You’ve created your own champagne brand, the first bottles are ready, and now you have to sell it. The first thing most people reach for is the tasting note: fine bubbles, notes of brioche, a long finish.
That’s all very well, and it has its place. In my view, though, it doesn’t really distinguish your champagne from so many others. You do still need one, because in some circles a champagne isn’t considered a serious contender if you can’t say anything at all about how it’s made. What people remember afterwards comes from somewhere else, and the best way I can explain it is to tell you what happened one day in a cellar.
The year she was born
Some years ago I was guiding a couple who were looking for champagne makers to work with. They were importers rather than people creating a brand of their own, so it was a different kind of project, but they had the same task you’ll have: presenting champagne and selling it to other people.
We had a tour of one maker’s winery and then sat down to taste. I think we struck lucky, because he was clearly in an excellent mood that day. The lady happened to mention that her birthday was a few days away.
The maker took the four of us down into his library of old vintages, where every vintage made by him and his family, going back many generations, has its own space. He asked her which year she was born in, went to the right bin and pulled out a bottle from that very year.
It was a very unusual thing to do. The bottle was, I’d guess, about 35 years old at the time, so nothing you’d normally find in the shops, and the four of us sat in the quiet and the semi-darkness while he opened it. She was thrilled, by the gesture, which was so generous, and by the champagne itself.
That’s the type of story you can dine out on for a long, long time. The people you’re telling can probably taste the brioche and feel the fine bubbles on their tongue. A story like that takes them somewhere else: down into that cellar, on that day, with four people tasting an extraordinary bottle of champagne. It’s stayed with me long after any talk about how the champagne actually tasted.
The tenth above the water
So what’s the tasting note worth? It’s like an iceberg. It’s the tenth that’s showing above the water, and the real enjoyment is the 90 per cent you don’t immediately see.
I don’t think even professional wine tasters and sommeliers would totally disagree. For people who study wine and champagne, the tasting notes and the technical side matter a great deal more, but even they are seduced by very special occasions and very special bottles, and when they describe those bottles you’ll always find some words that are more emotional than anything else. That’s what you’ve got to appeal to when you’re selling most things, and champagne is no exception. With champagne we have a head start, because the name itself conjures up pleasant images for most people. The trick is to build on that imagery and hone it down to specific events and experiences and stories, on a more human and individual level.
You do have to adapt to the people in front of you. Some of them will want the detail. Others are just enjoying champagne for the occasion and the buzz, and that’s fine.
The stories are already there
Champagne is full of them, and a lot of them are hiding in plain sight. Look at almost any vineyard in the region today and the vines stand in dead straight rows. It’s so normal that nobody gives it a second thought.
Before phylloxera, the insect that destroyed the Champagne vineyards at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, the vines were planted in what they called en foule, in a crowd. New vines sprang up from the previous year’s roots and came out of the soil here, there and everywhere, in no pattern whatsoever. You couldn’t work between them with horses, so everything was done far more laboriously and slowly.
When the vineyards were replanted, they were planted in rows, which let horses through and, much later, tractors. So in a strange way the devastation led to changes that have benefited everybody concerned, albeit after a great deal of suffering and over a long period of time.
There are little things like that dotted all over Champagne, and you’ll need them when you come to sell your champagne.
The part that’s yours
That history is there for anyone to use. The story you tell about your own champagne has to be yours, though. In my view the story, and indeed the whole concept of the champagne, has to reflect who you are.
Three of my current clients show three different ways of doing it. One is a businessman who owns and runs a great many businesses, and there’s a philosophy, a common thread, that runs through all of them. It matters to him, and he’s made sure it’s part of every aspect of his brand, including the way the champagnes he’s chosen come together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. Another client has named her brand after herself. A third chose a very unusual name that has no particular meaning in English or in French, except to him. His customers will almost certainly ask what it means, and he’ll be able to tell them in his own words why he chose it.
That’s why I ask every client, right from the very start, to think carefully about what it is about themselves they want the brand to reflect. Every one of the decisions that follow is built on that answer: the style of the champagne, the name, the packaging, so that it all hangs together. It also means they’re comfortable with what they end up with, and more confident when they go out and sell it.
It’s also why I strongly recommend that my clients come to Champagne at least once. When they present their champagne, they can talk about the whole experience as well as how it tastes, and they’ll be telling it first-hand.
If you’re thinking about a champagne brand of your own, the place to start is what you want it to say about you. Book a call and I’ll take you through how your project would run.