Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon is Wine Enthusiast’s Winemaker of the Year

Wine Enthusiast Magazine have named Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon “Winemaker of the Year” in their 2015 Wine Star Awards.

Roger Voss, reporting for Wine Enthusiast, writes that it is Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon’s ability to “catch the moment of Champagne’s revolution” that has made him Wine Enthusiast’s 2015 Winemaker of the Year.

Roger Voss reports that Jean-Baptiste is using modern methods – biodynamic and organic farming, fermenting in wood, picking grapes for ripeness, not acidity – to make a “new-old style of great Champagne”.

Jean-Baptiste has been working with the Rouzaud family, which owns Roederer, since he graduated from oenology school. He worked in the Roederer estates in California, Tasmania and Bordeaux, before returning to his native Reims in 1999.

Lecaillon revolutionized the vineyards by banning herbicides and introducing biodynamic farming to 184 of Roederer’s 590 acres.

He is also responsible for other properties in the Roederer group: the Bordeaux chateaux (including Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande), Roederer Estate in Mendocino, Domaines Ott in Provence and Ramos-Pinto in Portugal’s Douro region.

But, he said to Voss, “I’m not a flying winemaker. Everybody on the spot knows much better than me. I see myself as the team coach.”

Voss sums up his work today: “with ‘many more vintages to go,’ Lecaillon is one of a handful of winemakers changing the way Champagne is produced and how the region sees itself. He’s perhaps the most farsighted, seeing climate change as a major factor in how to approach vines and winemaking. While looking to the future, he has also learned to take from the past.”

Click here to read the full article on Wine Spectator.

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