IS STILL CHAMPAGNE STILL CHAMPAGNE?

IT WAS AN AFTERNOON in 2001 spent rifling through his family’s archives that first sparked Frédéric Rouzaud’s curiosity. Rouzaud is the CEO of Champagne house Louis Roederer, which has been owned by his family for centuries, and among those papers, he found menus from suppers thrown in the 1940s and 1950s by his great-grandmother Camille. The formidable widow was then barely halfway through her more than four-decade tenure at the vineyard’s helm. She’d scribble the assortment of wines to be served—the best vintages of Cristal and other sparkling labels, of course, but also, remarkably, always a few still reds and whites made from specific plots dotted around the family’s almost 600 acres of vines.

“She liked to show how the region can also produce great still wine, with surprising wines that people didn’t expect,” explains Rouzaud of his great-grandmother’s menus, which included examples from the niche category now known as Côteaux Champenois (or “the Hills of Champagne”). Why