If an RM champagne producer is doing well, if his sales are increasing and his brand is getting fairly well known, sooner or later he’s going to find that he’s reached the maximum production capacity that his own vineyards can supply.

There are only a few options available in this situation:

One is to accept that the company cannot increase its sales any further and try to be content with that situation, but that’s not very satisfactory for an ambitious person who wants to continue to grow and prosper.

Another option is to raise the price of the limited number of bottles that can be produced. That strategy could work, but there is presumably a limit to what people will pay.

A third option is to buy more vineyards, but at an average price of well over 1 million euros per hectare and perhaps double that for a hectare of prime, Grand Cru, vineyard, you need very deep pockets, or a very understanding bank manager and that’s assuming that the vineyards were ever to come on the market.

So, that leaves buying in grapes as the only remaining solution and that’s why some Grower Champagne producers change the legal status of their company from RM and set themselves up as NM.

However that doesn’t mean that they suddenly turn into industrial giants producing millions of bottles. Far from it; that’s the last thing they want. Growth has to be slow and controlled because it’s all very well making extra bottles of champagne, but you still have to sell them and you also have to invest in more vats, more storage space and goodness knows what else, so becoming an NM is not a decision to be taken lightly.

So several NM are still very small-scale operations where everything is still overseen personally by the owner who continues to lavish the same skills and pride on the champagne as he or she ever did.

Here are a couple of excellent examples of what I mean and incidentally, some first-class champagnes too if you ever get the chance to try them.

Pehu Simonnet

David Pehu buys a small quantity of grapes from his wife who, thanks to an inheritance from her family, owns a plot of vines in a very desirable area which she has kept in her own name. To buy these grapes from his wife David has to be legally set up as an NM. Does that mean he has overnight become a giant industrial complex producing champagne on a massive scale? No of course not; it’s still him out in the vineyards cultivating the vines and picking the grapes; the NM label is merely a legal peculiarity and for all intents and purposes his champagnes are still Grower Champagnes.

De Sousa

Erick De Sousa’s answer to the supply problem was to create a second company and a second brand called Zoémie de Sousa (as opposed to the original brand which is just called De Sousa).

For many years Erick has managed vineyards for his neighbours and he has used exactly the same methods in his neighbours’ vineyards that he employs in his own. However, now he has an NM company, he can buy his neighbours’ grapes and use them to make his new brand of champagne.

Veuve J. Lanaud

Another small family owned producer run by two young brothers who want to grow their business and to do that they opted for NM status, but it’s still just the two of them who do almost all the work in the vineyards and in the winery

So the moral of the story, as with so much in Champagne, is that sometimes you need to look beyond what might seem obvious to get the whole story and to get that story do come back to my blog soon and discover more of the secrets of champagne

All the best from Champagne

Jiles