Dom Perignon Champagne Brut Tribute To Jean-Michel Basquiat 2015 750ml

A super-complex Champagne with chewy tension. Aromas of coffee beans, lemon peel, burnt sugar, chalky minerality, barley candy and tarte tatin. Fine pinprick bubbles with flavors of lemon leaves, aspirin and Mirabelle plums, plus a touch of grapefruit bitterness keeping the tension. Zesty yet integrated chewy acidity and a medium body with a toasted finish. Drink of hold.

There's a well-spiced, zesty edge to the flavors of glazed apple, mandarin orange peel, pink grapefruit pith and crème de cassis as they ride the finely detailed mousse of this fresh, focused Champagne. This vivid display is enriched by notes of canelé pastry, chopped almond, pastry cream, smoke and vanilla, all coming to the forefront through the midpalate and chiming on the lasting finish. Drink now through 2035.

The 2015 Dom Pérignon is terrific. Bright and poised, the 2015 shows terrific energy. Citrus peel, white flowers, mint, white pepper and slate all race across the palate. There's gorgeous tension and backbone here, with bright saline notes that extend the mid-palate and finish. This is a fine showing in a vintage that has proven to be tricky. I am intrigued to see how the 2015 develops in the coming years.

Aromas of tangerine, orange peel, freshly baked bread and fennel—framed by a discreet reductive edge—introduce the 2015 Dom Pérignon. On the palate, it is a medium- to full-bodied, ample and enveloping wine with a muscular core of fruit and ripe yet lively acids, culminating in a long finish where attractive Pinot Noir phenolics assert themselves. Fleshier and less incisive than the 2008, yet simultaneously brighter in tone—if less complex—than the 2017, this is a rendition that, much like the 2018, will demand patience before it shows all its cards. It was disgorged in early 2023 with a dosage of five grams per liter.

2015 is unusually giving and luscious at this early stage, full of apricot pastry, bittersweet orange citrus and bitter almond, brightened by some pithy herbal characters that signal the year’s singular growing season yet also leaning deliciously into toasted bread, honey-nut and a little umami savour from lees ageing. It plays a deep, fruit-saturated and slightly grippy angle on Dom Pérignon’s often svelte style, less reductive than usual and much more immediate than the previous release (2013). This is a vintage perfectly placed for relatively youthful drinking, although Dom Pérignon’s record will mean this is likely to have a rewarding decade ahead.

For this tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dom Pérignon chose a work by the artist that is as meaningful as it is enigmatic, "In Italian" (1983). Although the meaning of the work "In Italian" remains a mystery, it carries an emotional intensity that is not unrelated to the resonance between Basquiat’s vision and that of Dom Pérignon. In Basquiat’s work, as in Dom Pérignon’s vision, the assemblage is a key element for the intensity of the aesthetic experience. For the painting "In Italian", the assemblage of materials and the successive pictorial interventions that hide each other until what was originally painted becomes indecipherable, opens the way to potentially infinite layers of meaning and multiple emotional configurations for the observer. As for Dom Pérignon, the tension between the different characteristics of the original wines creates an extraordinarily rich alliance of meanings, without ever erasing the trace of the original matter. This art of assemblage is reflected in the special edition, with three unique coffrets, each showcasing parts of Basquiat's masterpiece as a tribute to this creative process.