chardonnay and 50% Pinot Noir, all of them being reserve wines, a selection of the best lots at the winery across several vintages.
Once assembled and bottled, the wine goes through a very long ageing for over 10 years on its lees in the chalk cradle of the winery’s cellars in Reims.
Amazone de Palmer has a unique oval-shaped bottle that makes it look special and makes you feel you’re with a something special as you see it, like a Prestige Cuvée should do.
See the bottle (and the wine!) in video below:
But how does this Amazone de Palmer Champagne Prestige Cuvée actually taste?
The answer in in the tasting notes:
This luxurious sparkling wine comes in an intense ripe lemon color, golden almost, and definitely with slightly orange hues giving it an unusually profound appearance for a bubbly.
Stick your nose into the glass, and what hits your senses is not less profound or intense than its appearance.
Powerful nutty aromas jump out of the glass!
They not only feel intense though, but also incredibly deep and complex. You just want to keep sniffing it to try and understand how this smell is so charming. But there’s a subtlety to its depth and its intensity that makes it hard to describe with words, yet puts a spell on you…
You just hope it tastes as good as it smells. A bit like a good vanilla beans do.
Sweet spices, ripe citrus fruits, lemon marmalade, acacia and jasmine complete the picture of this stunningly-enjoyable nose.
Putting the wine in your mouth, two facts strike:
- It’s not disappointing which is a good thing given how expectations where risen pretty high after smelling it.
- Not only does it not disappoint, but the Champagne actually manages to surprise even more at this point.
When you put this Champagne in your mouth, the sea of charming aromas, a myriad of them, turns into an ocean of flavor streams going in many directions.
They literally blew up many of my references in wine. So many references, like old Port wine, Sherry, refined Champagne wines, Burgundy Chardonnay, seemed to be blended in the Amazone that it took me while to sort of realize what was going on here.
Essentially, when tasting Amazone, you’re not only tasting one wine or one Champagne, but many wines that seem to have been gathered and glued together in a bottle by some sort of magic.
Start your tasting while the wine is still cool and filled with Co2 providing freshness and effervescence, and you have an intensely flavored Champagne full of ripe citrus notes, pear, hazelnut, and brioche.
But as the wine warms up in the glass (and you can’t sip your whole flute like you would do with your everyday Champagne in a few minutes, it’s so complex and powerful you can’t help but taking your time), it slowly evolves taking on more and more flavors of a matured wine with increasing depth and complexity: evolved vanilla tones like an aged Port wine, appetizing nutty flavors like fine aged sherries (somewhere between Fino and Oloroso), doughy characters like some extraordinary Burgundy Chardonnays.
Let it rest and warm up even further at the bottom of your glass, and you end up with the impression it’s turned into a fine Cognac. It’s so intensely flavored and filled with oak goodness!
The more you spend time with a glass of this wine, the more you do seem to understand it. Yet the more you seem to be confused by it, stunned in a positive way as there’s never anything negative about it.
The acidity in here drives a constant feel of freshness and gives solid direction/tension to the tasting.
Overall
A stunningly complex and charming wine, where depth of flavor and intensity never cease to amaze all along the tasting experience.
Fresh it is, with intense citrus fruit characters, and a driven acidity that provides constant tension up to a long finish. Yet, deep and layered, almost lazy, it seems to play with you and have fun slowing your understanding of it with so many layers of complex matured and oaky flavors.
The result is a wine you just want your taste buds to keep experiencing, as it delivers so much pleasure with a balance and a depth that I’d say would question the most acute tasters.
Stunning Champagne, a wine to experience…!
Please let me know your thoughts