Billecart-Salmon Le Blancs de Blancs Grand Cru Extra Brut NV

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Billecart-Salmon Le Blancs de Blancs Grand Cru Extra Brut NV.

Billecart-Salmon Le Blancs de Blancs Grand Cru Extra Brut NV
$175, 12% alcohol, cork, Champagne/France.

There's a gravity to this wine — a weight that presses down and leaves a mark. Saline, lightly autolytic, bone dry, with rocks, lemon rind, pastry and rye bread running through it. Honey flickers on the nose; on the palate, a flash of caramel, so cold it feels brittle, almost stony. This is a genuinely excellent sparkling wine. It carries breadth and heft, but more than that, it carries a kind of authority — it doesn't ask to be liked so much as respected. 95 points – Campbell Mattinson.

  • Billecart-Salmon's Le Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru Extra Brut NV is a 100% Chardonnay Champagne sourced from Grands Crus de villages de la Côte des Blancs : Avize, Chouilly, Cramant, Mesnil-sur-Oger.

  • It's a non-vintage blend of two different years, aged on lees for (four to) five years in the house's cellars.

  • Vinification is done entirely in stainless steel, consistent with the house's typically low-dosage, precision style.

  • Details are scant on the percentage of reserve wine used, but it typically ranges between 20% and 50% (which is a significant margin for adjustment).

Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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