One of the questions people ask me most often, when they’re thinking about creating their own private champagne brand, is how long it will take. My answer is that, in general, it takes somewhere between nine and twelve months.
Before I sign an agreement with anyone, we go through what I call the briefing, and one of the things I explain there is that three months isn’t possible. If a client absolutely has to have a product ready in three months, I have to politely explain that I can’t be of assistance to them. It’s very important that they have a clear understanding, from the start, of what is and what isn’t possible.
The reason is that champagne, like all wine, is an agricultural product. Frustrating though it may sometimes be, you have to take the turning of the seasons into account and plan accordingly. Here’s what that means in practice, and when the best time to start actually is.
A year that runs on the seasons
France has eleven public holidays, and three or four of them usually fall in May. As in many countries, people often take an extra day before or after a public holiday to make a long weekend of it, so during those weeks you can’t get a great deal done.
And then there’s August.
When Champagne goes on holiday
At the end of July and the beginning of August comes what the French call Le Grand Départ. Everybody leaves work and goes off to the coast, or to their second homes, and they come back at La Rentrée, in early September, when the schools go back. For a winemaker, that’s usually the only time of the year to take a holiday with the family, so August isn’t a good month for doing business.
Traditionally the harvest followed straight on, in September. In recent years it has come several weeks early, in August. Either way, it’s the main event of the year, and understandably it commands all of the champagne makers’ attention. So there are two months when it’s hard to visit, and harder still to get their time.
Once the harvest is over, the region changes again. The grapes have been pressed and the wine has been put into vats, where it’s slowly fermenting. That takes little supervision, so the champagne makers have relatively more time for meetings, and for conversations about new products. From then until early December is a great time to start work on a champagne project.
In December, the champagne makers who sell a large part of what they make in France are busy taking orders and making deliveries. It’s less true of the bigger companies that export most of their production, because their export orders have to go out long before the end of the year to arrive in time for Christmas. So the schedule depends on which kind of maker you’re working with.
January to March, and on into April, is usually a relatively quiet time, and you can make a great deal of progress.
The dates in the cellar
Some of what takes time isn’t on any public calendar, and it isn’t obvious to anyone looking at a project from the outside.
One is disgorging, when the sediment is removed from each bottle and it’s fitted with its cork. Champagne makers don’t disgorge every day of the week. They do it in batches, a limited number of times a year. Some of the bigger ones have a day’s disgorging once or twice a month. Others only do it four times a year.
If we miss a disgorging date, we sometimes have to wait another month for the next one. So all the packaging that goes on at that point has to be ready and waiting at the maker’s for that date. And once the bottles are disgorged, they need to rest for a while before they’re sent out.
Another is the registration of the brand name. Normally it doesn’t take long to get a reply from the authorities in Champagne, but they’re an independent body, and they may take longer to reply than we’d ideally like.
Where the extra month goes
So before we start work with a client, we lay out the anticipated time frame, balancing what the client needs against the realities of getting a project done in Champagne. And we build in some leeway, because there will inevitably be unexpected events that cause a delay.
If we’re working on a nine-month plan, I’d build in an extra month. That should be enough to catch up on any time lost.
I put that month into the design stage for the labels and the packaging. The way the brand is going to look, the colours, the logos and everything else is something only the client can decide, and there can be a considerable amount of modification and adjustment along the way. Once the client has signed off on the proofs and given the OK for the way the product will look, we can work smoothly with the people producing the labels, the corks and all the other packaging, without much further intervention from the client.
The client has to understand that at the outset, to avoid frustration and annoyance later on.
When to start
So three months is out. Six months is sometimes possible, if everything goes to plan and a considerable amount of design work has already been done. Nine months is a much more reasonable time frame to work within, and twelve months gives the plan a little more flexibility.
A large share of the year’s champagne is sold in the last few months of the year, so clients understandably want theirs to be available before then. Starting in the final quarter of one year is a great time to have your champagne ready for the last quarter of the year following.
The one thing that moves that is selling through existing wine and spirits distributors. They look at new products in the springtime, because that’s when they decide what they’ll be selling at the end of the year, in the run-up to Christmas and the New Year. If that’s your plan, you need to be presenting your champagne to them in the spring, and you have to start creating it roughly a year before that. The whole twelve months shifts accordingly.
If you want to do something properly, it usually requires patience and time. Some things you can hurry up, and some things you simply cannot hurry up.
If you’re thinking about a private champagne brand of your own, the next step is a conversation. I’ll take you through what the year would look like for your project, and when your champagne could realistically be ready. Book a call.