The ultimate champagne present

The word exquisite is not one normally associated with revolution - but then nor was velvet until a few years ago. The exquisite revolution I'm about to describe comes in a wooden box, containing three bottles and a reproduction 18th century map. I cannot think of a more welcome Christmas present for a champagne-lover. Whether it will be welcomed by the producer's rivals is another matter.

Let me explain. Religions don't have a monopoly on dogma; wine regions, too, have their absolute certainties and truths. The dobermann pinscher among champagne dogmas is that it is by blending that you create the most perfect examples of this great sparkling wine. Burgundy and Bordeaux are all about tracking down top parcels of individual vineyards, champagne about taking the wine of 73 different vineyards and mixing them. The combination, intone the region's high priests, is always better than the individual parts.

I've never believed it. The truth is that this was a commercial necessity: champagne requires large stockholdings and global distribution networks, which means large companies and big brands. And that means blending. The fact that those large companies had managed to grab many of the region's best vineyards for themselves, burying their wines in blends, helped maintain the fiction that blending was best. If we couldn't smell and taste the wine of the region's greatest vineyards in isolation, then we weren't going to be in a position to question the dogma.

Until, that is, champagne's best small producer-growers began proving that single-vineyard champagne could be superb. And until champagne's marketeers began to see what success "micro-parcel" wines were having in Bordeaux and elsewhere. Revolution was on the cards and the old theology began to crumble. When would Champagne, we wondered, finally admit that it is no different, and that the finest wines will always come from the finest vineyards? Which large house would be the first to give way?

In the end, it was a surprise. The ranks have been broken by the lord of the jungle: Moet et Chandon. Inside that wooden box, you will find three single-vineyard champagnes, each made from a different single grape variety, disposing of another piece of blending dogma - that the best champagnes are made from two or more grapes. The only way in which these wines still differ from a top Burgundy is that each is a multivintage blend and therefore carries no vintage date. The exquisite reproduction map rubs our noses in the truth: great wine comes from great grid references.

I welcome this development as a long-overdue liberation. Champagne is a consistent and a good wine, but it can also be dull. The big blends are pleasingly featureless. Style, character and personality are often missing, no matter how hard the advertising campaigns try to convince us otherwise. Allowing more vineyard individuality into champagne would give this great wine the personality it deserves, but which it is often deprived of. No doubt Mo?t's big-brand rivals are horrified: they will now have to come up with replies of their own.

However, I'm afraid personality doesn't come cheap. The box costs £165 from Harrods, Harvey Nichols and Fortnum and Mason, though you can save £25 by buying it from The Vintage House at 42 Old Compton Street, WC1, at £140. If you want to buy the bottles individually, you can get them for £55 each from Harrods and Harvey Nichols, and £49.95 from The Vintage House (or mailorder merchant Tanners, 01743 234455).

"We didn't want to make a garage wine," chef de cave Georges Blanck told me - so these wines have all been grown in the same way as usual (ordinary yields) and made in the same way as usual (fermentation in steel tanks and not wooden casks). "It's just the origin which is the focus," said Blanck. My favourite is the pinot noir, called Les Sarments d'Ay: pungent and perfumed, yet vigorous and forceful, a kind of Lara Croft among champagnes ( 92/ 100).

Les Champs de Romont (from the village of Sillery) would be the anorak's choice, since it's a rarely seen varietal pinot meunier with pretty vanilla and pear scents and startling grapefruit intensity in the mouth (90/100). The chardonnay, Les Vignes de Saran (from Chouilly), is good, but needs longer storage to turn up the volume on its discreet, hazelnutcream style (89/100). Indeed, another year or two in a cool cellar would improve them all. Let's hope Santa can bring you one of those as well.