The Story of Champagne

by Nicholas Faith

  Well before the cooperatives had emerged as an independent force, four thousand of their members had carved a major place for themselves in the French market as récoltants manipulants – individual growers who sell only their own wine. In 1950 they were selling only 2.4 million bottles. Thirty years later the figure was up to over 60 million bottles in France, nearly half the total. And although both absolute sales and market share have slipped since then, they remain the single most important element in the French market. Obviously they were, and remain, highly competitive in terms of price. Direct sale by grower to drinker eliminated the long and costly French distributive chain. Their profits were increased by the fact that the growers and the cooperatives paid no taxes and were backed by subsidized credit facilities. Moreover, buying direct appeals to the French, who love a bargain as well as the ability to boast to their friends of the personal relationship behind the bottle they are offering.

  The growers were careful not to mention that nine-tenths of them were not truly récoltants manipulants and did not make their own wine, but were merely suppliers of grapes to the local cooperative. In return the cooperative would provide bottles of wine made out of grapes which had sometimes come only from the grower’s own commune, and therefore loosely resembled the wine he would have made using only his own grapes. But increasingly these wines were made in vast stainless steel vats and were a blend of grapes from thousands of growers from all over the region. These may be better wines than could be made by individual growers who are allowed to blend their own wine with a mere 5 per cent of someone else’s. But personal they assuredly are not.

  Although the published figures do not distinguish between the true and the false récoltants manipulants, we do know that they account for only 3 per cent of the juice pressed by the cooperatives, and individual members buy 25 million ready-made bottles from the cooperatives. So the genuine récoltants manipulants probably produce only 20–25 million bottles and are largely confined to the 400 or so major growers, less than a tenth of the total, who each make more than 25,000 bottles a year, and who together produce 18.5 million bottles. In other words, 90 per cent of them, selling half the wine, are merely agents for the local cooperative.

  Because there was such a ready market for ‘local’ wines the members exerted a steady pressure on the cooperatives to do more than merely press the grapes or produce vins clairs for the trade. They should, it was said, go on and install bottling machines, dig cellars, and produce their own bottles. These steps demanded levels of capital investment for which local cooperatives based on individual pressoirs were ill-equipped – a single bottling line needs feeding by dozens of pressoirs. Of course some cooperatives were choosy. The Club des Viticulteurs Champenois, founded just after the war at Cuis on the Côte des Blancs by Michel Gimmonet, a name which guarantees a sustained high quality of wine, sells its wines only in good years. Also important was the Union Champagne at Avize which brings together many of the growers on the Côte des Blancs.

  Geoffroy had formed the Union in 1963 with classic defensive objects: to assemble wines; to provide more sophisticated machinery; to limit stockage costs; and, only fourthly, to provide a stronger commercial force. But the Union’s trade remains almost exclusively with major buyers anxious to keep in with the biggest single source of the finest blanc de blancs. Members of other cooperatives saw it as rather smug: ‘Their wines are at the top of the pyramid,’ one told me sourly. ‘They have no need to sell, no need for the extra profit which comes from selling under your own brand name.’ Curiously, the brand for which they were best known in Britain, Pierre Vaudon, is not a blanc de blancs, but a blend.

  Two unions played a major part in revitalizing two much-despised regions, the Aube and the Aisne. For a whole generation after the Aube became a full member of the Champagne community, its membership was purely theoretical. In the late 1920s and 1930s many of the Aubois emigrated to Paris in search of a steady job while the remainder scratched a living from mixed farming. ‘After phylloxera,’ says Michel Drappier, who now sells over a million and a half bottles of well-regarded champagne but was then only producing a few thousand, ‘every sort of vine was planted for us to survive’ – not just the ever-present Gamay but even Muscat and Arbanne. So they were generally cynical and unreceptive when the CIVC sent a young agronomist, Pierre Maury, to the area in 1956 to revive viticulture there.

  MAURY’S REVOLUTION

  Maury faced the assumption that the Aube was predestined to produce second-rate wines, to be eternally what it had been from 1911 to 1927 – une champagne deuxième zone – which had relegated them to a second divison. The Aube had still not lived down memories of the terrible ‘champagnes’ it had made from Gamay. Yet the climate and soil – both factors more Burgundian than ‘Champagnois’ – were admirably suited to the Pinot Noir. Because of the danger of late frosts the Chardonnay is still confined to less than a tenth of the vineyard, on well-drained south-east-facing slopes.

  Maury tackled the problems methodically and with a crusading zeal. He was faced, not only with suspicion, but also ignorance of even the simplest tasks – he even had to teach many of the growers how to prune their vines. Luckily he found a handful of young growers, including Pierre Gillet, not permeated with their elders’ pessimism. Gillet remembered older growers who had been taught to bring in the hay, which they knew would be profitable, rather than spray vines which had not yielded a penny’s worth of wine in living memory. Then he isolated a number of clones of Pinot Noir particularly suitable for the region. Even then the natives were suspicious: for a long time they thought he was in thrall to the makers of the smudge pots and sulphur mixture whose use he recommended. In a sense the whole region is his memorial, for when he arrived Gamay occupied five-sixths of the Aube’s vineyard area and by the mid-1980s it had virtually disappeared.

  In the 1930s Victor Lanson had pioneered any fruity Pinot Noir he could find in the Aube which he found riper and more loganberry-like than its equivalent in the Marne and in the 1950s and 1960s a few of the major firms, notably Taittinger, openly built up holdings in the Aube – Taittinger was particularly clever in finding hillsides suitable for Chardonnay – but such was the low esteem in which the region was held that most other big names tried to hide their investments. When Clicquot built a hanger to press grapes they claimed that it was used exclusively for Canard-Duchene, then their second brand and even when just under 40 per cent of the grapes in Piper-Heidsieck’s wines were from the region the fact was never mentioned. Other major buyers of juice from the Aube, like Laurent-Perrier and Boizel were equally coy. Today names like Moët are on open display on buildings throughout the region.

  Nevertheless, apart from a handful of firms like Drappier, the Aube is dominated by small individual growers and their cooperatives (one of the first in the whole region had been set up at Les Riceys in 1922). The 1964 law preventing the build-up of large agricultural holdings was particularly important in the Aube, where the cooperative formed a key element in Maury’s strategy – for fifteen years he actually lived in the chateau next to the buildings at Bar-sur-Seine which house the Union des Cooperatives Auboises des Vins de Champagne (UCAVIC), the Union which brought together 720 growers belonging to eleven local cooperatives.

  Until 1967 the cooperative confined itself to selling the grapes produced by its members, then started selling its own wines as buyers’ own brands then, with the help of the Crédit Agricole, they started to sell their own and launched two brands, Abel Jeannin and Leonce d’Albe, typically crisp Aube wines which were well distributed both in and outside France. The cooperative is still run by Pierre Gillet’s son Laurent, a businessman, not a grower. Today it has 800 members with 1,400 hectares of vines and trades as Veuve A. Devaux after its best-known, high-priced brand.

  THE AISNE EMERGES

  The story of the Aisne, its Cooperative de la Vallee de la Marne (COVAMA) and its Pannier brand, is less dramatic than UCAVIC even though the vineyard in the Aisne to the west
of the region along the valley of the Marne on the way to Paris has grown dramatically, from a mere 445 hectares in 1958 to 3,400 hectares today; the vast majority planted with Pinot Meunier. The Aisne cooperative succeeded through strict internal discipline. In 1973 they took over a local firm, Pannier, which had a good name and an experienced chef de caves, but was selling only 150,000 bottles a year – only a third of that under its own label – and hired a professional, Francois Alvoet, to run the business. Now Pannier is selling over 2 million bottles of light, fruity, typical Pinot Meunier wines much appreciated in Britain.

  THE ‘SECOND GENERATION’ COOPERATIVES

  The enormous 1955 crop had given a major boost to the first generation of cooperatives; the 1970 crop – three times its size at 210 million bottles, double the sales of champagne that year – triggered the development of the Centre Vinicole de la Champagne at Chouilly, just south of Epernay. The CVC was the dream of Henri Macquart, the ambitious grower who had replaced Doyard at the CIVC. He had seen that there were simply too many small cooperatives without the necessary capital or qualified personnel to cope with the whole production process. So he brought together sixty-four local cooperatives and five regional groups representing another twenty-one individual cooperatives representing five thousand growers to finance (and supply) one super-centre which now dominates the skyline south of Epernay.

  In 1980 they bought a relatively new brand Nicolas Feuillatte, founded by a rich coffee merchant of the same name and since then it has provided a best-selling, easy-drinking champagne for French supermarkets. Then in September 1987, in a move with considerable implications for the whole cooperative movement, Moët and the CVC agreed that much of the champagne required for Moët’s Mercier subsidiary would be made by the CVC at Chouilly. This truce in the battle between cooperatives and merchants not only increased Moët’s supply of wine: it also implied that the CVC, the largest of all the unions, would cooperate with, as well as compete with, the merchants.

  The first major brand launched by a cooperative was Jacquart. Initially it was made by another ‘second-generation’ cooperative, Cooperative Regionale des Vins de Champagne (CRVC), situated in Reims. The idea of the CRVC as a rather select cooperative was dreamed up by the late René Robert, whose father had been director of a cooperative at Mesnil-sur-Oger in the heart of the Côte des Blancs. In 1962 he brought together a small group of producers, mostly from the grands crus, who decided they wanted to create their own blend. But the CRVC started slowly. By 1967 Robert had only forty-four members, but by 1980 there were twelve times as many, with a production capacity of 5.5 million bottles, figures which had risen to 700 members and 8 million bottles by 1985. By 1980 the CRVC was big enough to start doing a mini-Burtin, selling under a dozen brand names, including such uninspiring names as Hartman, Tucker, Valles and Arnaud. On Robert’s retirement the members appointed Christian Doisy, a young, eager Champenois as his successor, and chose the name Jacquart, quite by chance because the firm’s premises happened to be in the street of that name. They then added the symbol: a picture of a statue in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, representing la Trompette de la Renommée – the Herald of Glory. Those unversed in the iconography of French history see only a well-built lady with one substantial breast bared, blowing her own trumpet while seated on a frolicsome horse.

  But all the cooperatives, including the CRVC, had a long way to go. Although their export sales doubled to over 4 million bottles between 1983 and 1985, this still represented less than 6 per cent of the total. Moreover, the cooperative brands still have rather sketchy representation abroad. Nevertheless, during the 1960s and 1970s the cooperatives and the recoltants were lucky. They accounted for nearly half the sales of champagne in France – the world’s most dynamic market for their product, which took three out of every four bottles of champagne throughout the period. Not unnaturally, the second oil shock of 1979, followed by some years of relative austerity, placed a lid on this market which has been slowly declining ever since. Unfortunately, it has remained more conscious of price than of quality.

  In the 1980s there was a gradual reduction in the role of the recoltants manipulants. For any commercial success which depended, as did theirs, on its tax-effectiveness, was bound to face problems. When vineyards were taxed lightly, if at all, one major merchant used to divide his business into two. ‘Officially’ the profits were made by the firm which owned the vineyards and thus did not pay any taxes.

  So it proved. In the late 1970s the theoretically right-wing government of President Giscard d’Estaing limited the size of agricultural businesses enjoying tax-exemption. When the socialist Francois Mitterrand was elected president in 1981 tax-exemption was further reduced from F500,000 to F300,000, thus affecting any grower with an above-average holding. Indeed, the agricultural classes were worse off since they did not enjoy the tax-exemptions for stock-holding available to ordinary commercial concerns.

  So the supposedly monolithic class of recoltants manipulants divided into two: the majority who, tired of selling bottles directly, contented themselves with the (very comfortable) living provided by selling their grapes, and a minority who are following the path pioneered by Ruinart and Moët two and a half centuries ago and using their land and its grapes as the foundation for an orthodox champagne business.

  THE WORLD REJOICES – AND SO DOES CHAMPAGNE

  The merchants still dominated sales abroad, but did not really come into their own until the French market ceased to expand. Before the war six markets, above all Britain, the United States and Belgium, accounted for two thirds of exports, then just over 10 million bottles. In 1956 total exports had risen by only 2.5 million bottles to 13 million, and the same trio dominated sales. By 1966 sales outside the ten major markets were still a mere 4 million bottles. In the following twenty years sales outside the top ten more than quadrupled as the gradual spread of affluence throughout the world has added to the number of countries – like Japan – with a substantial number of champagne drinkers. Sales in the United States increased as American tastes increasingly turned to ‘genuine imported French champagne’ as against the local versions. And as the economies of traditional European buyers improved so did exports, even though the habit did not spread any wider. From a mere 15 million bottles in the mid-1950s they increased fast to reach over 70 million by the mid-1980s. The major markets remained loyal, with Britain, Canada, the United States, Belgium and Switzerland invariably in the top ten, joined since 1956 by Germany and Italy. Indeed, for a few years at the end of the 1970s the Italians replaced the British as the biggest foreign consumers of champagne, but at the end of the 1970s their enthusiasm was dampened by economic (and fiscal) problems.

  The 1980s witnessed a major boom. Exports rose from 38 million bottles in 1976 to 81 million ten years later, reducing the proportion of total sales going to the French market from 75 to just over 60 per cent. The increases in total sales lowered stocks to less than three years’ sales and resulted in the sale of lot of inferior, green, acid wines. Many less scrupulous merchants took full advantage of the loophole which allowed wines to be sold after a year in bottle so they could get the 1982 wines to market for Christmas 1983. This meant bottling in November, months before the traditional date, and inducing the second fermentation before the wines had stabilized. Inevitably, the finished wines were acid and unready, indeed could never mature because they were so unstable. So from 1984 the tradition of over two hundred years was formalized: wine could not be bottled before 1 January the following year.

  With direct sales, yields and acreage all increasing, the growers enjoyed an increasingly strong bargaining position during the 1960s and 1970s which they used to the full. By the mid-1980s the average grower, with between 1.5 and 2 hectares of vines, could live comfortably from the F200,000 gross income they provided, over three times the national average wage. The arguments between the growers and the merchants were kept relatively civilized, thanks partly to the merchants’ acquiescence in the ever-i
ncreasing power of the growers.

  The basic price of grapes gradually got out of control, partly because the indexed percentage figure had been raised. Because of the way the price was calculated even this percentage is probably an underestimate – the Champenois themselves assume that half the price of a bottle is represented by the grapes. By the 1980s champagne had developed into an immensely profitable agro-industry which provided even better profits for the region’s growers than for its firms – the distinction between a poor and rich grower, they used to say, is that the former has to wash his own Mercedes.

  The CIVC went further. The contract guaranteed that the merchants would buy all the grapes offered to them, and the Societe d’lntervention de la Champagne Viticole was set up in 1959 – the next record crop after the 1955 harvest – to absorb any surpluses (it had to absorb over a quarter of the 1975 crop). In 1982 and 1983, the biggest harvests in the history of champagne, each big enough to fill around 300 million bottles, 70 per cent more than total sales, the CIVC devised the system of a centralized stock regulator – a stock level designed to provide a balance between years with high yields and others where production was less than sales. These mechanisms form a sort of short-term insurance policy in which the odds are on the side of the insurer, given the region’s notorious propensity to produce small crops after one or two big ones.44 Modern viticultural techniques can enhance the size of large harvests but can do much less to minimize the effect of bad weather.