Trade even to ‘wet’ countries showed few signs of recovery. The British government imposed a 33 per cent ad valorem tax – the type of tax particularly dreaded by the Champenois, producers of such high-value wines. The tax was eventually reduced but remained at four times the pre-war level. Fortunately, a luxury tax imposed in France itself lasted only until 1923. The Treaty of Versailles forced the Germans to recognize champagne and France’s other lesser appellations, but did not provide them with the means to pay for them. Moreover, they continued to object to the idea that champagne was a purely French drink and the French occupation of the Rhineland provided further fuel for German Francophobia.
The period between the wars provided an unprecedented threat, not just to the living standards of the growers, but also to the region’s distinction as the producer of the finest sparkling wines in the world. Nevertheless, and amazingly, within a quarter of a century after the civil war of 1911 the foundations had been laid for the genuine partnership between the growers and the firms, which remains intact to this day and is unique among French winemaking regions in its ability to spread the results of post-war prosperity among all those involved, from the smallest vineyard owners to some of the world’s largest producers of alcoholic drinks.
Replanting following the phylloxera was only just getting under way in 1914. Inevitably the fighting had taken its toll of the vines as well as of the men. In Verzenay, at the heart of the Montagne de Reims, only 15 per cent (75 out of 500 hectares) of vines were still producing. In 1920 over 40 per cent of the total vineyard area were arrachés ou incultes – uncultivated or uprooted – and only 6,000 hectares were in production (of which only 2,500 were grafted). Even these vines had been greatly weakened by the lack of proper nourishment and attention during the war.
The upheavals necessitated by replanting as a result of phylloxera involved a revolution on the viticultural side, as well as a far more scientific approach to the winemaking itself. After the war the Champenois hired an eminent agronomist, Georges Chappaz, to supervise the replanting and, thanks to him, by the end of the 1920s the vineyard had 8,000 hectares of grafted vines in production. These were planted in regular rows, and not, as before, en foule – the higgledy piggledy selection of vines whose position depended on where the shoot had been planted near the parent vine. Although the actual number of vines had been reduced from, in some cases, 40,000 a hectare to under 10,000 a hectare, they were immensely more productive, and as a result average yields jumped from 25 to 46 hectolitres for every hectare (1,250 to over 2,300 bottles for every acre of vines).
In a lucid pamphlet, Jean-Luc Barbier35 spelt out the bleakness of the figures which threatened to condemn the region to being merely the producer of undistinguished still white wines. Because of replanting, the area of vines in the Marne increased by 3,500 hectares during the 1920s, and when the Aube was included as a producer of proper champagne in 1927 this increased production by up to a quarter, although production could vary widely, from a mere 74,000 hectolitres in the hot dry summer of 1921 to nearly ten times that figure in 1929. The price of grapes fell so far that by 1932, as one Parisian journalist put it, ‘I’ve seen families which live exclusively on potatoes.’
One answer was to create cooperatives, partly to prevent fraud, partly to sell wines rather than grapes. There had already been tentative attempts. In 1902 the famous designer Cappiello had created a poster to advertise ‘Pur Champagne’ from the ‘Association des Vignerons Champenois’. As Alain Berger pointed out cooperation ‘sprang from necessity, not from ideological principles or a clearly expressed act of will ... a response to the trade rather than a real attempt at collective emancipation.’ The first cooperative in the region was formed as long ago as 1898, as an instrument of social protest, but did not survive the upheavals of the phylloxera epoch. The first of today’s cooperatives were founded in the desperate 1920s and 1930s, their model a winemaking cooperative at Festigny, run by the movement’s apostle, Berthelot. Others were founded to try and absorb the excess vintages of the 1930s, but when the federation was formed in 1939 it brought together only twenty-eight members with a total capacity of 500,000 bottles.
COGEVI was established in 1921 and still survives today. It was originally located at Dizy but is now, appropriately enough, housed in Aÿ near Bollinger, Deutz and Ayala and indeed, in the 1950s, it took over the ruined buildings once occupied by Bissinger, the first firm to have been set alight by the rioters in 1911. Although COGEVI was able to sell up to 100,000 bottles it had its problems. The banks wouldn’t lend it any money so the loans made by the members had to be converted into shares. But the cooperative started to flourish after Raoul Collet, their director for the following thirty years, arrived in 1927. By1934 he was successful enough to be awarded the Legion d’Honneur.
The viticultural and technical changes were matched by a final settlement of the problem with the Aubois. In 1919 the government had provided a better definition of vins d’appellation d’origine but at the same time washed its hands of Champagne’s boundaries, effectively telling the Aubois to go to court, which they duly did. They won their case in 1925 and two years later a new law swept away the class distinction from which they had suffered. They – together with large swathes of the Aisne – were included in a newly enlarged appellation whose boundaries have lasted to this day.
But the recognition came at a price. The types of grapes allowed were restricted to three, two black, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, and the white Chardonnay. The Aubois were given eighteen years to uproot their Gamay vines, a deadline they missed by several decades. The exact shape of the vineyard was decided on the ground by a government commission which, basically, followed local memories of where vines had once been planted. The result was a generally agreed area of 60–70,000 hectares of land deemed suitable for vines.36
THE EFFECTS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION
No sooner had the boundaries of Champagne been defined and the replanting completed than the area was hit by a world recession which was bound to affect a luxury product like champagne with particular force. In the six years starting in 1930 exports averaged a mere 7.5 million bottles, half the level of the late 1920s, and a figure not seen since the 1850s. By contrast the French market stood up remarkably well. Sales, which had been running at just under 15 million bottles a year, jumped by a third to nearly 20 million in the first half of the 1930s, and by another 15 per cent in the immediate pre-war years. But these were cheap champagnes, often deliberately fermented with unseemly haste in warm warehouses for immediate sale. The better the grapes, the less the demand: old-timers vividly remember growers from the Côte des Blancs pleading with Duval, of the family firm of Duval-Leroy, to buy their grapes at any price.
In the early 1930s production rose, stocks amounted to five times annual sales, and in 1934, the finest and biggest harvest since replanting, the crop amounted to 100 million bottles, which represented another five years of sales – by this time the merchants’ stocks had soared to six times annual sales. Inevitably, the price of grapes slumped, from F11 a kilo in 1926 to an unbelievable 50 centimes a kilo nine years later, so that they were simply not worth picking. Since 1930 the Commission de Propagande et de Defense du Vin de Champagne had brought growers and merchants together under official auspices, but only in 1935 did the Champenois initiate an effective programme of self-help. The world economic climate had slightly improved, and the government supported a tougher definition of the meaning of Champagne, but the recovery is indelibly associated with one man, Robert-Jean de Vogüé.
ROBERT-JEAN DE VOGÜÉ
Robert-Jean de Vogüé37 was the single most important figure in the history of Champagne, as well as a crucial figure in the history of modern French viticulture and agribusiness and, by any criteria, a business genius. He understood the need for a family business like Moët to introduce non-family shareholders and to go public, to diversify within the drinks business by merging with Hennessy, to buy up companies like Mercier to broad
en the consumer base of the business, to invest abroad, setting up businesses making sparkling wine in such unlikely countries as Brazil and Argentina, to buy other producers – like Dior – of luxury products. Above all he saw the need for growers and merchants to work together and created the framework for a partnership which still exists – an organization corresponding to his belief in ‘responsible capitalism’ which made him unpopular with fellow-industrialists.
He was an improbable figure to act as a commercial, let alone a social, revolutionary. He always claimed that he belonged to the nineteenth century: ‘Life was so agreeable then,’ he would say. If so, he adapted formidably well to the demands of the twentieth century. His grandfather was a distinguished archaeologist, his father chairman of the Suez Canal Company, his cousin chairman of the Saint-Gobain Glassworks. He himself was trained as a soldier and had passed through the French staff college, the Ecole de Guerre, before taking over at Moët although he was not a member of the family but had married a descendant of the founder. When he took over Moët was no longer the biggest firm in the business and was virtually bankrupt.
He retained into old age the hawk nose and the trim moustache of an army officer fully aware of his gift for leadership. ‘He ran Moët – and Champagne – like the best sort of regimental commander,’ says Claude Fourmon, his faithful chief of staff for thirty years. ‘What mattered to him was choosing the right men, fixing their objectives and the methods they would use and then letting them get on with it.’ It was the long-suffering Fourmon who had to cope with de Vogüé’s refusal to contemplate the logistical consequences of his policies. He would repeat Napoleon’s famous saying: ‘L’intendance suit’ – an assumption that willpower mattered more than logistics – when anyone queried the practicality of one of his many ideas.
But he combined the military mentality with that of the showman. ‘You must sell first,’ he would say. Moreover, he realized the importance of exports: ‘Too many Frenchman close their shutters,’ he said. ‘I have opened many windows’. There was something of the boulevardier about him. His showmanship extended even into his personal life: he built up a delightful collection of white pets – dogs, doves, pheasants – which surrounded him on the lawns of his house at Mareuil-le-Port.
His family had inherited an important stake in the business and it was at his grandmother’s suggestion that he was called in to rescue the firm after the previous management had lost its way. They had sold a third of the family’s vineyards, then spent the money not just repairing the former buildings which had been damaged during the war but lavished every penny they had on a massive new head office and cellars, a building designed to be proof against shock and shell rather than for its architectural qualities. Moët’s market share, over 11 per cent in the late 1920s, had slipped – to less than 8 per cent in the early 1930s, a figure at which it remained until the war.
Nominally, de Vogüé was only one member of a triumvirate. The others watched resentfully the way he immediately assumed the leadership. He was not a natural lover of champagne: he often drank Scotch and the executives at Hennessy remember how he mixed Perrier with his champagne when he visited Cognac to explain the Moët-Hennessy merger.
De Vogüé’s first stroke of genius was the invention of a new brand, in 1932, in the depth of the depression, almost immediately after he had taken over as the director responsible for sales. At a meeting of the Syndicat, Lawrence Venn, an English journalist who was advising the members on marketing their wines in Britain, suggested that the members should jointly launch a luxury brand. They were so obsessed by price and cutting costs that they turned the idea down out of hand. The depression had so shocked them, so unbalanced their judgment, that they blamed their agents for the message they were bringing. André Lallier of Deutz remembered how his father sacked his British agent in 1929 because sales were dropping. He was typical in his inability to grasp the implications for Champagne of a world economic crisis. The most distinguished victim was André Simon, for thirty years Pommery’s English agent, sacked by Melchior de Polignac in 1932. Apparently Simon, who worked on commission, wanted an increased percentage to compensate for reduced prices. Simon was then fifty-five. Nothing daunted, he spent the next thirty-five years building up an unequalled reputation as gastronome and wine writer.
De Vogüé was different. As Venn left the meeting he was buttonholed by de Vogüé, who invited him to a dinner at which the idea of Dom Perignon,38 the most famous – and most profitable – of luxury champagnes, was born. It took another two and a half years for the wines to complete their maturation, and in 1935 the 1921 vintage was launched as a ‘Cuvée Centenaire’ to celebrate the centenary of Simon Brothers, Moët’s agents in Britain. A hundred and fifty of the Simons’ best customers received an osier basket containing two eighteenth-century-style bottles of the new champagne. A number of Americans in London had been among the first to taste Dom Perignon and wanted more. So it was launched commercially in tiny quantities – a mere hundred cases of the 1921 vintage – in New York for Christmas 1935. The wine crossed the Atlantic on the newly built French liner Normandie, an appropriate start for a wine which has remained the smartest of champagnes in cafe society – though it was not the first such gesture. The first Orient Express carried with it crates of Cristal from Roederer. But today Dom Perignon sells over 4 million bottles annually, probably more than any other luxury item in the world.
De Vogüé’s first contribution to the wider champagne community came as Dom Perignon was being launched, providing him with the opportunity to exploit his instinctive belief in business as a partnership. In a book published forty years later entitled Alerte aux Patrons (Warning to Bosses) he had warned that ‘private enterprise could only survive if it were based on a greater degree of partnership between investors, managers and workers’. At a joint meeting with the vignerons at Chalons-sur-Marne he proposed that the price of grapes be raised sixfold to F3 a kilo, which provided the growers with a minimum livelihood. It later settled down at below that figure, but at least had been moved above its previous pitiful level. A new organization, called the Commission de Chalons, was set up to supervise the agreement, and established the habit of collaboration between the two sides under the benevolent supervision of the state which has lasted ever since. De Vogüé was promptly dubbed ‘the red Marquis’ and attacked as a traitor to his class by some of his fellow-merchants, notably Melchior de Polignac. He was lucky that his brother had married the daughter of Bertrand de Mun of Clicquot, probably the single most influential figure among the merchants, who was loyal to his brother-in-law.
In 1935 the growers’ leader, Maurice Doyard, eight generations of whose family had made wine in Vertus, got the Commission – and the government – to agree to new measures to improve the quality of champagne which had slipped so badly, especially in the French market. Only 7,500 kilos of grapes could be harvested from every hectare of vines, only a hundred litres of wine could be extracted from every 150 kilos of grapes. The prefect was authorized to declare the minimum alcoholic content of the year’s wine before the grapes were harvested, and the wine would have to be kept in bottle for a year before it was sold. All this was presented as a return to usages locaux, loyaux et constants – local, loyal and constant habits – in other words what the Champenois claimed to have been doing in the first place. Three years later yields were further restricted by new regulations which ensured that the vines were pruned more closely.
The Champenois got their timing right. In the late 1930s sales recovered somewhat. The French market continued buoyant, and exports jumped by a half to over 11 million bottles annually – albeit still lower than sales after the Franco-Prussian war. The biggest boost came from the repeal of Prohibition in 1934. Sales in the United States had never entirely stopped, for there had been a regular smuggling route. At first the wines were shipped through the tiny islands of St Pierre and Miquelon off Newfoundland. Then via an elaborate system in which the precious cases (wrapped in canvas t
o prevent seawater seeping in) were offloaded into tiny boats just off the three-mile limit and then dumped on sandbanks where they were picked up by bootleggers.
The end of Prohibition was a huge bonus, even though it let in some of the most unusual salesmen Champagne had ever seen. The most extraordinary was probably Joseph Reinfeld, whose earliest ambition before 1914 had been to be a coal miner in Wales.39 He bluffed both Cointreau and Piper-Heidsieck into believing that the other had already promised him their American agency, and thus acquired rights to both brands. His firm, Renfield Importers (Reinfeld having Americanized his name), subsequently became one of the biggest in the United States.
OCCUPATION, AND COOPERATION
The recovery was barely under way before it was brutally halted by the outbreak of war and the German invasion of 1940, so swift that the Champagne region did not suffer physically. The shared sufferings of the Occupation brought the community closer together. As was their practice in Cognac and Bordeaux, the Germans installed a ‘Weinfuhrer’. In Champagne this was Otto Klaebisch, a former wine merchant, and brother of his equivalent in Cognac. But he was far more brutal a figure than his brother and the winemakers in Champagne were less cooperative than those in Cognac and Bordeaux. During the Occupation many cellars were blocked up to prevent the Germans from grabbing them – despite which the Germans managed to acquire up to 18 million bottles.
The Story of Champagne Page 13