Champagne Louis Roederer Collection 246 Champagne French Wine

The producer attaches a date to this wine's story: 2012. That, Louis Roederer says, is the year the house began its Perpetual Reserve, and the same house describes Collection 246 as a multi-vintage blend that includes wine from that reserve. We do not have a shopper rating for this wine.

Champagne, as our region guide tells it, is one protected name on paper and many small vineyards on the ground, sorted into several separate growing areas. Mixing grapes, places and years in a single wine is normal there. The weather runs cool, with ocean and continental influences overlapping near the northern limit of dependable ripening. The guide credits that coolness, together with moderate rain, with keeping acidity in the grapes, though frost and storms are a regular trouble. The production area was set by French law in 1927, and the name belongs only to wine made inside that area, by its rules. As for the exact grape varieties in this particular blend, the percentages are not confirmed on our end, though the house's own account of the base vintage below fills in real detail.

Louis Roederer's own account fills in that detail. Cellar Master Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon says climate change had been reshaping Champagne for thirty years before the house acted, and built the Perpetual Reserve to bank extra-ripe grapes from the warmer harvests that followed. Collection 246 blends 55 percent wine from the 2021 harvest with 35 percent from that Perpetual Reserve and 10 percent reserve wine that spends time in French oak at the house's Cristal estate, sourced in equal thirds from three named estates, la Riviere, la Montagne and la Cote. The producer calls 2021 its most demanding growing season since 1958, a year of reduced yields that still produced Chardonnay grapes the house describes as "remarkably resilient," present in the blend at an unusually high proportion and credited for the finished wine's freshness and precision.

The finished wine rests in the house's cellars for close to four years before release. The producer's own tasting note describes mirabelle plum and candied citrus, with what it calls a subtle touch of oak and "toasted and iodised" overtones, the maker's words for a Champagne it positions for cellaring as well as drinking now. No dosage or alcohol figure appears on the producer's page for this bottling.

In our September 2026 checks, the one shelf price we noted for this bottle was $48.99. It comes as a 750 ml bottle. Is a blend built partly on held-back wine what the next celebration calls for?

Our call: the bottle for a shopper who buys on a house's own multi-year blending story; Louis Roederer documents the 2021 harvest, the Perpetual Reserve and named-estate sourcing behind Collection 246 in real detail. Pass if you want the crowd's word or a stated dosage figure first; no shopper rating has reached our record, and the producer's own page leaves both dosage and alcohol content unstated.

The Grocery Store Wine Desk · written Sep 16, 2026 from our research file for this wine. Numbers reflect our latest checks.