Vitryat

Vitryat is a small, isolated vineyard in the east of the Marne, around Vitry-le-François, on the edge of Perthois, the plain of the Marne that stretches towards Saint-Dizier and is already humid Champagne. It is not on the Côte d'Île-de-France like Reims, Épernay and Sézanne, but on another cuesta, the Côte de Champagne, the same one that farther south leads to Montgueux: this is how the appellation regulations describe it, distinguishing the vineyard's three côtes. The slopes rest on chalk, and almost all the vines are Chardonnay: 97.5% according to UMC figures, which count just under 460 hectares across fifteen communes and around 260 winegrowers.

The communes are Bassu, Bassuet, Changy, Couvrot, Glannes, Lisse-en-Champagne, Loisy-sur-Marne, Merlaut, Saint-Amand-sur-Fion, Saint-Lumier-en-Champagne, Val-de-Vière, Vanault-le-Châtel, Vavray-le-Grand, Vavray-le-Petit and Vitry-en-Perthois; Bassuet, with about 90 hectares, is the most densely planted. There are no Grand Cru or Premier Cru. However, the Vitryat was already on the 1911 échelle des crus, at the bottom of the scale: its crus were worth 41–42% of the base price and rose to 51–52% in 1920. LThe vineyard area of the Vitry-le-François arrondissement was approved by the INAO only in November 1990, and the regulations still cite it as a special case.

The L'Union des Maisons de Champagne lists the Vitryat among the terroirs of an extended Côte des Blancs, together with the Val du Petit Morin, the Côte de Sézanne and Montgueux; the Comité Champagne devotes one of its five Routes touristiques du Champagne to it, the one for the Coteaux Vitryats.

At STELT, we currently have no wines from the Vitryat; for Chardonnay on chalk, see the page for the Côte des Blancs.