Lanson Noble Champagne: A Vertical Tasting Stretching Back to 1979

What happened

A Decanter expert sat down with a range of Lanson Noble Champagne spanning several decades, with the oldest samples reaching back to 1979. The exercise was a formal vertical tasting, structured to assess how the house's prestige cuvée develops and holds its character across an extended period in the cellar. The central question guiding the tasting was a straightforward one: why do these Champagnes age as well as they do?

Lanson, a producer based in the Champagne appellation, has long offered Noble Champagne as its flagship expression. By lining up vintages across such a considerable stretch of time, the tasting provided a rare opportunity to observe the wine's evolution in a systematic and comparative manner.

Why it matters

Vertical tastings of prestige cuvées are among the most instructive exercises available to serious Champagne enthusiasts and collectors. When bottles from different decades are assessed side by side, patterns emerge that a single vintage tasting cannot reveal — the way a house's style persists or shifts, and the conditions under which a wine reaches its peak or sustains it.

For those making decisions about when to open a bottle or how long to commit cellar space, this kind of evidence is genuinely useful. Understanding that a cuvée can remain compelling across four or more decades informs purchasing choices in a way that no single tasting note can replicate. It also places the collector in a more confident position when acquiring older vintages on the secondary market.

Context

Lanson is a Champagne AOC producer with a prestige cuvée, Noble Champagne, that has accumulated a substantial back catalogue of vintages. Vertical tastings of this nature are relatively uncommon in the public domain, given the rarity and cost of assembling bottles across such a wide range of years. When a specialist publication such as Decanter undertakes the exercise, the findings carry weight for the wider community of collectors and trade buyers who follow the region closely.

The tasting was published on 25 May 2026 and is available at the Decanter website.