The score for NV Egly Ouriet Les Crayeres Vieilles Vignes Blanc de Noirs Champagne Grand Cru is 98+ points from Robert Parker and the tasting note - A blend of the 2016 and 2015 vintages, the NV Brut Blanc de Noirs Grand Cru Les Crayères is an especially good rendition of this almost routinely sublime bottling. Unwinding in the glass with notes of pear, wild berries, clear honey, white flowers, praline and freshly baked bread, it's medium to full-bodied, beautifully layered and textural, with a taut, concentrated core, racy acids and a long, mineral finish. This chiseled, intensely flavored Champagne was disgorged this year with only one gram per liter dosage. Far from resting on the considerable and merited laurels that he has accrued over a 30-year career, Francis Egly has continued to refine and improve. The last decade's innovations include refrigerated press pans to immediately cool the must in ever-warmer vintages, a peristaltic pump to handle his wines even more gently and a once-again expanded cellar that gives him the space to work still more precisely. Just like his work in the vineyards, investment in the winery has been incessant. Starting from next to nothing when he began in the 1980s, today Egly holds some 700,000 bottles in reserve wines and wine maturing sur lattes—equivalent to seven times his annual production.