2026: Happy New Year. Bonne Année. Godt Nytår

Winter weather and cold westerly winds have well and truly taken over after the cosy Christmas celebrations throughout December and the first New Year’s festivities. 2026 is certainly underway on many fronts, and not always in the ways we might have hoped. Still, we would like to wish you a very happy New Year. High politics is not our table. What matters is to keep our noses to the right track and stay inspired, doing so side by side with others who are also pressing on.

We send you our very best wishes all around—for your loved ones, for health, for finances, for dreams, and for the rest of life in general. Thank you to you and everyone else for all the contact over the past year: champagne purchases, visits to us and to you, enquiries, invitations, gifts, and even postcards. Of course, they all go up on display.

The new vintage: 2026 arrived with frost and snow. At this time of year, we are busy pruning the vines. It’s tricky in the snow, but there are always other tasks to be done instead. Towards the end of winter, we will decide how to blend the new wines from the 2025 harvest. We have several Chardonnays wines, some of which have been aged in oak casks. The Sollissandre champagnes have gotten off to a great start, so it’s tempting to continue in that direction. Solliphere also flew off the shelves last year. We have decided that this single-vineyard champagne will be our blanc de blancs, which we will always keep in stock. That means we need to produce it regularly. Everything points to 2025 being an excellent vintage, so it makes perfect sense to make another Solliphere.

Looking back: 2025 could not have been more different from the incredibly challenging 2024. Hail damage in early May was something we couldn’t recover from, and it cost us yield. For the rest of the time, it was more or less a walk in the park. Even so, the harvest yield ended up exactly the same as in 2024, due to a hot, dry summer. We were disappointed, though we know that viticulture is an extreme sport of the more complex kind. An incredible number of factors influence both the quantity of grapes and their development. We must always question our methods, to complement or even improve upon them.

The organic methods: The green AB label is not yet on our bottles. Nevertheless, we had the great pleasure in 2025 of seeing more people choose our wines, in part because of our organic certification—including the Danish ambassador in Paris. We are thrilled by this recognition, even before our organic bottles are on the market. Champagne takes time. We have worked with organic methods since 2021, but as the conversion spans 3 years, the first certified organic bottles will not be released until autumn 2027 at the earliest—almost seven years in total. That’s a long time to wait, so it’s a great help to be able to get a head start by presenting a bottle from the conversion period: Sollissandre Noirs from 2022 has already been very well received.

All our single-vineyard champagnes have been stepping stones towards the final conversion. This too has been a long project. Our work began in 2012. The very first bottle, Solliage, was released in 2018. Then came the first Solliphere in 2019. Now we have three vintages: 2014, 2017, and 2019. Two of our champagnes are from our land in Soulières: Sollissime from 2015 was released in 2020 and Sollissandre Blancs from 2018 was released in 2024. All are certified Viticulture Durable en Champagne, which you can read more about on our website.

The magic begins with the word champagne. Moments light up in so many beautiful ways when you open a bottle of champagne. As you pour a glass for those you want to spoil a bit, you sprinkle a little of that magic dust around the room. The bubbles set our senses alight, making the moment shine even brighter and perhaps even last longer. You have scattered the stars and, with them, created your own champagne moment with your guests.

Enjoy it, enjoy the moment—right now, the snow is falling white. Otherwise, 2026 lies smooth and open before us. We look forward to hearing from you.

New Year’s greetings from Soulières,

Solveig Tange & Alain Gerard