Harvest 2025: Rich wine working its way to organic champagne

Some Loisy Chardonnays that may have lost weight but remain absolute beauties on the day of harvest

The champagneharvest at Tange-Gérard is finished. Bottomline was few grapes more mature than ever before. Another firsttimer was to have picked all grapes by September 3rd. Subsequently, we expect the year of 2025 to join its predecessors and finish warmest year ever measured. During our 5 days harvest, 16 persons dealt carefully with 24 tonnes of beautiful grapes. Now, the most sugar-concentrated must of ours fermentate to transform into wine. It’s a very promising start for  future champagnes.

2025 teared along in our plots from the first leaf until harvest done. Hail decimated the potential for grapes early May. Especially hit was a plot, that usually delivers many clusters of a good size. Another pecularity this year were especially Chardonnays that lost weigth days before the harvest due to drought. Some 10 to 20% lost depending on the plot.

All this would matter in the end: we finished with less kilos than hoped for in a year that had seamed more of a walk in the park than growing grapes in Champagne because of a dry, warm summer with rare but nicely spaced rain just right for thirsty grapevines. Well, not enough we learned in the end: the grapes remained small. Some even shrinked. Furthermore, the massive rain of 2024 likely left us buds with less clusters initiated. Organic is certainly not for the weak-willed.

The last Chardonnays in Loisy-en-Brie on September 3rd 2025 confirm the beauty of the year in general.

Eventually, the grapeharvest lasted five days from August 30th and onwards. As the maturation kicked off for real from mid-August, the sugars piled up in the grapes so fast, that we considered calling for the staff four days earlier than we had announced ourselves just one week earlier.

Eventually, we stayed with the original planning and picked the grapes on days of all kinds from warm late summersun, grey skies and even one afternoon of massive rain. The grapes endured it all to finish with impressive sugars to deliver musts of 11,2% alcohol without loss of too much acidity.

During the grape harvest, time flows in a different way. The season of the grapes will last as long as it needs. Then autumn arrives. It will rain nuts whether the calendar says late August or September. The harvest time frames its own micro world as well. We live together, share the only target of great grapes for one week.

Then we get back to our personal projects of the next year: education, moving, new job, retirement, in short change. We will explore the results next year, within this group of people who travel between many different stations of life. At our place, grapeharvest is also a time-out to meet other people and learn from them.

During the autumn: The freshly pressed must spends some hours in a special tank for whatever is not liquid to sediment: small stones, pips and so on. Soon after, the must is moved to achieve its first alcoholic fermentation in a steel tank . Typically within a week or two.

Later in the autumn, we will likely want to move some of the young wine to small oak casks. During these months, the wine will gain more complexity on the nose as well as the palate. Eventually, we will end up with a more varied collection of still wines for the playful moment of assembling base wines into future champagnes next spring.

In the meantime we will introduce the brand-new Sollissandre Noirs in autumn 2025. Sollissandre Noirs is made of 100% Meunier grapes and partly aged on oak. We hope that you will enjoy this champagne as much as its predecessor Sollissandre Blancs, that with the speed of light became our bestseller in 2024.

Solliphere 2014 has developed pleasant, mature notes. We have dosed it differently for a better balance. All these and the rest of the singles-collection are certied Viticulture Durable en Champagne (VDC). This is the most common certification in Champagne today. You can read more in our website. Since 2021, we have worked on our organic certification, which is the only guarantee that no synthetic chemicals like the herbicide Round-up was used. However, the organic champagnes are not for sale yet.

We continue with the known brut classics like Tradition, Noirs & Blancs, Rosé d’Assemblage, Rosé de Saignée and Selection from 2012. Tradition exists in a sweeter demisec version as well.

A glass of champagne is the perfect way to celebrate for 15 minutes or 15 hours, whatever your mood, your day, your schedule allow. All these champagnes may celebrate the special days or send any ordinary monday to the skies with a whoosh and bubbles in your glass. We look forward to hearing from you.

 Harvestgreetings from Alain Gérard & Solveig Tange, Soulières, September 2025

The Dream team of the Tange-Gerard grape harvest in 2025.