Ironically, it was the obsession of the Vichy government with corporatist structures bringing together the forces of capital and labour which gave de Vogüé and the Champenois their chance to build on the work of the Commission of Chalons. In December 1940, only a few months after the Germans had arrived, the government and the Champenois set up a Bureau National de Repartition des Vins de Champagne. It was provided with considerable powers and was able to double the price of grapes from F6 to F12 per kilo. Firms would also have to carry three years’ stock in future. This prevented the Germans from stripping Champagne of all its wines. Although it naturally infuriated the merchants, it saved the smaller ones which otherwise would have had to sell their whole stock. In any case the Champenois cunningly ensured that much of the ‘champagne’ they delivered was mousseux from non-Champenois grapes.
In April 1941 the Bureau de Repartition was replaced by the more formal Comité Interprofessionel du Vin de Champagne, now known by the simpler name of ‘Comité de Champagne’. Until 1986 it was presided over by a government commissioner – in reality the chief agricultural engineer for the region but since then it has been totally independent. It was endowed with powers to: ‘Organize, control, direct the production, the distribution, the transformation and the trade in wines produced in the Champagne appellation, to organize the relationships between the different professions involved, to intervene to supply the market when production is inadequate, or to stabilize it when production is excessive.’ It has provided extremely effective technical services, enforced regulations to improve the quality of the wines, has power to control prices and is self-financing thanks to levies on the value of the harvest and on the sales price of the wine.
The structure of the CIVC provided for special commissions to fulfil its numerous functions. But these were all paritaire, including equal numbers of representatives from both sides. And it worked because of de Vogüé’s obvious commitment to the Comité – he had resigned from Moët for the duration of the war – and the solid support he enjoyed from Maurice Doyard, a grower from Vertus who had been active on the growers’ behalf for a decade. After the war, de Vogüé carried the gospel of a new relationship between growers and merchants to Cognac, where it resulted in the Bureau National de Cognac, a body openly modelled on the CIVC. He also spread the word to Bordeaux, but there the divisions ran too deep for the same partnership to be forged.
Heroism during these years was the norm rather than the exception. The Marquis Suarez d’Aulan, head of Piper, and a former Olympic bob-sled champion, was killed while fighting in the Resistance, and his firm sequestrated when weapons parachuted from Britain were discovered in its cellars. Moët was discovered to be the headquarters of a Resistance cell and de Vogüé and his key assistant, Claude Fourmon were both arrested. De Vogüé was so popular that a mass protest prevented their planned execution and instead the two joined de Vogüé’s brother and Gaston Poittevin, a growers’ leader, in being deported.
The head of the house of Bollinger, Jacques Bollinger, a much decorated pilot in World War I and reserve officer in the second, died in 1941 at only forty-seven, worn out by his work as Mayor of Aÿ. Fortunately for the firm, he left behind a widow, the fabled Madame Jacques – universally known as ‘Aunt Lily’, childless, and determined to maintain the firm’s reputation as if it were her offspring. For thirty years she could be seen bicycling around the vineyards, tirelessly overseeing every detail of production. But she was only the most famous of a whole band of women who carried on their husbands’ work – including Madame Chayoux of Ayala, Madame Olry-Roederer of Roederer, Madame Merand at De Castellane and Madame Abel Lepitre. This is a fascinating phenomenon since the making, let alone the selling of wine in other regions has traditionally been jealously monopolized by male members of what were almost invariably family businesses.
Melchior de Polignac was the exception to the rule that Champagne’s inhabitants opposed the occupiers. He had always been pro-German, shocking British visitors in early 1940 with his sentiments. Even German behaviour during the Occupation did not deter him. One guest remembered him as late as 1943 still fearing a hypothetical Anglo-Saxon triumph more than the reality of German occupation. At the end of the war he disappeared from the scene and died a couple of years later in lonely semi-exile in Monaco, then ruled by a cousin, a notorious Nazi sympathizer. The family’s reputation was, however, redeemed by Princesse Guy de Polignac, wife of the last member of the family to head the firm. She was born Gladys Dupuy, the daughter of a French press baron who had married an heiress from Philadelphia. During World War II she worked heroically for the Red Cross, not just in France but also in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany.
THE CLASSES OF PRODUCERS
NM Negociant Manipulant A person or company who buys must or wine to produce champagne.
RM Recoltant Manipulant Grower who produces and sells wines exclusively from their own grapes.
RC Recoltant Cooperateur A grower who sells under their own name wine partially or totally produced by a cooperative.
CM Cooperative de Manipulation Wine cooperative which markets wines made on its premises from members’ grapes.
SR Societe de Recoltants A family firm selling wine made from its own grapes.
ND Negociant Distibuteur Distributor who buys in bottles of champagne then labels them on their own premises.
MA Marque d’Acheteur Buyer’s own brand.
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27Jancis Robinson Vines, Grapes and Wines.
28La Revolution Champenoise.
29The firm was not called Heidsieck Monopole until later.
30To escape tax the sugar had to be used on the spot by the individual buying it. The merchants bought the sugar for use in a number of scattered wineries. Eventually they were allowed tax relief on the sugar wherever they used it.
31All the quotations in this section, unless otherwise stated, are from Dr J. Nollevalle admirable work of 1911, L‘Agitation dans le Vignoble Champenois. Although he was Director of the Wine Growers’ Federation, he scrupulously avoided naming any of the guilty firms, a notable instance of Champenois solidarity.
32After one of the marshals who had surrendered to the Germans in 1870.
33Today even the CRS, the dreaded French security police, are not prepared to control demonstrators in winegrowing regions.
34Wife of Claude Taittinger and herself of the Suarez d’Aulan family which then controlled Piper-Heidsieck.
35La Crise de l’Economie viti-vinicole champenoise entre les deux guerres.
36The vineyard is described in Chapter 9.
37Pronounced Vog-u-e
38Originally Mercier had registered the name. But it passed to Moët as part of her dowry when a Mercier girl married Comte Paul Chandon-Moët.
39Not so ridiculous as it sounds. Before 1914 coal miners were true aristocrats of labour.
7
DAYS OF GLORY
The French call the thirty years between the end of the war and the mid-1970s ‘les trente glorieuses’, years during which life for the French got better every year. In Champagne the joy was naturally delayed until potential drinkers had already cheered up for trade was slow to pick up after the war and the atmosphere was depressed to a degree which now seems almost unbelievable. In 1953 when René Chayoux of Ayala, then President of the CIVC, predicted that sales could go as high as 50 million bottles a year – that year they had just about regained their pre-1914 level of around 35 million – the idea was greeted with derision.
The atmosphere was still so depressed that the record crop of 1955 was greeted with horror. This was not surprising. It was enough to fill 69 million bottles against sales that year of 37 million, and a previous post-war record, set in 1950, of a mere 51 million. Yet 1955 saw the beginning of an unprecedented boom which resulted in a fourfold rise in sales over the following twenty-five years, first in France and then in the rest of the industrialized western world. By the end of the century sales had risen to a totally unp
recedented level: six times Chayoux’s forecast.
GROWTH – AND NEWCOMERS
In fact, only three major buyers were prepared to take advantage of the surplus and bet on a more prosperous future and all three represented important themes in the growth of sales. One, perhaps inevitably, was de Vogue but the other two were – very different – newcomers, Bernard de Nonancourt and Gaston Burtin. Nonancourt, was a charismatic figure, well over six foot in height who built up Laurent-Perrier from nothing into one of the biggest brands in Champagne, a success story unmatched by any other newcomer. His father, a war hero, had died in 1924 when Bernard was only fourteen. His mother was the daughter of Henri Lanson. The young Bernard was largely brought up by his grandfather, meeting the growers and even allowed to help blend the wines if he did well enough at school. Victor Lanson’s man of business, Gonderie, was told to buy Laurent-Perrier – an old-established firm which had virtually gone out of business in the slump of the 1930s – so that the de Nonancourt children could be independent. Gonderie then faithfully took care of the company until they grew up.
De Nonancourt’s elder brother died during the war after being deported to Germany. He himself spent much of the war in the Resistance in a small maquis cell of whom only twelve out of eighty members survived. As he once told me, ‘I was thrown in with a lot of hard men who cursed the bloody bosses and that made me think.’ He then joined General Leclerc’s legendary Second Armoured Division and was in one of the first French tanks which liberated Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden – he naturally inspected the cellars which were full of great French wines selected by that notable gourmand Marshal Goering.
After a four-year apprenticeship in the Lanson vineyards and cellars de Nonancourt took over in 1949 when Laurent-Perrier was selling only 80,000 bottles. He started work on his honeymoon having persuaded his bride – the daughter of the owner of De Castellane, itself a major champagne firm – that their Caribbean honeymoon would also have to be a selling trip. De Nonancourt secured letters of introduction to every French ambassador in the region and even managed to sell three hundred cases to the British Ambassador to Mexico. The six thousand cases he sold nearly doubled his firm’s sales at a stroke.
Back home he soon hired two key associates. His number two, Francois Philippoteaux, who was with him for nearly thirty years, played the same role as Claude Fourmon did with Robert-Jean de Vogüé while Giraudière, his sales director, was a childhood friend. De Nonancourt soon found that ‘the other houses were sleepy, I was hungry’. He was also prepared to innovate, partly out of sheer necessity. As a youth he had seen how fashionable the still wines of Champagne had been in Paris in the dark days of the depression, so he introduced a still red wine, a Coteaux Champenois, which he offered to France’s restaurants as part of a full range of the region’s wines, finding that wine lists formed an effective substitute for advertising.
After the 1955 harvest de Nonancourt borrowed every penny he could from a friendly bank manager, using his Lanson shares as security, and bought up large quantities of grapes to be ready for the increased demand he – rightly – felt sure was on the way. He compounded his success two years later with his boldest stroke, the introduction of Grand Siècle. This was made from three vintages from premiers crus and was the first premium champagne which was not the wine of a single vintage. He was also prepared to be expensively original with his rosé champagne, a rarity because he made it the difficult way by allowing the skins of the grapes to remain in contact with the juice for a short time – the saigné process – rather than by blending the white wine with 10 per cent or so of red.
De Nonancourt was one of the few merchants – another was Joseph Henriot, more of a grower than a merchant – to avoid France’s cumbersome distribution system. Only the biggest firms could afford their own specialist distribution networks. The others depended on agents multicartes, independent businessmen in their own right and thus difficult to control. So de Nonancourt built up a substantial private clientele taking an average of five cases at a time. ‘When the wine’s good,’ his grandfather had assured him, the buyers will always return.’ De Nonancourt died aged ninety in 2010, leaving to his two daughters a business which was the third biggest by turnover in Champagne.
But the single biggest beneficiary of the 1955 surplus, a total contrast to the flamboyant de Nonancourt – and a key figure who provided much of the new production required, was Gaston Burtin, a man who claimed, not unreasonably, to have democratized champagne. His firm, Marne et Champagne, eventually produced up to 10 million bottles under three hundred different labels, none of them its own name – though, given the region producing so many of his wines it should, according to local wits have been called Aube et Champagne. Burtin was not a Champenois by birth, but was evacuated from his native Laon, 65 kilometres to the north of Reims, when it was occupied during World War I. He worked for his wife’s uncle in the drinks business for ten years, founding his company in 1933, initially selling wines to the wholesalers who were the predecessors of the post-war supermarkets. But it was the big crops of 1950 and above all 1955 which provided his opportunity. Burtin persuaded the sellers not to ask for their money immediately and simply waited to sell the wines. The gamble worked magnificently. The 1956 crop only covered two-thirds of sales and 1957 only two-fifths. Burtin had made a fortune. But he did not cash in directly. He exchanged the cuvée – the first pressings – he had bought for other people’s tailles, the third, despised juice from the press. He saw that the 30 per cent premium paid by major firms for the first pressings was double the differential paid by retailers, a simple piece of arithmetic which gave him an extra 15 per cent profit on every bottle. Even then he did not sell immediately. He believed, then as now, that what matters is stocks, which eventually rose to 30 million bottles – purchased with his own money without any need to take on loans.
Within Champagne Burtin’s most important role was to provide its balancing stock. As demand grew, other firms learnt that he could provide an apparently inexhaustible supply of vins sur lattes – wines which had already undergone their second fermentation40 – of which he used to sell up to 4 million bottles. Moët was a big enough client to be able to buy wine tailored to its own specific style – at one time Moët’s Brut Imperial was known as ‘Burtin Imperial’, but lesser clients had to take one of Burtin’s standard offerings and disguise it through their own particular dosage.41 He has thus been a major influence in standardizing Champagne’s wines.
The idea of showmanship, publicity, promotion, runs deep in Champagne. But to Burtin economy was an absolute rule, overriding any need for expenditure in marketing. He bought up all the old houses round his headquarters, but boarded them up – old houses cost a fortune to heat. The only executive car was a diesel van (which saved fuel, and vans escaped VAT). His office resembled that of a provincial station-master, and was housed in a grey, nondescript office building.
When the time came to expand his operations, Burtin naturally preferred the efficient rather than the picturesque solution. He dug an enormous hole a hundred feet deep on the Avenue de Champagne, and filled it with seven storeys of below-ground storage space with 13 kilometres of roadway. By the 1980s his single bottling line produced 10 million bottles.
By the end of the 1970s he was buying so much wine that he could produce an excellent brand which could be sold on its name and provide good value for money without any promotion. He was totally self-financing, saving F3–F4 a bottle in interest charges and spent nothing on publicity – saving in all about 20 per cent of the price of a bottle. In doing so he was breaking the oldest of all rules in the champagne business: that you need to spend money to promote your products.
With his profits he bought the old-established firm of Gauthier. This brought with it modern and well-equipped cellars and a bottling plant along the Avenue de Champagne, between Moët & Chandon and Pol Roger. Gauthier had a number of brand names, including a hangover from the nineteenth century called
Alfred Rothschild, which had been a well-established business selling own-brand champagnes to French grocery chains before being bought out. The Rothschild family has never succeeded in blocking the name in France but was more successful in Britain where the distributor was foolish enough to employ the motto ‘You can bank on Alfred Rothschild’ in a short-lived publicity campaign. Burtin hired a bright young sales director, Philippe Baijot, who sold the light but satisfying Alfred Rothschild brand to supermarkets, many of which already bought their own-brand champagnes from Marne et Champagne. Alfred Rothschild still sells 2 million bottles annually in France.
The only other newcomer of any size was Taittinger which, like Laurent-Perrier, concentrated on lighter champagnes suitable for the increasing demand for champagne suitable to be consumed as aperitifs. Taittinger’s interests in Champagne formed only part of a solidly based family-controlled group which also included a number of major hotels. As a young officer on the staff of General Joffre, the hero of the Battle of the Marne, Pierre Taittinger had been stationed at the Chateau de la Marquetterie, just south of Epernay. After World War I he bought the chateau and its vineyards. Although he was busy as a – very successful, very right-wing – politician between the wars, he did find time to buy the firm of Jacques Fourneaux, founded in 1730 and thus one of the oldest in Champagne.
After 1945 the business was developed by two of Pierre Taittinger’s six sons: Francois, killed in a car crash in 1960, and Claude. Francois set the firm on a sound financial basis; while under Claude Taittinger it was a fellow-pioneer with de Nonancourt in what he termed the ‘modern style of champagne’, lighter champagnes with more Chardonnay suitable to be drunk as aperitifs. He also believed strongly in the power of advertising. ‘It was a media desert,’ he says of Champagne in the early 1960s and for some time Taittinger was virtually the only firm advertising in the French market.
The Story of Champagne Page 14