Scalawine

Champagne danced to a slightly different beat this week.  But this was not stadium rock from heavy Moët et al (geddit?) big bands. Instead four groups of single estate producers showed wines in Epernay, Aÿ, Avize and Reims.  We prefer to use the term single estate or domaine champagne instead of ‘grower’ so as to avoid the peasant image this implies.   

For one of the groups, Terres et Vins de Champagne, this was their fourth annual marketing tasting in Aÿ and they pioneered the champagne weekend festival idea in 2009.  I have been to the last three of their fairs and seen the expansion of this mini phenomenon which has now spawned three more grouplets:  Les Artisans du Champagne, (first event in 2011, Reims, which we attended too) and two debutant groups this year:  Terroir et Talents de Champagne (Epernay), and Trait-D-Union (Avize).  This last has no website and may have been a one-off event; wait and see.  

The 53 producers were overwhelmingly single estates (the old term being ’grower’), so-called because they make champagne only from grapes grown on their own land.  Between them these 53 make about 1.5% of all champagne: some 5 million of the 320m annual bottles.  Numerically, a drop in the ocean.  But for champagne connoisseurs this was an important place to be. And single domaine champagne, certainly in some of the world’s top cities, is right now uber cool.  What marked every tasting was not just the faces of the world’s established champagne affiicionados and journalists, but a hip segment of bloggers, champagne fellow travellers and geeks and young independent wine merchants wanting something different from champagne than Mumm, Moët and the mainstream.  Thousands of corks were pulled in this grand ‘dégustation’ but the metaphorical mood music was ‘indie’ not pop. And the attendees were often chic and cosmopolitan to a fault; you heard Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and American as much as French.  If anything, the French wine trade and journos stayed away, as did the Brits, bar two, but more of that later.   

As more single estates become viable, reaching a critical mass of sales and some vital export sales, the more they are faced with a marketing dilemma.  Even with critical mass you will never have the millions of euros to spend on distribution and marketing that the big houses have.  It is not unusual for the likes of Moët, Mumm and Veuve Clicquot to spend between 30-45% of gross pre-tax operating profit on marketing.  In practice this means high spend on PR operations, brand planners and agency offices in capital cities.  It means a small army of sales executives constantly in sales talks with the key places you want to have your bottles, including the best hotel and restaurant chains, up-market independent retailers and corporate buyers.  So forming the kind of promotional groups we saw in Champagne last weekend is smart.  They need to do it differently by creating a buzz of interest in a community of shared values: real wine.  Twitter and Facebook add to the mix and a restricted invitation list adds exclusivity.  It’s aim is communication directly with the opinion formers of fashion cool in wine.  

Furthermore these producers may be reacting to one uncomfortable fact.  The traditional bread and butter market for single estate small champagne makers has been the nearby French, Dutch and Belgian middle classes, especially those within a day drive of Champagne who love to chat with a vigneron and fill their car boot.  Domaine champagne has been 38% of the French domestic market but only 5% in the wider EU and only 4% of champagne going beyond Europe.  But some signs show this close-to-home market shrinking in these hard times.  The better single estates now price themselves almost at the level of grande marque brands.  Sales of bottom end champagne in supermarkets under €15 a bottle have been rising in mainland Europe in recession and more people are looking for cheaper fizz to drink at home rather than pay restaurant or good domaine prices at the cellar door.  Go ahead growers realise they need to create an international buzz; they need to export.  And they need to get themselves more in touch with the small but significant cult markets for domaine champagne that have grown up in places such as Japan and the west coast of the USA.

And rather than going to the four winds taking your champagnes to other countries and paying for tasting opportunities and PR there on a very limited budget, it makes sense to club together and show them on your own doorstep, promote the events via social media and make the world come to you.  It’s something of a shock to see cooperation in Champagne which has always been a world where brands mostly kept to themselves.  But my feeling is this new promotional model will blossom for single estate champagne.

There’s a neat alignment between the philosophy of many leading small domaine champagne makers and the trend for more ‘natural’ and authentic wines.  Big brand champagne has long been one of the more manipulated and ‘technical’ wines, blended across many districts and several vintages to make consistent brand styles in high tech wineries.  The wonder is that the houses’ really top wines can often be exquisite.  But control and homogenization of taste and style is at the heart of most non-vintage big brand champagne and the marketing is big spend PR.  Many of the producers on show this weekend are making the opposite: perhaps the model is small domaine burgundy.  There is utter commitment to ripe grapes, lower yields, organic if not biodynamic methods and certainly ‘lutte raisonée’: keeping chemical treatments to the absolute minimum.  There is a great deal of experimentation with barrels, variations on malolactic fermentation, low dosage, reserve wines and making wines from single parcels of grapes.  Every producer showed three 2011 vins clairs (the still wine from the first of the two fermentations) to reflect the harvest and vineyard as well as three finished champagnes from earlier years this weekend.  Instead of selling champagne as glamour, it is promoted as ‘real’ and a product of its terroir.  The story is not about the aspirational and slightly naff dream world of the drinker at smart parties, but the values of intelligent urban chic: natural, authentic and artisan.  Above all, it’s about a community of sustainability: we are the future, we can steer our planet safely by holding on to its elemental gifts of terroir.  And my goodness that’s cool. 

Interestingly, all the groups mirrored shifting facets of this newer and more youthful market for sustainable champagne.  Each of the tasting days was well attended; bees round a honeypot.  The biggest scrum, in the freezing cold of an overcrowded old winery was at Trait-D-Union in Azize, where the senior cult elite of Champagnes Jacques Selosse, Egly-Ouriet, Jacquesson, Jérome Prévost, Larmandier-Bernier and Roger Coulon showed their wines.  Nikon toting and doting wine journos and bloggers emptied from taxis onto the Côte des Blancs and queued shivering with their invitations well before 10am.  They then spent 90 minutes elbowing their way to samples of £100 a bottle nectar and a few snatched words with the gods of single domaine champagne. All in all, just about the worst professional tasting conditions I’ve ever encountered, though it was worth seeing Francis Egly simmering with irritation at having to lower himself to serve wine to a heaving array of glasses thrust at him by desparate supplicants.  Later, it was also a chance to showcase Anselme Selosse’s spanking new boutique hotel – see below.  Other producers grumbled that this salon, announced late by exclusive invitation, had clashed for half a day with another tasting event.  If nothing else, this tasting showed what for me was the best champagne opened all week:  two of Pierre Larmandier-Bernier‘s last magnums of his Larmandier-Bernier Cramant 1996, aetherial with such a gentle mousse, razor balance and long finish of lemon oil and nuts.    

The Terres et Vins de Champagne salon, founders of this mini annual fizz jamboree, is the biggest (19 producers) group and the most ‘out there’.  The attendance in Aÿ at the Champagne Goutorbe owned Hotel Castel Jeanson, is always somewhat younger, more switched on and well-informed than the others, though several tasters I overheard irritated some wine makers with the constant idea that if a champagne is not zero dosage something must be wrong with it.  Almost all the producers are organic or nearly so, a good number in conversion to biodynamics or already certified and no chemical intervention, with combinations of ploughing and cover crops, is the norm.  Like all the events, at the high point of the day it was packed out.

The Les Artisans du Champagne (14 strong) salon, meeting at the the Reims boat club, had perhaps the best venue, spacious and less frenetic.  The producers are more established and senior but no less committed to high quality than the other groups.  There is more variation of character and business type too.  They include, surprisingly, the négociant small house Alfred Gratien, longtime supplier to the UK’s wonderful mail order Wine Society.  At about 280k bottles per annum, along with Jacquesson, this house was the biggest producer on show during the weekend.  But in this group too you find one of Champagne’s elite jewels: Laurent Champ’s Champagne Vilmart.  You wonder why he feels the need to be there.  Then you see him deep in interested conversation with everyone who wanted to speak to him and realise this openness is one of the reasons he got to the top of Champagne in the first place.  

Finally, the 14 newcomers Terroir et Talents de Champagne were the first out of the traps showing on Sunday in Epernay, a mixed group again based on a network of fairly established small estates and with high quality wines on show.  Like the other groups, the membership is far flung across all Champagne’s districts. I did wonder why quite big and well-known single estates such as De Sousa, Serge Mathieu and Fallet-Dart need group marketing but perhaps that underlines the fact that a recession always demands new thinking even for those with a track record.  I was told by various producers that the group began from just a network of friends. 

So why were the UKs’s wine journalists and merchants not there?  No doubt several saw judging for the International Wine Challenge as the priority and were being paid to be there; fair enough.  But the UK’s supermarkets, needing high volume and easily selling the bulk of UK champagne, will never be that interested in unknown small champagne producers no matter what the quality.  UK journalists are used to Champagne’s mountain coming to them rather than needing to go to the mountain, and it is usually in the shape of the big well-known brands.  Until they get out and about more in Champagne, little will change.  Out of over 2,000 grower champagne producers and 145 presently imported into the UK but often in tiny amounts and fleetingly, it needs wine writers to believe in these wines more and shout the odds of those that are good.  Amongst the 53 on show this week, a start could have been made.  

Recommended top champagne producers of the salon week: