The new competition was particularly severe on the more parochial merchants in the smaller towns, who had relied on word of mouth to sell their wines directly to the customers. At the end of the century Raphael Bonnedame lamented how ‘at the beginning of the nineteenth century the town of Avize boasted a crowd of names made famous by the excellence of their products, a fact which has contributed more than a little to the prosperity of the district. To quote only a few, let me recall the names of More, Grandjean, Laboure, Doerr, Soules, Jouron, Lambert who were all known for the excellence of the wines they sold under the name of growers’ champagne [champagne des proprietaires] to a clientele of friends in France and Belgium.’ By the end of the century these names and many others had all disappeared, ruined by the major brands who alone had the resources and the connections to compete in the expanding markets outside France. Typical was the case of Billecart. Jacques Bouche had got into the business by marrying a Mlle Billecart, ‘a highly respected name in Mareuil’. He was one of the first to rely on vente directe – direct selling – by word of mouth, which proved only a temporary blessing. His son Hippolyte had worked with Irroy who sent him to the United States. He then managed an important paper-mill before joining his father’s business. His reliance on his American contacts cost the house dear: he was cheated out of 100,000 gold crowns, an immense sum in those days, and the firm did not recover until after World War I.
MADAME POMMERY
The career of the other major newcomer, Madame Pommery, who took over the same year as Mercier founded his firm, was in many ways an echo of that of Madame Clicquot seventy years earlier. She too was widowed young (at the age of thirty-nine). She too relied on one or two key employees (notably her husband’s young assistant, Henri Vasnier). She too relied on one key foreign market – in her case the British market, where her motto ‘quality is the main thing’ became famous. Like a good Remoise, she too bought vineyards on a massive scale: 300 hectares, second only to the holdings built up by the Moëts and the Chandons over the previous hundred and fifty years. She too married her daughter to a member of one of France’s oldest and most distinguished families – in her case the Polignacs. Unfortunately, whereas the Clicquot business thrived under the tutelage of the heirs of Madame’s man of business, Edmond Werle, the Polignacs kept control of the business in their own, rather amateur hands.
But Madame Pommery was a unique show-woman. Other merchants, like the Krugs, contented themselves with excavating a deep hole, arranging their stocks and champagne-making activities within them, and then covering them up. Madame Pommery had the genius to perceive that she could combine a champagne factory with a ‘Theatre of Champagne’. She persuaded the Ruinarts to sell her most of the cellars in the Crayères on the Butte Saint-Nicaise. These dramatic pits, shaped like steep pyramids within the chalk with only a small square hole providing light and access, had been excavated by the Romans to provide building materials. Claude Ruinart had used them as cellars. Madame Pommery went several better. She arranged a dramatic flight of steps leading down to them, dramatized them, even had bas-reliefs carved in the walls (an idea copied by other firms). Largely as a result of her initiative, Champagne’s cellars, which before her time had been a curiosity for a few thousand visitors a year, became a major tourist attraction.
CHAMPAGNE’S BELLA FIGURA
Every house was everlastingly exploiting any possible opportunity for sales and publicity. There were special champagnes for cyclists (champagne de la pedale),25 for freemasons and, for Catholics, champagne de Cardinaux. Victories in the Crimean War were duly celebrated, and there was even a champagne anti-Juifs during the Dreyfus affair. By the 1870s there was a whole industry devoted to publicizing the more important firms. Raphael Bonnedame wrote, printed and published a series on some of them, calling them ‘Les gloires de la champagne’ – ‘Champagnes’ glories’.
The combination of increasing profitability and competition from such extroverts as Pommery and Mercier resulted in an unprecedented output of buildings, furniture and publicity material. One architect, Alfred Gosset, worked not only for Pommery and Mercier but also for Moët as he was thought to understand the particular requirements of champagne firms. It was an era when only a handful of organizations – like the railways and the champagne firms – could afford to take advantage of the flowering of artists who converted the poster into a work of art. There are plenty of examples of splendid posters by such geniuses as Cappriello and Mucha, as well as a surprisingly unremarkable one by Bonnard and a delightful one by Toulouse-Lautrec. The grower-merchant Alexandre Henriot became a major collector of posters.
The major firms naturally built extensively, above all on the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay and were transformed into some of the industrial wonders of the world. Vizetelly describes many of them. Some were clearly unimpressive, like the ‘mean-looking premises’ of Perrier-Jouët. The firm’s wine was clearly not distinguished either; according to Vizetelly, in an early example of blind tasting, its ‘First Quality’ had been classed below a ‘cheaper wine of their neighbours, Messrs Pol Roger ... and inferior even to a wine of de Venoge’s, the great Epernay manufacturer of common-class Champagne.’ Happily, the house recovered and Perrier-Jouët became and remains a well-respected brand. Some of the premises were more picturesque than functional, but the king was clearly Moët, ‘those magnates of the Champagne trade’, as Vizetelly calls them, as befitted a firm which accounted for between one in twelve and one in eight bottles sold in the world.
Moët employed 1,500 workmen in an amazing factory which held between ten and twelve million bottles, five or six years’ stocks, together with 20,000 casks. On the surface was the enormous sale de tirage, a bottling hall in which, in the summer months, 100,000 bottles a day were ‘taken in the morning from the stacks and cleaned, washed, dried, filled, corked, wired, lowered into the cellars and carefully arranged in symmetrical order.’ Not surprisingly, ‘what with the incessant thud of the corking-machines, the continual rolling of iron-wheeled trucks over the concrete floor, the rattling and creaking of the machinery working the lifts, the occasional report of a bursting bottle... the din became at times all but unbearable.’
In the cellars (which used thirty tons of candles annually) everything possible was done by machine, including the dosage and the branding of the corks. The subterranean empire was so vast that ‘the visitor, gazing into the black depths of the transverse passages to the right and left, becomes conscious of a feeling that if his guide were suddenly to desert him, he would feel as hopelessly lost as in the catacombs of Rome’. Even today the general gloom is occasionally increased by fog, which creates an unbelievably frightening atmosphere, reminiscent of the true London fogs of my youth.
Madame Pommery had named the roads within her cellars after her major markets like Buenos Aires, Dublin and Havana. But she should have named the broadest underground avenue after London. In 1898 champagne’s ten biggest markets took nearly 18.5 million bottles. Of these Britain took nearly 10.75 million, a record which stood until very recently (the next biggest was Belgium with under 3 million).
ANGLO-SAXON TASTES
The merchants’ eyes were concentrated on London, but they were prepared to tailor their products to any major outlet. Wines destined for the French market were invariably sweet to take advantage of the new taste for drinking champagne as a dessert wine. Simon wrote: ‘The place of any sweet wine at mealtimes is at the end of the meal, with the sweets or dessert, and this was the place given to sparkling champagne in France from the outset, a place which it held for a hundred years.’ The provincials in la France profonde – France’s heartlands far away from Paris – drank champagne only on special occasions, like weddings, or, archetypally at the end of banquets, to accompany the innumerable toasts.
The Germans too inclined towards sweetness, but the record was held by the Russians who required up to 20 per cent of sweet liqueur in their champagne together with a dose of yellow Chartreuse to increase its
strength. Clicquot and Roederer, the two houses which had found their fortune in Russia, kept to the sweetest wines. In the 1860s Roederer stole a march on its rival by developing Cristal, a special champagne in a clear bottle, originally reserved for the Tsar of Russia. In the past hundred and fifty years it has proved the most durable of luxury brands, although it now relies on the unequalled quality of the firm’s estates rather than any added sugar. In fact, the idea of such a wine had been stolen from the ever-inventive Mercier. At the outset of his career he had devised a clear bottle and a special wine dedicated to Napoleon III which he called ‘Reserve de l’Empereur Blanche’. He went over the top though: his bottle was shaped like a decanter, with the cork moulded to resemble a bunch of grapes.
The American market was a law unto itself. It was always important, generally the third largest export market, accounting for over a million bottles a year. But for over a century the Americans, supposedly so restless for novelties, remained largely faithful to three brands: Mumm, Moët and Piper-Heidsieck. All three owe their original strength to great salesmen. J.C. Kunkelmann, the partner of Piper, was the pioneer. Indeed, he earned his partnership by his efforts in the USA as a young man, selling 600,000 bottles in the United States, a tenth of the region’s total exports at the time. As a result, ‘Mr Piper’s Heidsieck’ became synonymous for what Americans called – and sometimes still call – ‘real imported French champagne’.
Just before the outbreak of the Civil War Charles-Camille Heidsieck, from a rival branch of the family, went to the United States armed with his best hunting rifle which he used to inspire articles, allegedly about shooting, in fact about his wine. He was so successful in Mobile, Alabama, that his wine was called simply ‘Charlie’. He was eventually captured by the Unionist forces in the Civil War and returned to France a ruined man.
Piper was followed by Mumm, whose Cordon Rouge, launched in 1881, had an equal success, thanks to another great salesman, de Bary. Mumm became the house wine at the New Orleans brothels where jazz was born. But both were eclipsed by one of champagne’s greatest showmen, George A. Kessler, owner of Moët’s American agency. Agencies could be highly profitable businesses in their own right – in 1908 the Simon brothers, who imported Moët in England, bought up the cognac firm of Courvoisier on the profits from their champagne agency.
Kessler was not an attractive character. In the official history of the Savoy Hotel, his favourite London haunt, he is described as ‘a tall man with a pointed imperial beard and gold-rimmed glasses... he looked severe and had an uncertain temper.’ But he was a notable publicist. He was driven round in an ‘electric victoria’ – a fashionable electric carriage – and the wines were delivered on an electric trolley car, fitted with rubber tyres to reduce breakage. He became famous in society both in London and New York for his ‘theme’ parties. At a ‘hobo dinner’ the guests had to wear rags and leaky boots; in London he flooded the forecourt of the Savoy for a Venetian party. In 1908, when the Olympic Games were held in London, he built a mock Parthenon in the grounds of his house at Bourne End, 30 kilometres west of London, to entertain what the press described as ‘the gamesters’.
In New York, his antics had the desired results. As he boasted in a series of splendidly vulgar advertisements, ‘all records were broken’, with Kessler’s company selling 102,000 cases of White Seal in 1903, over a quarter of all the Moët sold in the world and ‘the greatest number of cases of any one brand of champagne ever imported’. White Seal, a favourite of the Americans for several generations, was sweeter than the Brut Imperial sold in Britain. But his biggest coup came when a bottle of White Seal was used to launch a new yacht being built in the United States for Kaiser Wilhelm. Best, the agent for Rheingold, the sparkling wine normally used by the ever-patriotic German Royal family, was furious (he had already slipped a few cases to the German Ambassador to make sure) and inspired newspaper articles claiming that Kessler was lying. Kessler sued, and won nominal damages after a well-reported legal action. It was a splendid farce generating a great deal of useful publicity.
In the United States, as elsewhere, champagne belonged to two connected worlds: high society and the demi-monde. It spread more widely in Chile where the boom at the end of the century triggered by sales of guano fertilizer was celebrated with a consumption of champagne higher per head than anywhere else in the world. But only in England, in the years between 1860 and 1914, did champagne become a truly democratic wine.
The spread started with Gladstone’s sharp reduction in the duties on French wines in 1861 and 1862, a blessing to a business which had suffered over the previous quarter of a century from the sobriety which we call Victorian, but which probably dates back to 1830 when William IV replaced the bucolic George IV. ‘What affected the wine trade more than anything else,’ wrote Simon in 1905, ‘was the much more temperate habits of the drinking public.’ But that relatively temperate British middle-class could be profitable customers and clearly preferred the region’s by now-famous brands.
Not even the Gilbeys, who had held the middle-class market in an iron grip thanks to their two thousand agents, respectable grocers in every corner of the country, could halt the onslaught of champagne’s brands. The Gilbeys had been pioneers of ‘own-label’ drinks, selling exclusively their own ‘Castle’ brand. As they put it a few years later, ‘A certain amount of prejudice in connection with an article of luxury, like wine, has to be contended with, and we do not ignore the importance attached by certain consumers to various well-known brands.’ A much-despised ‘grocer’s port’ or ‘grocer’s claret’ could be disguised by decanting it. But the origins of a bottle of champagne could not be disguised. In 1882 they gave in. But, typically, in listing some leading brands of champagne, they lowered the prices so as to deal a mortal blow to their snobbish enemies, the London wine merchants (although they took care not to reduce their agents’ margins).
‘Brandolatry’ is how Simon described the war. The battle was heralded by a rumble of complaints in the trade press that champagnes were being sold cheaply as ‘loss leaders’, ‘to induce people to buy other goods on which a much larger profit may be safely made.’ A letter in The Times signed ‘In Vino Veritas’ complained bitterly that retailers were being squeezed by the ‘patent medicine branch of the wine trade’ as he loftily described the champagne firms and their allies like the Gilbeys. ‘Hundreds of pounds,’ he went on, ‘are paid by certain shippers of champagne for the sole privilege of hanging up show cards in public places to get the public accustomed to the mere sound of a name.’ In the flurry of letters and leading articles which followed it emerged that In Vino’s own brand of ‘veritas’ was by no means generally accepted. The old-line merchants were clearly regarded as profiteers forming a ‘champagne ring’, and the new names provided a welcome guarantee of quality. ‘A person who dines at his club or a hotel must go very much by the brand,’ opined the Saturday Review, a serious and highly regarded weekly: ‘the whole merit of the brand system is that it puts a man beyond the power of waiters or landlords to defraud without downright forgery – a very dangerous proceeding... the finest wine of the province, the wine which flavours and constitutes the great cuvées, is almost a constant quantity and does not admit of multiplication.’ The firms had clearly established that their brand names stood for reliable quality, and that a premium price had to be paid for that assurance.
The timing was no coincidence. In the 1880s the Bordelais, suppliers of the claret which had been the staple drink of much of the British upper class, were suffering from a double crisis: mildew, which had ruined the quality of their wines, and phylloxera, which was destroying their vineyards. The gap left by the slump in claret consumption was filled by whisky and champagne, both in the form of highly publicized brands. The British also took to Ratafia, the local fortified wine, which resembled sherry rather than port. It was so popular as a drink for mid-morning or teatime that British bakers even produced a small macaroon called a Ratafia biscuit to accompany it, j
ust as they had previously introduced a Madeira cake.
DRYING OUT?
The English have never thought of sweet champagnes as dessert wines, remaining loyal to ports and madeiras if they are looking for a touch of sweetness at the end of a meal. Nevertheless, until the 1860s, as Simon noted, ‘champagne was considered perfect when it had a rather yellowish tint, and a certain amount of “richness”, a word which conveyed an idea of sweetness as well as of comforting alcoholic strength, Clicquot’s “rich” champagne was then the most celebrated brand and fetched the highest prices, while Perrier-Jouët’s was the most popular, and Giesler’s also enjoyed a good reputation. The high percentage of liqueur added by the producers made it possible to drink Champagne very young, two or three years after the vintage; this enabled shippers to sell their wines at much lower prices, and they encouraged this practice as much as it was in their power.’
In 1848, a year famous for abortive revolutions, a well-known merchant, Burne, tasted the 1846 Perrier-Jouët ‘brut’ without any added sugar at all, and liked it so much he shipped some of it. But neither Perrier himself nor the buyers at the ‘well-known military club’ to which he sold it, could stand it. According to T.G. Shaw,26 ‘strong, rich’ wines ‘when fortified by brandy, to add to their apparent body, are often preferred in England to the purest and best; a perversion of taste which Frenchmen can account for only by supposing that our palates have been so long habituated to strong, dark brandied wines that we prefer this inferior champagne.’
The Story of Champagne Page 9