There’s a lot of pleasure to be extracted from the Champagnes of Jacques Selosse even if you never come within eyesight of a bottle. A quick foray into the critical tributes to the estate’s wines throughout the years alone provides a feast for the imagination. “Burgundy with bubbles.” “More than a passing resemblance to Montrachet.” The praise would have us believe that we’re not dealing with Champagne at all. Meanwhile, the word “idiosyncratic” is deployed often enough to suggest the inventions of a mad scientist. 

To actually acquire a bottle of Selosse, however, means contending with more practical realities. This is partly due to the wines’ low supply; a mere 275 cases are produced each year of the estate’s revered Substance cuvée, which can run you $795 in the U.S.—if you can find it. 

The demand has deep roots. After Anselme Selosse took over his family’s estate in 1974, his unique wine-making style—inspired by both Burgundy’s terroir-centric philosophy and sherry’s vintage-mixing solera system—gained a devoted following amidst the burgeoning grower Champagne movement, in which the families who traditionally farmed the grapes for the region’s big houses began making their own wines. In 1994, Selosse was famously hailed as the top winemaker in France in every category by the prestigious French Gault Millau guide, fueling interest in the estate well beyond its original locus of devotees in France and Italy. 

The production remains small, and the winemaking methods honed by Anselme Selosse in the 1980s withstand the test of time. But one thing has changed: as of 2022, purchasers must now download an app onto their phones and scan the back label in order to access the wine’s disgorgement date, dosage, and base vintage—information that all used to be simply printed on the paper. The solution was proposed by French company WID, which specializes in tracking technology for the wine industry, and was first explored by Selosse around 2019.

These are not QR codes, but rather near-field communication—NFC—technology, meaning there’s an actual NFC chip under the label that uses radio waves to communicate with the smartphone. For serious collectors of Champagne, the incentive to scan the back label is clear—disgorgement dates and base vintages of non-vintage Champagne can impact the desirability and value of an individual bottle. In exchange, the scan records the location of the bottle and feeds that information back to the estate. A very Silicon Valley overlay atop a very traditionally-made wine—assuming, that is, you come across a bottle with an intact NFC chip. But more on that later.

This is Selosse’s latest attempt to tackle a problem that has long plagued the estate: tracking and authenticating prized bottles around the world in an industry famously rife with counterfeits and theft. Selosse’s motivations in adapting NFC chips were particular; the estate told French radio network France Bleu in 2022 that they specifically wanted to fight against the re-sale of their wines on the technically legal but still unregulated gray market. Their primary objections, they claimed, were the exorbitant prices the wines command in such parallel markets, and the potentially damaging conditions in which they may be shipped.

Two years in, there are some signs that the technology has been successful. Blake Murdock of Rare Wine Company, Selosse’s U.S. importer, revealed that during the first year in which the estate’s releases were tracked, the NFC chips identified a U.K. merchant who had been buying bottles all over Europe. In theory, the Selosse estate can now contact such resellers whose allocated bottles go awry and demand answers.

Murdock assured that it’s not, say, individuals buying a few bottles at a wine shop in Paris to then resell in the U.S. who should worry about running afoul of the estate. Rather, it’s the bigger fish who are the problem: “the traders, the distributor partners who are perhaps getting an allocation of 100 six-packs, and they’re flipping 50 six-packs without putting it in distribution, and just making some easy money.” 

Selosse is synonymous with serious money, even in the channels the estate deems legitimate. A bottle of its Initial cuvée—Selosse’s entry-level Champagne, if that term can apply to such a producer—can go for $1,250 on a restaurant wine list. It’s the profit-grabbing from sellers beyond the estate’s own business relationships where NFC technology offers some possibility for deterrence and control.

All well and good. The thing is: for those that buy some bottles outside of Selosse’s official distribution channels, customers may find a hole on the back label where the NFC chip once was, according to retailers and purchasers who've seen the bottles. This, obviously, means the estate loses track of such bottles. The estate’s partners are well aware. “It’s definitely a problem,” said Murdock. “But in theory those bottles should be worth less money, because all of the sudden you can’t authenticate [them]. You can’t scan the bottle and find out what the disgorgement date, or what the base years are. You have no idea what you’re buying.” Still, since Selosse’s reputation has transcended wine geekdom—like Keller in the Rheinhessen and Richard Leroy in the Loire Valley—one would imagine chip-less bottles might still find a home with collectors determined to find the best, or the nerdiest, Champagne that money can buy. 

After all, long ago Selosse definitively became the kind of wine for which ardent interest sometimes curdled into law-breaking. A group of still-unidentified thieves broke into the domaine and made off with 300 cases of wine—as well as rolls of labels that could be used to churn out fakes—in 2013. Given that, it’s understandable that the Selosse family is leery of how their bottles move about in the world once they leave the domaine.

The NFC technology is attracting other winemakers, particularly the grower Champagne producers in Selosse’s circle. Murdock reports that Jérôme Prévost and Bérèche et Fils are exploring the options. (Both domaines did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) They have good reason to do so; as sales of grower champagne outperform the big houses, other elite producers may well face the kind of outsize demand that strains Selosse—and all that comes with it. 

Producers in Burgundy have been looking into NFC chips as well, although it’s less clear what vintage still wines can offer consumers in exchange for the location scan. For now, the quirks of non-vintage boutique Champagne offer the most natural opportunity for the estates and their fans to trade information. For traceability purposes, ultra-prestigious Domaine de la Romanée-Conti still deploys serial numbers on their bottle labels, and the potential for blockchain technology continues to be floated in the industry at large. 

But as with much else about Champagne, the smaller growers cracked the code first.