Laurent Perrier Brut Vintage 2015

On Oct. 1, 1948, a 28-year-old war veteran named Bernard de Nonancourt took over a small Champagne house in Tours-sur-Marne that his mother had bought a decade earlier. He had spent the previous four years earning the right to run it — training at Lanson, learning the trade properly — but the years before that are the ones worth knowing.

During the occupation, Bernard and his older brother Maurice joined the French Resistance. Maurice did not survive it; he died in a German concentration camp. Bernard did survive, serving as a sergeant in Gen. Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division. In the final push into Bavaria in 1945, his unit found Hitler's private wine cellar at the Kehlsteinhaus. De Nonancourt blew the steel doors off it himself, uncovering roughly half a million bottles, including cases of 1928 Salon that German soldiers had stolen from France years earlier. He came home with the Croix de Guerre and the only surviving claim to his family's Champagne house.

He spent the next 57 years turning Laurent-Perrier from the 100th-largest Champagne producer in the world into the third-largest, launching Grand Siècle in 1960 and the now-iconic Laurent-Perrier Rosé in 1968 along the way. If you know this house at all, there is a decent chance it is from that pink bottle. It made the family's fortune. It is not, however, where Laurent-Perrier does its most serious work.

That happens here, in the vintage Champagne, and the house treats the decision to make one with real discipline. Laurent-Perrier declares a vintage only about once every two years, and only when the year warrants it. The 2015 vintage warranted it the hard way. A mild, wet winter gave way to brutal spring frost and a stormy, difficult summer that could easily have wrecked the whole season. What saved it was a cool, dry September that let the fruit finish ripening slowly and properly, right when it mattered most.

The blend is a clean 50/50 split: Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs — Chouilly, Oger, Cramant and Oiry — and Pinot Noir from the Montagne de Reims, including Aÿ, Verzenay and Ambonnay. It spends a minimum of seven years on its lees before release, with a restrained dosage, giving it the kind of depth and composure you expect from a house that declares a vintage only when the year is strong enough to justify it.

In the glass: beeswax, candied lemon, honeysuckle and hawthorn up front, with toasted bread and orange developing underneath, carried by a creamy, elegant texture and lively acidity that keeps the whole thing from ever feeling heavy. It finishes clean, citrus-bright and distinctly mineral — Champagne for a dinner table and a long evening, not a toast and a photo.

I think about Bernard de Nonancourt every time I open a bottle of this house's vintage Champagne. Not the rosé, not the easy, famous version — this one, the one that took real discipline to make after a year that nearly went wrong. Some wines carry history lightly. This one carries enough to deserve your full attention.

Pour it slowly, with roast chicken, seared scallops or aged Comté, and give this Champagne the attention it deserves.

— Ben