When people first think about who’ll make their private champagne brand, they usually expect the choice to come down to the champagne itself: how it tastes, what it costs and how many bottles the maker can supply. Those things matter, of course, and we go through every one of them carefully. In my view, though, the person you’ll be dealing with matters just as much.
Whoever makes your champagne becomes, in effect, your supplier. They’ll make your first order and every order after it, for as long as you keep buying, so you’ll be coming back to the same people year after year. Finding a maker who’ll take on someone else’s brand at all takes time and a wide network of contacts, and once you’ve found one, you’re choosing a person as much as a champagne.
Champagne has plenty of larger-than-life characters. Some of the makers I work with have been in the champagne business since childhood and have no ambition to do anything else for the rest of their lives. One maker I know puts on tastings that are usually incredibly memorable, because the champagne just flows and flows as one bottle after another is opened for the customers to taste.
Many of my clients are fascinated by the history of champagne and by the families we meet along the way. Every so often, one conversation shows exactly why it matters who’s sitting on the other side of the table.
The man who bought a forest
Not so long ago I visited one of these makers with a client. He’s a sort of larger-than-life character himself, rarely seen without his dog, or dogs, and an avid hunter, and he’s been in the champagne business since he was a child.
During the visit my client asked whether there was any hunting in the Champagne area, because he was an occasional hunter himself back home. That was enough. The two of them struck up a great conversation about hunting, and my client mentioned that he’d recently bought a membership of a hunting club.
The champagne maker turned round and said, “Well, I actually bought myself a forest.”
He wasn’t joking. I believe it was about 100 hectares of woodland, and he now has his own private hunting grounds there.
I can’t remember exactly what my client said when he heard that, but I do remember that he was fairly impressed, and that he realised he was talking to a man he could connect with. It brought a warmer atmosphere to the meeting straight away. From that moment on they had something in common, and they were laughing and smiling together, almost like old buddies.
My client went on to work with him, and the project is under way.
It’s an unusual story, and it came out in a one-to-one conversation, the way these things do. It was totally unexpected. But it added a certain magic and a feeling of connection to the whole visit, and it brought my client and the champagne maker that much closer together.
It’s one of the reasons I strongly recommend that my clients come to Champagne at least once. You only find out that a champagne maker owns a forest by sitting down with him.
What the big brands can’t offer
In many cases, the fascination of champagne lies in the people who make it. The more you know about their lives, and the more you get to know them, the more real it all seems. It gives a dimension that you simply don’t get with the large international brands, which don’t have the same sort of larger-than-life, eccentric, idiosyncratic characters to meet.
When you create your own champagne brand, those people come with it. Whenever you pour your champagne for friends or customers, you’ll be able to tell them who made it, because you’ll have met them, sat at the same table and heard their stories for yourself.
If you’re thinking about a champagne brand of your own, the first people I’d want you to meet are the ones who could make it. Book a call and I’ll take you through how your project would run.