Champagne Francis Boulard & Fille

Since 2009, the family line at the cellar

The organic work starts in the vines before Delphine Boulard, winemaker at Champagne Francis Boulard & Fille in Faverolles Et Coemy, brings the fruit back to the cellar. She has held that station since 2009, inside a family line of Champagne winegrowers that reaches across more than six generations. The estate was founded in 2009 by Francis Boulard, Jeanne Boulard, and Delphine Boulard after the former Raymond Boulard Champagne House came apart, and its scale tells much of the decision that followed: a small grower house, about 3 hectares, roughly 25,000 bottles a year. Delphine now carries the work as winemaker, with organic cultivation treated as a daily responsibility rather than a label applied at the end. The house frames its own discipline through nature, terroir, and purity, but the more useful reading is practical: estate fruit, close farming, Champagne made from land the family works itself. In a region where lineage can become ornament, this one remains tied to the method.

Pinot Meunier, old oak, and a 2 ton press

The vineyard program rests on Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, with the plantings described as 40% Pinot Meunier, 30% Pinot Noir, and 30% Chardonnay. The vines are dry-farmed, estate-grown, and harvested by hand, with organic and biodynamic cultivation shaping the work before the first press. In the winery, grapes go to a membrane press with a capacity of 2 tons, and the house uses only the cuvée, the first extraction, for Champagne. Base wines go through malolactic fermentation, a choice that softens acidity while leaving the fruit and chalk in view. Fermentation happens with wild yeasts in oak foudres, then the wines age in old oak barrels, wood used for texture rather than display. The signature bottlings, including Le Murtet, Les Rachais Rosé, Les Vieilles Vignes, Les Murgiers, and Mailly Champagne, show the estate by variation: parcels, grapes, and élevage held within one line of intent.

A rural house a few meters from the cellar

The place is a countryside domaine at Domaine Flancourt in Faverolles-et-Coëmy, with the house and guest rooms set a few meters from the cellar. The tasting room keeps the scale of the estate in view; this is not Champagne as theater, but Champagne as a working farm with bottles resting close by. The cellar, the vineyard, and the house sit together, so the rhythm of the property stays legible: fruit brought in, must settled, foudres watched, bottles left to take their time. Quiet suits it. The room does not need much decoration when the names on the bottles already point back to parcels and family decisions. At Champagne Francis Boulard & Fille, Delphine Boulard, Le Murtet, and the old oak barrels are the concrete work still in hand.