There's quite a story behind these bottles. When RWC was founded in 1989, one of the first European producers we worked with was Jacquesson, which hadn't been imported into the US in decades. And one of our most popular Jacquesson wines was their 1985 Brut Signature, which was then their luxury cuvée.

Despite its youth, the wine was such a stunner that we asked Director Jean-Hervé Chiquet if we could buy a cache of the wine to be left undisgorged in his cellar. Over the years, each time we visited the estate, Jean-Hervé would disgorge a bottle for us to taste, and so we knew the wine was developing beautifully.

Finally, in 2017, about a quarter century after we bought them, we had the bottles disgorged and shipped to us, adorned with a spectacular gold-leaf recreation of a Jacquesson label from the 1840s. 94 rating from Richard Juhlin.