Gosset: The Oldest Wine House in Champagne

The house of Gosset was making wine in Champagne long before Champagne meant bubbles. Founded in the village of Aÿ in 1584 — when the region’s glory was its still red wine, not sparkling — Gosset is the oldest wine house in Champagne, a living link to a time when the most coveted wine in France was a red from a single Champagne hillside, fought over by kings and popes. (See also: the whole sweep of wine history.)

The oldest house in Champagne

Gosset traces its origin to 1584, when Pierre Gosset — an alderman of the village of Aÿ and a grower — was making and selling wine from his own vines. That founding date makes Gosset the oldest wine house in the Champagne region, older by well over a century than any of the famous sparkling names that came later¹.

It would stay in the founding family for some seventeen generations — an unbroken thread of more than four hundred years — before passing, in 1994, to another old French wine dynasty, the Cointreau family of Cognac².

The red wines of Aÿ

In the sixteenth century, the wines that made Aÿ famous were still — and mostly red. The vin d’Aÿ was reckoned among the finest wines in all France, poured at the royal court and spoken of in the same breath as the great growths of Burgundy³.

This, not sparkling wine, was the treasure the young house of Gosset set out to sell. Aÿ sat at the heart of the Grande Vallée de la Marne, its south-facing chalk slopes ideally placed to ripen Pinot Noir, and its reputation drew buyers from across Europe⁴.

A wine fought over by kings

So prized was the wine of Aÿ that the greatest rulers of Renaissance Europe competed for it. According to the Victorian chronicler Henry Vizetelly, Francis I of France, the Emperor Charles V, Henry VIII of England and Pope Leo X each kept a commissioner stationed at Aÿ to secure the finest vintages — four of the most powerful men alive, all with an agent in one small wine village⁵.

None loved it more than Henri IV. The king styled himself “Sire d’Aÿ,” favoured its light wines on his doctor’s advice, and is said to have kept his own press there so that his supply would never run dry⁶⁷.

If I were not King of France, I would like to be Lord of Aÿ.— attributed to Henri IV of France (r. 1589–1610)⁶

Before the bubbles

It is easy to forget that Champagne was a still-wine region for most of its history. The deliberate, sparkling Champagne we know today did not emerge until the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the era associated with the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon and the perfecting of the second fermentation in the bottle. By the time the bubbles arrived, Gosset had already been in business for generations, and the house made the same journey as the region, evolving from a maker of still Aÿ wine into a producer of sparkling Champagne⁸.

Oldest wine house, or oldest Champagne house?

Here a careful distinction matters, and Gosset is scrupulous about it. Gosset is the oldest wine house in Champagne, founded in 1584. The oldest house established specifically to make sparkling Champagne is another firm entirely: Ruinart, founded at Reims in 1729, when Nicolas Ruinart drew up the charter of what became the world’s first true Champagne house⁹.

Both claims are true, and together they neatly frame the moment the region turned from still wine to the sparkling drink that made it world-famous.

A distinctive house today

Now based in Épernay, to which it moved in 2009, Gosset carries its long history into a very particular style. Almost uniquely among the great houses, it blocks the softening malolactic fermentation, preserving the grapes’ natural acidity for a fresh, vinous, age-worthy Champagne — wine made, as it always has been, to be taken seriously as wine¹⁰¹¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Charlemagne and the medieval vine
• A history of French wine
• The British thirst for Champagne

References

1. Champagne Gosset — The Gosset House (Our History). www.champagne-gosset.com ↩
2. Wilson Daniels — Champagne Gosset: The Story. wilsondaniels.com ↩
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Champagne (wine). www.britannica.com ↩
4. From the Vine to Wine — The Importance of Aÿ. fromthevinetowine.com ↩
5. Henry Vizetelly — A History of Champagne (1882), Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org ↩
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Henry IV (king of France). www.britannica.com ↩
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Francis I (king of France). www.britannica.com ↩
8. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Dom Pérignon. www.britannica.com ↩
9. Maison Ruinart — Our History (the first Champagne house, 1729). www.ruinart.com ↩
10. champagner.com — Gosset (glossary). champagner.com ↩
11. The Finest Bubble — Champagne Gosset. thefinestbubble.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Rich on Champagne’s evolution from still wine to sparkling.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Good on the history of the great wine houses and regions.

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