M. Hostomme

M. Hostomme is at 5 rue de l'Allée in Chouilly, a grand cru village on the northern edge of the Côte des Blancs, a couple of miles from Épernay. The line painted on their own wall reads "le relais d'une tribu depuis 1931", the handing on of a tribe since 1931, and that is more or less how the place works.

The vine-growing goes back further than the Champagne does. Paul Hostomme, born in 1877, was the one who decided, in a farming world of mixed crops, to put his money into vines. His son Marcel bought up plots through the 1930s, including frost-damaged ones nobody else wanted, and created the Paul Hostomme brand; in 1951 the business became Champagne M. Hostomme. Marcel's sons Michel and Jacques took over in the 1960s and pushed it into export, England first, and by 1985 they were selling 70,000 bottles a year. Laurent Hostomme, the fourth generation, joined in 1993 and runs it now with his wife Chrystelle. In 2021 the house sold more than 340,000 bottles, and by 2025 it was shipping to 27 countries with about fifteen people on the payroll. Their son Paul, born in 2005, is the reason the packaging turned orange.

One thing worth knowing, because the word grower gets used very loosely in Champagne. Hostomme is a family house with one man's name on the door, but it is not a small estate bottling only what it grows. Their own technical sheet for the Tradition cuvée says it blends fifteen villages and three grape varieties: Chouilly and Avize in the Côte des Blancs; Boursault, Oeuilly, Fleury-la-Rivière, Dormans, Serzy, Faverolles and Coëmy in the Vallée de la Marne; Chamery, Écueil and Ville-Dommange in the Montagne de Reims. That is a blender's palette, and it is a large part of why the Tradition tastes complete rather than narrow. Calling them a grower would be stretching it.

What they are good at is patience and precision. Fermentation is in temperature-controlled stainless steel, malolactic is blocked across the range, and the proportion of reserve wine is high: 40% in the Tradition, 30% in the Origine. The ageing is generous for the money. Tradition gets 24 months on the lees, Origine 36, and the Arpent has had eight years. The cellars run to 2,600 hectolitres of temperature-controlled stainless steel, four 40-hectolitre oak tuns and a dozen small barrels, with 1,200 square metres of storage holding up to 800,000 bottles. The vineyards carry both the Viticulture Durable en Champagne and Haute Valeur Environnementale certifications, and they have put in solar panels and planted hedgerows.

The range splits in two. Les Essentielles are the house wines: Tradition, Origine, the demi-sec Gourmandise, the extra-brut Réserve, a Rosé de Saignée, a premier cru Blanc de Noirs and a grand cru vintage. Les Éphémères are the odd ones, built round a single plot, a single grape or an unusual method. Tradition Brut, the Origine Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs and the Arpent Extra Brut are the three to know.