Montgueux

Montgueux lies barely ten kilometres from Troyes, the medieval capital of the Counts of Champagne and host to the great trade fairs that once drew merchants from across Europe. The hill's vines only entered the officially delimited Champagne zone in 1927, when a new law finally extended the appellation to the Aube, decades after the original 1908 boundary had excluded it and helped trigger the region's wine riots. Under the échelle des crus that ranked every Champagne village until its abolition in 2010, Montgueux was fixed at 80 percent, the lowest rung on the scale and formally classed an autre cru, the same bottom tier applied uniformly across the Aube regardless of individual terroir. Today a little over 200 hectares are planted on the hill, farmed by several dozen growers producing a Chardonnay whose quality has long outrun that old administrative ranking. The village's modern reputation owes much to one family. The Lassaignes settled in Montgueux after the First World War, and Jacques Lassaigne planted his first vines there in 1964, initially selling grapes to the large Champagne houses like most of his neighbours. In 1981 he built the estate that still bears his name to begin producing and selling Champagne under his own label rather than just fruit. His son Emmanuel joined in 1999 and began releasing his own cuvées from 2002, steering the domaine toward a single-village, chalk-focused style. Bottlings such as "Les Vignes de Montgueux" have since been praised by French wine critics and placed on the lists of Michelin-starred restaurants, and Domaine Jacques Lassaigne is now widely regarded as the producer that carried Montgueux's name into serious wine circles.