Jim Dronk, Champagne Master-Level

Jim Dronk is Champagne Master-Level, a certification from the Wine Scholar Guild. He imports directly from small champagne growers and visits the houses himself. This page explains what that background involves and why it matters for what ends up in the shop.

What Champagne Master-Level involves

The Wine Scholar Guild is an educational body that runs specialised certifications on the wines of France, Italy and Spain, with a network of schools in more than thirty countries. The Champagne Master-Level is their most demanding programme on Champagne: a year of study, closed with an exam.

The material goes well beyond tasting. Soil science and the geology of the Côte des Blancs and the Montagne de Reims, the difference between pressing systems, how assemblage and reserve wine work, the role of dosage, the law behind the appellation, and the economics of a region where thousands of small growers and a handful of large houses exist side by side. Precisely the knowledge you need at a cellar table to understand what a winemaker is doing, and why.

Why that matters for this shop

Champagne is a region where the labels give away little. Two bottles that look the same can be made in completely different ways: one from bought-in grapes across dozens of villages, the other from the grower's own parcels on a single slope. On the label that often appears only as a two-letter code.

We deliberately choose the second category: récoltant-manipulants, growers who farm their own grapes and make their own champagne. These are the houses where you speak to the winemaker directly, where the number of bottles per cuvée runs into the thousands rather than the millions, and where a decision in the cellar is tasted straight back in the glass.

The selection is strict. We taste at hundreds of growers, and only a small handful of those make it into the range. We only take what we would pour ourselves, and that means driving home empty-handed on a regular basis.

The houses we visit

This is the current range. It is deliberately mixed: different regions, different grapes and different styles, from classic to outspoken.

• Champagne William Saintot
• Champagne La Villesenière
• Champagne Aurore & Florian Laval
• Champagne Henry de Vaugency
• Champagne Régis Poissinet
• Champagne Liébart-Régnier
• Champagne Bolieu
• Champagne Simon Rion

The glass counts too

Alongside champagne we carry crystal glassware from two houses: Lehmann, designed in Reims and developed with sommeliers, and Italesse from Trieste. That is not a side note. A champagne poured into a narrow flute leaves part of its aroma behind in the bottle. At the tastings we run, the difference between two glasses holding the same wine is often the most surprising discovery of the evening.

Questions are welcome

Torn between two bottles, looking for something to go with a particular dish, or wondering what sets a cuvée apart from the rest of the range? Do ask, through the contact page. You will get an answer from someone who has sat at the maker's table.

18 · no sales under 18