With nearly 30 years as a Champagne pioneer in the Marne Valley, Jérôme Dehours is a perfectionist with clear convictions.
You can see it in the way he analyzes his vineyards around the sleepy Lilliputian village of Cerseuil (pop. 87), on the cool left bank of the Marne River. You can see it also in the meticulous organization of his spotless winery, with its maintained-like-new vintage hydraulic basket presses, and in the thoughtful lineup of sparkling and still wines he has created.
And you can sense it in the instructive way he leads his team. When his vineyard workers knock off at noon on Fridays, he has the group come to the winery to toast and informally taste his wines with charcuterie and cheese as they stand around a bar in the pressing area. On one sweltering summer Friday, when a young man shows up bare-chested, reddened from too much sun, Dehours politely but firmly sends him to go find his shirt.
Dehours, you see, is all about upholding standards. It’s the story of his life and his family members, who have worked not just for Dehours’ success but that of the area and its oft-underappreciated grape, Pinot Meunier.
The domaine was started in 1930 by his grandfather, who tired of suffering as a grower and founded the local wine cooperative, then his own winery.
“At the time, the Champagne houses made money and the growers starved from hunger,” says Dehours, a fit 58-year-old. “My grandfather said, ‘We need to make our own wine.’ He was a trailblazer in Champagne.”
But Dehours & Fils would not pass smoothly across the generations.
Dehours’ father, who continued to develop the estate through the 1980s, died in 1987 at 54 years old, and the winery was taken over by a group of creditors with little interest in quality.
Dehours, who studied enology and agronomy at high school in Champagne and in Burgundy, joined the estate while dreaming about taking over its management.
In 1996, Dehours and his brother-in-law negotiated to acquire the winery and 12 acres of family vineyards with a plan to pay off the debt. “My challenge was to relaunch the domaine and to valorize the terroirs,” says Dehours.
Inspired by Burgundy producers who were doing just that, Dehours quickly became part of a group of young producers revitalizing Champagne.
One of his first moves was trying something almost unheard of in the region at the time: creating single-vineyard, vintage-dated crus to show off his old vineyards and their varied, cool terroirs of clay and sandy soils.
The concept to put the name of the vineyard locale, or lieu-dit, on the label was pure Burgundian. But the Champagne governing council balked at the idea.
“They told me, ‘You don’t understand anything about Champagne,” he remembers.
The council members questioned how he could use the name of a place that was part of the community. Dehours countered that, as in Burgundy, he or anyone else had the right to use the name of vineyard sites.
With nothing to legally stop him, in 1999, Dehours produced about 160 cases each of two wines from his old-vine sites: “Brisefer,” a Chardonnay vineyard planted by his grandfather, and “Genevraux,” a Pinot Meunier plot planted by his father.
“It was very unusual for Champagne,” he says, but adds that among wine lovers and the trade, the Champagnes were well received on release in 2003: “It was like everyone was waiting for it.”
The move not only helped Dehours but also elevated Pinot Meunier in the minds of Champagne drinkers. It also confirmed his belief that Pinot Meunier— grown here because it typically blooms after the valley’s spring frosts—was more than just a practical little cousin of Pinot Noir.
“When I was young, people would say ‘Meunier is a variety that cannot age,’ and I believed it too,” Dehours says as we bounce around vineyards in his perfectly restored 1970s Citroën Mehari, an open-sided utility vehicle–cum-beachmobile. “But with experience, I completely changed my opinion, and I let the Meunier ripen to have a better potential for aging.”
In the last 28 years, Dehours has grown the vineyards he owns or rents to 55 acres spread over more than 40 sites—all within a two-mile radius. His annual production is about 10,000 cases total of 13 wines.
Four of those are his tiny-production, single-vineyard cru Champagnes, which show the differences among varieties, vineyard ages, soils and exposures.
Starting in 2013, Dehours stopped using vintage dates on these bottlings and began blending the latest harvest’s base wine with perpetual reserves that combine all the vintages from the same cru. “It’s a choice,” he says, “It gives a greater expression of the terroir.”
He also makes three single-vineyard, still Coteaux Champenois, vintage-dated wines: two from Chardonnay and one from Pinot Meunier.
The remaining six wines are Champagne blends, including his largest volume wine, the non-vintage Brut Grand Réserve (2024 release, 91 points $72). Making up half of Dehours’ estate production, this bottling is Pinot Meunier-based and relies on a perpetual reserve dating back to 1998. There’s also a slightly pink-tinged Extra Brut Oeil de Perdix NV (2023 release, 93 points, $90).
Though he eliminated vintages for nearly all his Champagnes, Dehours created a new vintage sparkler in 2013 called “Millesime” (which literally means vintage) that blends the “best juice of the domaine” every year. “It can be Pinot Noir, Meunier and/or Chardonnay,” he says of the wine, which is aged for seven years in bottle on its lees before disgorgement. (The current vintage is 2016.) “There’s no formula.”
Maybe there is one—sort of. Dehours, the vineyard stickler, believes that 85 percent of quality is fixed by the harvest date, when he strives to press healthy, ripe, undamaged fruit.
“The further you go along in the process,” he says, “what you do has less and less importance.”
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