To the Roederer Awards last night, held in the Portico Rooms of Somerset House – grand, grey masonry wedged between the Thames and the Strand, hard by Waterloo Bridge. This annual awards event (under the grand, grey skies we have enjoyed for the last three months) took on more than usual significance this year owing to the fact that 2008 saw no Glenfiddich Awards.

(Rumour has it that there had been tensions for some years between the Glenfiddich marketing team, who considered the Awards money would be better spent on advertising, and others in the company who were proud of what the Awards has achieved over three decades and felt that their impact, though difficult to quantify, more than justified the investment. Whether the absence of ‘The Glenfiddichs’ marks a temporary crisis of confidence or whether they have reached the end of the road has yet to be seen. If they don’t reappear next year, the stag will have bolted.)

Wine writers, anyway, are lucky to have the Roederer Awards; there is no ready equivalent for the food writers in 2008. The company responded with a ‘bigger and better’ format which included a tasting of the range on the evening of the Awards, and a bigger set of Awards (including Online Wine Writer, with the ‘Wine Writer’ category being split into ‘Wine Feature Writer’ and ‘Wine Columnist’). Frédéric Rouzaud, surely the friendliest and least pretentious head of any Champagne house, was good-humouredly in evidence all evening.

Roederer has just changed its packaging. “Less gold, less showy,” said Frédéric Rouzaud, “to reflect the purity and precision we are looking for in the wines.” I liked the new, de-blinged labels, especially the silvery Blanc de Blancs version. Tasting conditions weren’t perfect (it was a party, after all) but the nuanced, mineral-salt edginess of the `02 Blanc de Blancs and the pure, sappy elegance of the Vintage `02 were both delicious. I wasn’t quite so sure about the `03 Rosé which seemed a little plump and featureless for Roederer. We were all given a taste of the `95 Cristal from magnums, too, which was complete and captivating, a great billowing eiderdown of sumptuously bready Champagne fruit. Just coming into its own, though it would obviously better in another 7 or 10 years. It made one wonder how much Cristal is drunk “too young”. 80%? 90%? Oh well … at least the label always tastes à point.

As I sipped these fine Champagnes, though, a thought came to mind which I’ve had quite a lot over the last year. The Brut Premier dosage is 11 g/l; the Brut Rosé and the 2002 Vintage are both 11.5 g/l; and the Blanc de Blancs `02 is 9.5 g/l. They increasingly taste just a little too rounded for me. I don’t mean that this is an error on Roederer’s part (all the major houses are in the same boat), but what I am beginning to wonder is whether or not we aren’t moving towards a world in which we don’t need quite that much sugar any more. I think the market (or the more wine-literate, Roederer end of it) is beginning to want a purer, dryer, more refined and slightly more demanding Champagne. More and more growers, indeed, are selling their Champagnes in undosed form (I tasted at Tarlant recently); more and more houses are offering undosed cuvées. These can often be challenging, and I’m not suggesting that zero dosage would be right for a sans-année house benchmark. But my guess is that we will see most dosages reduced over the next decades closer to 6 g/l than to 12 g/l, and perhaps below. That dryer, more mineral-revealing finish will taste increasingly ‘right’ to the target audience, and it will help differentiate Champagne from the opposition, since sugar can mask the essential nerve and sinew of Champagne. It may be that this is also a side-effect of changing styles of ripeness (the taste of global warming?) in Champagne. Increased viticultural standards in future will hasten the change.

Oh yes … who won? The Online category was won by Tom Cannavan’s Wine Pages ( this must have been an impossible category to judge, since JancisRobinson.com and Wine Anorak.com were also shortlisted; all three are outstanding, though online delivery tends naturally to be more personal than edited, published work, making the choice harder). Anthony Rose of The Independent took Wine Columnist of the Year; Will Lyons of Scotland on Sunday the Regional Wine Writer; Tom Stevenson the Champagne Writer; and Wine Book of the Year was Charles Metcalfe and Kathryn McWhirter’s self-published The Wine and Food Lover’s Guide to Portugal. I was lucky enough to be shortlisted in three categories (Champagne, Wine Columnist and Wine Feature Writer), winning the latter and making it three Roederers in three years. That makes three magnums of Cristal … which, naturally, I’m determined not to drink too soon. They will serve their time in a wonderful (and usefully inaccessible) cellar in Norfolk and be drunk when their labels have become illegible.