Henriot then merged his family business with Veuve Clicquot, formerly run by Robert-Jean’s nephew the able, brusque autocratic Alain de Vogüé who had relied rather too heavily on – static – sales in Scandinavia and in Latin America. Moreover, he had no obvious successor which provided Henriot with his opportunity. In late 1986 he reinforced his position by arranging for Clicquot to be taken over by Louis Vuitton, the manufacturer of luxury luggage, a firm controlled by Henry Racamier, an elderly Parisian financier, but one in which Henriot also had a significant interest. The following year, threatened by a bid from a major British drinks group he and Recamier arranged for Louis Vuitton-Clicquot-Henriot to be taken over by Moët. Two years later the newly created monster fell into the even more ruthless hands of Bernard Arnault and has flourished ever since.
The trend for selling shares to outsiders and being quoted on the French stock exchange, another of de Vogüé’s ideas, has now been copied by a number of others. Nonancourt did so, and today the group he founded includes the very select brand, Salon, produced in Le Mesnil Sur Oger at the heart of the Côte des Blancs which he bought in 1987; Delamotte, which was already owned by his mother’s family; and de Castellane, previously owned by his wife’s family and best known for its splendid tower next to the railway tracks in Epernay, but now a cut-price brand.
At least three newcomers have copied the example set by de Vogüé and de Nonancourt – who is regarded as a hero to two of them – and in most cases the takeovers have benefited the brands in terms of both qualitative and quantitive success. They have all benefited from the downfall of Gaston Burtin’s empire. Until shortly before he died in 1990 it was assumed that he would leave the business to his three key employees, his chef de caves Philippe Kuhlman, whom he apparently treated as the son he never had, his finance director M. Gausert, and the salesman Philppe Baijot – unsurprisingly the locals noted that the KGB was about to take over. But in the end the ninety-year-old was persuaded to leave the business to his great-niece Marie-Laurence and her husband, Francois-Xavier Maura, a Corsican osteopath, neither of whom knew anything about champagne, indeed Burtin had sacked his great-niece at one point, which made it easy for competitors to take his contracts with supermarkets. It is difficult to see how these ultra-cheap, premier prix champagnes can be remotely profitable. Offers can go down as low as €7.95 a bottle even though each bottle contains 1.2 kilos of grapes, for which the official price is €6 a kilo. The same query hangs over the champagnes sold at times in British supermarkets at £10 a bottle. Cynical observers attribute the price to grapes produced above the officially approved levels and which cannot, therefore, be sold at anything like the regulated price.
Baijot quit the day after the Mauras took over and went into business with Bruno Paillard, the son of a local broker. A few years earlier he had started his own small, high-quality business, which he continues to own and run separately. The partnership began in 1991 with the acquisition of the then-dormant firm of Chanoine. This provided an essential base for selling wines to supermarkets in the face of the amateur competition from the inexperienced new owners of Marne et Champagne. Three years later they brought in the Boizel family as shareholders, followed by Besserat de Bellefon, owned by a German group. BCC soon also bought the small, but well-respected firm of Philipponnat which was not thriving as part of the troubled liqueur firm of Marie Brizard and brought with it one of the region’s most famous vineyards, the Clos des Goisses at Montreuil. They then managed to persuade Charles Philipponnat, who was working in Argentina, to come and manage the family’s former business with great success. They pursued the same policy with their next acquisition, Bonnet, one of the biggest in the Aube, leaving it to be run by its then managers after the Bonnet family had decided they were no longer interested in the business and sold to BCC in 1998. But the biggest bet made by Paillard and Baijot came in 2005 when they bid for the remains of the Burtin empire which the Mauras had run into the ground, a business which included the prestigious name of Lanson. After a few years the bet succeeded.
Now Lanson-BCC, with two of the top ten brands in sales through French supermarkets, Alfred de Rothschild and Chanoine, was only one of the groups which benefited from the fall of Marne et Champagne. The top ten also includes Moët with Mercier, Laurent-Perrier with de Castellane and the CVC cooperative with the number one seller Nicolas Feuillatte, which sells 3.8 million bottles, over a million more than the runner-up Heidsieck Monopole, made by the group headed by Paul-Francois Vranken, a tough Belgian-born businessman who started his career working for Bass, the British brewers. He arrived in Champagne in 1976, originally to supply buyers’ own brands on which his success has been based ever since. He now controls a quoted company which is probably the second-biggest group in Champagne. Its brands include Heidsieck Monopole, a firm which has probably had more owners since 1945 than any other in Champagne and so is a natural candidate to be classed as a premier prix champagne. More recently he bought the proud firm of Pommery, a purchase which has raised doubts about the future quality of the wines because it was deprived of its vineyards during the few months it was owned by LVMH. Vranken now claims to be the biggest owner of vines in Europe thanks to its ownership of the port firm of Rozes, a major player in the French market and two substantial winemaking businesses: Listel in the Camargue, and the Château de Gardonne, in Provence.
The third new empire has been built up by Alain Thienot, born in 1938, and a former broker in Champagne, who sells wines under his own name and also those from three firms he has bought: the previously rather neglected Canard-Duchene which he has done much to resuscitate, with sales up to 4 million bottles; the downmarket Marie Stuart; and the well-respected Joseph Perrier. He also owns a wine merchants and a couple of estates in Bordeaux.
But the most dramatic example of a takeover improving the prospects of two serious brands came when Pernod-Ricard bought Mumm and Perrier-Jouët in 2001 from Seagram, which had scandalously neglected Mumm in particular. The new owners invested heavily in Mumm’s winery and have already gone some way to restoring its historic position as one of the top half-dozen brands – sales in Britain doubled between 2014 and 2016 and the managing director Michel Letter hopes to double volume from the present 9 million bottles and triple turnover within the next ten years.
Three other brands also benefited from a change in ownership. In 1993 Gosset, one of the oldest firms in the business was bought from the sixteenth generation of the founding family by the Cointreau family who owned the very superior Frapin cognac and had accumulated substantial funds by selling their stakes in Rémy Martin and Cointreau itself. In the hands of Beatrice Cointreau and then her brother Jean-Pierre Cointreau, its reputation and sales have thrived. Much the same can be said about Deutz, absorbed into the Roederer empire the same year, except that the managing director Fabrice Rosset has also had to improve the quality of the firm’s wines – as he says ‘when I took over at Deutz I knew that if we don’t produce quality we are dead meat’.
The case of Taittinger was somewhat different but had an equally happy ending. When the family group, which also owned a number of leading hotels, was broken up thanks to problems within the family it was threatened with takeover by a foreign firm. But France Inc. intervened in the shape of the Crédit Agricole, which helped Claude’s son Pierre-Emanuel Taittinger to retain the firm, which has also since flourished.
In the new hypercompetitive business climate only a few of the largest cooperative unions can hope to compete – and their members are unlikely to tolerate the lengthy period of losses inevitable in setting up a global commercial network capable of marketing several million bottles a year. There are reckoned to be 14,000 members covering 13,000 hectares with 125 press houses and of the 30 million bottles sold by the 40 cooperatives big enough to do their own marketing 25 million are sold under their own brand names. For instance, Pannier in Chateau Thierry, in the unfashionable part of the Marne valley was a pioneer in producing fresh fruity wines based on the
Pinot Meunier.
But the two biggest forces among the cooperatives are the CVC in Chouilly with its best-selling Nicolas Feuillatte and the three members of the Alliance Champagne, formed in 1997 by combining the efforts of COGEVI in Aÿ, the CRVC in Reims and COVAMA – the Union Auboise. They have managed to improve the image – and the sales – of the Jacquart brand both outside and inside France. The alliance possesses a major trump card: the underlying quality of some of its wines. Its better grades, the Vintage and the Jacquart Selection, contain around half Chardonnay, and this shows up in the lightness and balance of the blend.
Until the 1970s COGEVI was the biggest cooperative and remained thoroughly old-fashioned, as can be seen by the name of its first brand: Alphonse Perrin, in honour of its founder. But it has recovered from a period of stagnation in the 1970s and has grown from having seven hundred members to its current eight hundred. The name emblazoned on its premises and its bottles is now that of Raoul Collet, director for nearly thirty years until his death in 1960.48 Collet is now an upmarket drink and sells a respectable 500,000 bottles, a figure they are hoping to double within a decade
By no means all winemakers rely on their local cooperative, for there are of course several thousand recoltants manipulants selling 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.
GROWERS WITH AMBITIONS
Over the past few decades a new breed has emerged, of individual winemakers offering superior wines. This may have surprised the Champenois but was a perfecly natural development: the bigger the units in any given industry the more likely there are to be opportunities for niche producers offering something different from standard products, generally at much higher prices.
But in 1950 one producer went bravely against the old cliché ‘small producer small wine’. Jacques Selosse started to sell wines made exclusively from his 15 hectare vineyard in Avize in the heart of the Côte des Blancs. In 1980 his son Anselme took over, but carried on his father’s philosophy, one worthy of a pretentious Burgundian. ‘Essentially we’re of the countryside,’ says Anselme, ‘and our goal is to give expression to the countryside.’ It’s not just that the wines are as near biodynamic as makes no difference, but, above all, he treats the grapes as though they were grown in Burgundy by fermenting them in wood. The wines – which are too oaky for many palates – earned him the title of ‘Best French Winemaker’ from the leading French wine magazine Gault-Millau. Another early independent spirit was Paul Tarlant with 14 hectares in the Valley of the Marne who, as well as the normal three varieties, uses small quantities of three of the very minority permitted varieties, Petit Meslier, Arbanne and Pinot Blanc in his wines which are fermented in wood.
In the early 1960s, three growers in Bouzy founded a partnership which they called Barancourt, specializing in blanc de noirs. The wines are made exclusively from the black grapes in their commune, and are now sold by Paul Vranken. But the bravest launch was the Club Tresors, an association of artisan winemakers. Inclusion is dependent upon the utmost quality standards. There are currently twenty-eight members.
UNESCO
In 2015 Champagne was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Champagne is the first award winner defined as ‘agro-industrial’ thanks to a new World Heritage Site definition established in 1992 to include ‘Living Cultural Landscapes’. In the first years of the twenty-first century and encouraged by a thesis on the subject the CIVC brought together a small team to define the concept. It was headed by the late Pierre Cheval, the regional director of the Crédit Agricole – whose wife owned Gatinois, a well-regarded firm based in Aÿ. Cheval had two key assistants, Pierre-Marie Tricaud, a well-known planner and Michel Guillard, a polymath dentist, professional photographer – and former publisher of what was France’s most prestigious wine magazine, the Amateur de Bordeaux.
Because of the size and political complexity of the region the team had to persuade dozens, if not hundreds, of mayors, as well as presidents of departments and their like, a role which Cheval fulfilled brilliantly. At national level he had to deal with two ministries, Environment and above all Culture where, fortunately, the person responsible was Michelle Prats whose family used to own Cos D’Estournel, an important estate in the Medoc and who was also involved with ICOMOS the Paris-based institute which advises UNESCO in its search for suitable sites.
After an initial attempt to apply for recognition of the whole region the team narrowed its focus to three key features of the production of champagne. Obviously the first was a sector of the vineyard, in this case the historic Vin de la Rivière, the north bank of the Marne round Epernay, east to Aÿ and Mareuil, as far as Dom Perignon’s Abbey d’Hautvillers above the river to the west. The second ace was the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, the kilometre-long row of major firms from Moët to Mercier with their often architecturally important headquarters. The third element in the Champagne equation are the unique cellars. It was only when Michel Guillard went round the region photographing them that the Champenois realized how important – and how extensive – they were.
No other individual producer has gained as much prestige as Selosse but there are now many others, like Larmandier-Bernier, virtually all from the finest crus who have launched their own wines as premium products, often at very competitive prices. Their motives seem to be mixed, including pride in their wines, the reluctance of firms to pay premium prices for grapes from the very best of the greatest vineyards and the opportunities offered by selective importers like the respected American author-merchant Kermit Lynch who seems to be able to sell these wines, not just to metropolitan sommeliers and up-market wine shops but even as far afield as Montana.
In a sense, more surprising has been the steady rise of the Aube to be more than a supplier of basic wines. ‘Thirty years ago,’ says Gérard Rafai, the commercial director of Alexandre Bonnet, ‘we exported very little, now it accounts for over half our sales.’ But, he adds ‘you have to go out and sell the wine and the region, for now we’re playing on the same court as the growers in the Marne.’ To which he could have added – for the first time in history. The general acceptance of the potential of wines from the Aube is best illustrated by the fact that Veuve Devaux dares to blend its home-grown Pinot Noir with Chardonnay from the Côte des Blancs to offer a range of superior beverages.
At the end of 1987 the CIVC tried another tack to improve quality: a levy payable by the merchants, the size of which depends on the point at which they buy. If they buy grapes they pay less; if they buy wine (above all sur lattes) they pay much more. Conversely the growers are paid more if they sell grapes rather than wine.
But for the past twenty years or so the CIVC has given up its historic task of setting prices for the grapes. In the past, ten days before the harvest the growers and merchants got together under its auspices to decide on the price of the grapes amid much agonized discussion of the quantities to be allowed. Today there is a free market. The area in which the CIVC has continued to achieve results is the protection of the good name of champagne. With the help of the French government it was able to persuade the European Union to ban the use of the phrase méthode champenoise by producers outside Champagne. Matters came to a head when Cordoniu, makers of Spanish cava ran an advertisement showing a champagne glass and a bottle in a champagne bucket under the slogan: ‘Cordoniu the Champ’. This proved too much. The Champenois claim they tried, but failed, to reach an agreement within the EEC on the rules which should surround the phrase. For, as André Enders, then the director of the CIVC told me, to associate any sparkling drink with champagne it has to follow the same rules. It proved impossible to agree on the principle of maximum yield or on the minimum period for which the wine should be kept in bottle – the Italians wanted a mere nine months. The Champeno
is’ attitude hardened and they pressed their case. As a result, after 1992 the magic words méthode champenoise were no longer allowed on any wines made within the EEC. Two years later the Champenois had to abandon their right to call wines with half the pressure of normal champagnes by the historic name of crémants – sad for those who love the name as well as the delicious creamy wine previously sold by Mumm as Crémant de Cramant, a name replaced by the less appetising Mumm de Cramant.
More recently Jean Luc Barbier spent much of his ten years between 2004 and 2014 as director of the CIVC – now renamed the Comité Champagne – patiently persuading individual countries to protect the name of champagne. Its most complicated problem, oddly enough, was with the Indians when they produced Marquise de Pompadour, made from Chardonnay grapes grown in the hills behind Poona. It was delicious, light and elegant as befits the technical advisers, a subsidiary of Piper-Heidsieck, called Champagne Technologie, based in Reims. No wonder the Indians omitted any mention of Poona on the label and concentrated instead on the magic word: CHAMPAGNE. Eventually a fifteen-year-long lawsuit resulted in removal of the word. In Brazil, with the help of Francois Hollande who mentioned the subject to President Dilma Rousseff, he persuaded the winemakers that they could gain more by proclaiming the geographical origins of their wines – as Vinos del Sul – than by continuing to use the C word. Patience and persuasion achieved the same result in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and Vietnam – a substantial producer of sparkling wine drunk to celebrate the Tet holiday – while the European Union helped him to achieve the same result in China. In the United States he manged to persuade Gallo and Constellation, two of the three biggest producers of ‘domestic champagne’ to desist, leaving only Korbel, whose primary output is sparkling wines. So today the only major exception is Russia, which remains solidly devoted to ‘Krimski’ and ‘Donski’ champagnes.
The Story of Champagne Page 18