Most people who write to me about creating a private champagne brand have already made a list.
It’s a sensible-looking list. Four or five houses whose names they know, the ones they’ve drunk at weddings and seen behind every hotel bar in every city they’ve worked in. The plan is to approach them one at a time and see who says yes.
I understand the instinct, and the houses on that list do make excellent champagne. But I can tell you how it goes, because I’ve watched people spend weeks on it. They’ll get through to somebody eventually. They’ll be passed to the right person eventually. And then they’ll be told no, by all of them, and nobody will explain why.
The reason has nothing to do with how good the pitch was.
Why the famous names say no
There are somewhere around 370 registered champagne houses. Between them they ship about 80 per cent or more of all the champagne that leaves the region, and they take a similar per cent of the money.
Read that the other way round and you’ve got your answer. A house at that scale can sell every bottle it’s able to make, under its own name, at its own price, in markets it already controls. There’s no version of your project that improves on that. Putting somebody else’s brand on their wine costs them capacity they’ve already sold, and gains them nothing they want.
That’s a commercial reality, and it’s the part people outside the trade don’t see. It isn’t snobbery and it isn’t a negotiating position. Nobody at the house is sitting there waiting to be persuaded.
The occasional exception is a well-known celebrity, and even then what usually happens is a joint promotion rather than a brand somebody else owns.
Why most of the growers can’t either
So you go the other way, down to the growers. There are more than 4,000 of them, which sounds like a lot of doors.
Here the obstacle is a different one. A grower champagne must, by law, be made only from grapes from vineyards the grower owns. Land in Champagne costs enough that most of them farm somewhere between four and six hectares, and as a general rule every bunch they pick goes into bottles bearing their own family name. They’ve spent two or three generations, or more, building that name. They aren’t looking to fill their press with somebody else’s.
Which leaves the cooperatives. Groups of grape growers who’ve pooled their resources to cover the cost of a press, a building and the sales and marketing expenses because they’ve neither the ambition nor the skills to sell under their own label, but they can work at real scale by selling bottles under the brand name of the cooperative. These cooperatives are potentially good partners for a private champagne brand, but by definition, most of them operate at large scale and won’t look at an order below ten thousand bottles.
There are obstacles in all three categories, and there are exceptions in all three.
What makes a maker say yes
This is the part I’d most like you to take away, because almost nobody says it out loud.
Some of the smaller makers can’t sell every bottle they could potentially produce. What they do instead is sign a contract with one of the big houses to supply a proportion of the grapes off their vineyards, and the big houses are always looking to secure their grape supply. Those arrangements are long established and they’re a normal part of how the region works.
Now think about what that means for you. That grower has capacity. It’s committed, but it’s committed to a contract he may well find less interesting than a private champagne brand. If a serious project is presented that offers real ongoing revenue for the foreseeable future, ending or reducing the supply contract and putting those grapes into your champagne can be the better business for him.
So the question that actually matters is which growers are currently selling some grapes to a big house, and might be persuaded to discuss your private brand project, or alternatively where do you find the relatively few growers who have larger estates and spare production capacity.
There’s a tailwind on that at the moment, as it happens. Champagne sales have been soft for a few years, particularly in France, so makers who sell mainly into the French market are looking for new business in a way they weren’t five years ago. Some makers who’d have refused this conversation in the past will now consider it.
The village I don’t send people to
I lived in Champagne for twenty years with my family, in one of the seventeen Grand Cru villages out of the 319 in the whole appellation. I know the makers there. I know their parents. They’re glad to hear from me when I call.
The obvious thing would be to walk every client I have down the road to a neighbour. It would be quicker for me and comfortable for everybody.
I’ve never worked that way, because what’s convenient for me isn’t the point. The great champagnes don’t all come from one village, and if I steered you towards mine you’d end up with whatever my neighbours could do rather than the thing you actually asked for. So I keep contacts across the whole region and I go looking wherever the answer happens to be, and I’m not affiliated with anybody. That independence is the only reason I can tell you honestly that a particular maker is wrong for you, and it’s a large part of what the relationship is actually worth.
The numbers that decide which door you can knock on
Volume is what opens and closes these conversations, so let me be clear about it.
Five hundred bottles is possible as a first order. The smaller the number of bottles, the higher the unit cost, because the investment is spread over fewer of them.
A thousand is what I usually suggest to start with. It doesn’t scare away any of the smaller makers, and it sits well within the capacity of every other sort of supplier except the cooperatives.
Ten thousand is often the floor if a cooperative is where you’re heading.
Three projects, three doors
Three of my current projects sit one in each category.
One client in Germany is working on something large, looking to order ten thousand bottles or more, so I went to a big cooperative based in Reims. They were interested in the project, and they made it clear they’d need an order of at least ten thousand before they could really commit to it. That’s within this client’s capacity to order, so I put it to him.
Another is working on a number of champagnes to create a whole range. For each champagne we’re looking to work with a small grower who has the capacity to take it on, and the quantities are a few thousand bottles of each.
The third is based in Africa, and for him I’ve been able to contact a maison that isn’t as historical as some of the major names but has large vineyard holdings and can satisfy his requirements.
Three clients, three categories, and not one of them would have found their maker from a list. Once the maker is found, the decisions that follow are a much longer list than the one they arrived with.
If you’ve a project in mind and you want to know which of those three doors it fits through, that’s a short conversation rather than a long email. I’ll tell you what’s realistic at the volume you’re thinking of, and whether the thing you want exists. Book a call.