Vitryat

The Vitryat is a small Chardonnay area southeast of Châlons-en-Champagne, around the town of Vitry-le-François, and it sits well east of the better-known Champagne subregions. Like the Côte des Blancs to the west, the bedrock is Cretaceous chalk, but the topsoil carries a heavier overlay of clay, which gives the wines a rounder, fuller body and softer acidity than the linear, mineral whites of the Côte des Blancs proper. The area covers only a few hundred hectares today, a small fraction of what it was before phylloxera, and the relative obscurity of the wines reflects that long collapse rather than any limitation in the terroir itself. The Vitryat once held a much larger place in Champagne. Before phylloxera reached the region in the 1890s, the area around Vitry-le-François was a meaningful source of Chardonnay for the houses based further north and west. The replant that followed never restored the previous scale, and as the prestige of the Côte des Blancs grew through the 20th century, the Vitryat was largely written out of the popular Champagne map. Plantings have crept back up in recent decades, and a small but committed group of growers is working to bring the area's wines back into wider conversation.