Dom Perignon's chef de cave on life, grapes and his favourite vintage

Dom Perignon chef de cave Richard Geoffroy

(Image credit: Getty)

published 28 March 2017

Is the Champagne region a good place to live?

The Champenois love their region— it’s a secret they’re willing to share. They feel they are part of their terroir and there is an organic and, at times, confounding resemblance between the people and the land they’ve been shaping for centuries: noble and understated, but profound and comforting. It’s a very good place to live.

What’s your favourite place in the world?

I keep exploring the correspondences between the cultures of France, Italy and Japan. For me, the links create a fascinating and innate sense of harmony.

Why Dom Pérignon over any other Champagne?

Particularly in its second plenitude [one of three stages during a wine’s maturation, during which there is a window of opportunity to enjoy a new expression of the vintage], Dom Pérignon is so inviting, energised and intense, joyful yet complex. It’s a sheer pleasure to drink it.

What’s your favourite vintage?

Definitely 2003. The unprecedented 2003 is the mother of all challenging vintages. Somewhat controversial, it’s the vintage of extremes and superlatives: scorching heat and risktaking made the wine glorious, singular and satisfying.

What are your favourite grape varieties?

Chardonnay and Pinot Noir—both of them. The white and the black: Dom Pérignon’s yin and yang.

What would be your dream property purchase?

The Château of Versailles? I am only joking. Still, Versailles is the quintessence of the Age of Enlightenment and the actual contemporary of the birth of Champagne. The Sun King himself used to drink Dom Pérignon wines.

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.