One of the finest producers of contemporary Champagne is Adrien Dhondt, whose cellars are located in Flavigny, a village that isn’t even planted with vines. This small estate came into being in 1986, when Adrien’s father, Éric Dhondt, married his mother, Édith Grellet. The Dhondts were Belgian farmers in origin, and Adrien's grandfather had purchased vines in the Sézannais in 1972; the Grellets, by contrast, are natives of Cuis and Cramant. Today, the domaine farms seven hectares, and the vinous, intensely characterful Champagnes that Adrien has been producing since he took the reins in 2012 have earned the estate a celebrity disproportionate to its modest scale.

A self-taught person whose methods are informed by his own experiments and the work of vignerons he admires in Burgundy and Champagne, he believes in living soils and grapes harvested at full maturity. He employs no synthetic products of any kind, cultivating his soils and increasingly raising the trellising to deliver bigger canopies and experimenting with algae treatments against mildew to reduce the use of copper. Dhondt prunes short and debuds severely to limit yields and produce ripe, concentrated fruit at harvest time, a commitment that’s immediately evident in the glass.

In the cellar, Dhondt is a proponent of barrel fermentation with spontaneous fermentation, filling his fûts after a very short settling or even no débourbage at all (depending on how he feels about the vintage) and adding minimal sulfur dioxide. His cellar isn’t air-conditioned, so it fluctuates in temperature throughout the year, tracking the seasons; and the vins clairs spend a little less than year (usually eight to nine months) on the lees before tirage without cold stabilization, filtering or fining. During those months of maturation, the wines are topped up once a month, and bâtonnage is no longer performed. Increasingly refined barrel choices, with around 25% to 33% new oak in the cellar each year (mostly from Chassin, François Frères and Tonnellerie de Champagne), form the foundation for another qualitative step up. The influence of Burgundy is palpable in the wines’ texture and vinosity, though Dhondt’s wines are very much his own style.

The Dhondt family has worked with a perpetual reserve since they began estate bottling in 1986. Non-vintage cuvées are shaped by the presence of older wines drawn from this perpetual blend. After withdrawing 30% of his reserves for the new year’s tirage, Adrien replenishes the reserve with wine held back from the new vintage and racks the resulting blend to barrel—along with the fresh lees of the latest vintage. At harvest time, when empty barrels are needed, the perpetual reserve is returned to stainless steel tanks (two-thirds) and concrete (one-third). This process is repeated each year, ensuring the domaine’s barrels are never empty.

Today, the Dhondt-Grellet range begins with a non-vintage cuvée called Roc Solare. Dans un Premier Temps is no longer made, as the Pinot Noir vines in the Avenay Val d’Or were replanted (and Pinot Meunier from Cuis will produce a different bottling in the future). As a result, Adrien decided to isolate the vines from the Sézannais, planted in the 1970s by his grandfather, in this new standalone cuvée. It’s a warm terroir with deeper clay and pebbles of silex that smell like flint when struck against each other, producing a concentrated, expressive wine—though not at the expense of the chalky structure and tension. This is Dhondt’s largest cuvée, and it's vinified entirely in barrels, around one-third new, in line with the rest of wines from this estate. A 30% reserve wine component that complements the base year already sees barrel maturation, as described above.

Next come two non-vintage blanc de blancs bottlings from the Côte de Blancs, both incorporating 30% reserve wines taken from a perpetual blend. From a number of small parcels scattered around Cuis and Grauves and planted from the 1950s to 2014, Dhondt produces Les Terres Fines, which is one of his most fine-boned cuvées and a signature of the northern Côte de Blancs. Then comes the Cramant Grand Cru cuvée, assembling lieux-dits La Garenne—defined by deep, clayey and sandy soils in the heart of the village, producing a wine with an incisive profile—and Les Longues Verges, a chalkier site with vines affected by le court-noué, which produces a deep and concentrated wine.

The range continues with a pure Cuis wine, a vintage bottling from a northwest-facing lieu-dit Les Nogers planted with massal selection Chardonnay in 1974. This is a continuation of the hillside that produces Le Bateau in Cramant on the other side of the communal boundary. Dhondt’s parcel begins with sandy clay, becoming chalkier as one ascends the slope.

From Cramant comes Le Bateau, a wine that derives from a 0.14-hectare plot of land planted in 1951 by Dhondt’s great-grandfather with massal selection Chardonnay. The plot follows the contours of the slope, with some 70% exposed to the south and the remainder to the north, though harvest takes place the on same date. Le Bateau is the parcel where Dhondt has recently raised the trellising to deliver bigger canopies and offer shade for grapes and soil. This is a vinous, characterful wine with all the amplitude and texture that one expects at this address with incredible intensity.

While they each have a distinctive personality, all of these bottlings are concentrated and vinous, with their expressive fruit tones framed by a complex patina from sur lie maturation in barrel. And though they’re finished with minimal dosage (all of the wines are bottled with less than three grams of dosage), these are generous, expansive Champagnes that are delicious on their own but equally suggestive of aging potential. Today, Dhondt numbers among most exciting vignerons in the region, and readers who share the admiration for Champagne’s ongoing artisanal wine-growing movement will want to seek out a few bottles with urgency.