The new Louis Roederer Brut Collection is numbered as a series, just like Krug Grande Cuvée and Laurent Perrier Grand Siècle. Collection 244 was crafted using 10% oak-aged reserve wines (from 2012-2018), 36% Perpetual Reserve, and 54% of the finest grapes harvested in 2019. Fined with pea protein, the final bottling is vegan friendly (although you may want to consider some of the requirements of biodynamic farming). The result is a deep and rich wine with a gorgeously silky texture. Expect ripe peach, crisp pear, blood orange, baked apple, baguette, lemon meringue pie, mirabelle plum, almond croissant, festive gingerbread, grapefruit sorbet, honeycomb, blossom, chalk, smoke and a pinch of sea salt. If this is the future of Louis Roederer, we absolutely love it. The results are a wine that is both more complex and expressive than the Brut Premier that it replaces, but surprisingly also much fresher. The dosage has been dropped to around 8g/L and the balance is perfect. By adding the collection number to the founding date of the house, 1776, you get the year it was bottled. If you subtract one from that number, you get the base vintage, for this third release, it is 2019.