NV Champagne Chavost "Paradoxe" Brut Nature, Champagne, France

ABOUT THIS WINE

Paradoxe is 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Meunier, with the current NV bottling a multi-vintage blend spanning 2019-2023. Unlike most of Chavost’s range, which is built around individual vintages, Paradoxe deliberately combines reserve wines from five harvests. Those reserve wines were held in a mixture of barrels, large foudres and tank, with the final blend bottled in 2024. 

This Champagne is a Brut Nature at 0 g/L dosage and is vinified without added sulfites. Fermentation is completed in stainless steel and foudre, followed by aging in 228L French oak and 4,000L foudres, with lees aging and malolactic conversion.

ABOUT THIS PRODUCER

Champagne Chavost is a historic cooperative founded in 1946 in Chavot-Courcourt, a village just south of Épernay in the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay. For decades it operated as a fairly traditional cooperative, but that changed dramatically when Fabian Daviaux, the great-grandson of one of its founders, became cellar master in 2019. Daviaux returned to his home village after gaining winemaking experience elsewhere and began transforming Chavost around organic farming, minimal intervention, and a much more transparent expression of fruit, vintage, and terroir.

Today, Chavost occupies an unusual position in Champagne: it has the structure of a cooperative but the philosophy of a progressive natural-wine producer. Daviaux emphasizes spontaneous fermentation, little to no cellar additions, no added sulfur in many cuvées, and zero dosage, while the estate-controlled vineyards achieved organic certification beginning with the 2023 harvest. The resulting Champagnes tend to be vinous, energetic, fruit-driven, and distinctly dry rather than polished toward a consistent traditional house style. Even Chavost's colorful labels reflect this desire to present Champagne in a less conventional way.

Paradoxe is particularly revealing of Chavost's evolution. When Daviaux took over, he initially favored individual-vintage wines rather than the traditional Champagne practice of blending reserve wines, but he continued saving those wines from successive harvests. Paradoxe brings those reserves together, combining multiple vintages from 2019 through 2023 into a 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Meunier Brut Nature. In that sense, the name is fitting: it's a deliberate “paradox”—a multi-vintage Champagne from a producer whose modern identity was originally built around vintage expression, made with the same zero-dosage, no-added-sulfur philosophy that defines the new Chavost.