This holiday season Champagne lovers can enjoy a new star-powered sparkling rosé: the Brut Rosé Champagne Petite Fleur NV (93 points, $110). It’s the new release from Fleur de Miraval, a project launched in 2020 by film legend Brad Pitt and two "celebrity" winemakers, Rodolphe Péters of Champagne’s Pierre Péters and Marc Perrin of the Rhône’s Famille Perrin estates.
Petite Fleur is a sister label to Fleur de Miraval’s original bottling, the Brut Rosé Champagne Exclusivement ER3 (95, $350). Available for a third of the cost, Petite Fleur still keeps quality high, blending Chardonnay grapes sourced entirely from Grand Cru sites with a 5 percent dollop of Pinot Noir, vinified as still wine, to create the pale pink hue.
The Pitt and Perrin team goes back to 2012, when they first brought the hugely successful Château Miraval Côtes de Provence Rosé to thirsty rosé wine drinkers around the world and helped to launch “rosé all day” as a lifestyle. But looking beyond Provence, they noticed that there wasn’t as much of a focus on high quality rosé Champagne.
“We’re wine lovers on top of being winemakers,” Perrin told Wine Spectator in 2021. “We loved great white Champagne, but we often felt the rosé counterparts were not at the same level.”
Pitt and Perrin sought out Péters for his Champagne expertise, and after an extensive tasting of rosé Champagnes, they came up with their formula for success. The Exclusivement Rosé leans heavily on reserve wines that impart greater complexity and depth to the finished sparkler, using only 25 percent of wines from a recent harvest. By comparison, the Petite Fleur blends 65 percent of a recent vintage, 2019 for this first release. It’s a fresh and harmonious version, with apricot and white cherry fruit and rich hints of toasted nuts and mineral.
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