“I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad,” Madame Lily Bollinger (1899-1977) observed. “Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory.” As the final constituency results come in, we’ll all inevitably find ourselves in some combination of those four states.
If you’re sad, I hope you’re at least in good company – and that you’re as well supplied with the wonderful French mind-expander as I was this week, with a busload of Spectator readers on tour to Reims, Epernay and Aÿ. But I suspect you’ve also had more than your fair share of media attention for the spectacle of second-rate politicians sucking up to, dog-whistling and lying about tax plans. And since the elections at home and in France have temporarily taken business out of the news, I hope you’ll forgive me if I drop my armour once and for all and write a column that’s (almost) exclusively about champagne.
Seduction technique
Of course, I mean Champagne as a case study in resilient entrepreneurship and brand projection, regardless of changes in the political and physical climate: I’m not just going to brag about how much I drank. But I’ll start by confessing that after tasting 40 wines in four days, I can’t claim to be an expert. For example, I preferred the slightly nutty Henri Chauvet Brut Blanc de Noirs (£29.95 in the UK) to Bollinger’s supposedly fantastic La Côte aux Enfants 2012 (£1,060 – yes, that’s a bottle). Does that make me a Roast beef vulgar, or is it a perfect illustration of the myth-making that gives champagne its commercial power?
La Côte aux Enfants is ‘the realization of the visionary spirit of Jacques Bollinger’, who was Lily’s husband. The Blanc de Noirs is the unspun product of the fourth generation Damien Chauvet and his wife Mathilde, from a small cellar under their house in the village of Rilly la Montagne. If differences in taste in this game are small and subjective, price differences can be enormous – and it’s all about image.
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Bollinger prefers to associate itself with James Bond rather than with other famous British clients such as Patsy van AbFab. Giant producer Moët et Chandon, part of luxury goods group LVMH, is all about shameless bling. Pol Roger makes much of the fact that Winston Churchill drank the lifetime equivalent of 42,000 bottles of its bottles. Every house has its own high-flown talk about the spirit of each wine. And by the time you hit 40, you know that much of it is nonsense – but clever nonsense that makes drinkers feel good and protects champagne from all the newcomers to the wider world of wine. It’s the most brilliant seduction technique of all, and one that businesses in every sector, everywhere, should learn from.
Beautiful world
Bizarrely, we saw almost nothing of the French elections: barely a poster, no street campaigning, just a disjointed protest by farmers (with very expensive tractors) outside Reims town hall. The brasseries were busy – I recommend Boulingrin in Reims for authenticity and La Banque in Epernay because I like eating in converted banking halls – but I didn’t get the sense that the diners were deeply engaged in political debate; the only television footage of violence related to the vote came from the Pacific outpost of New Caledonia. As for French interest in British politics, there was none at all, unless you count a remarkably good impersonation – by a Brimoncourt salesman – of Boris Johnson.
Brimoncourt is an old champagne label that has recently been revived in Aÿ by Alexandre Cornot, a former tax lawyer and naval officer. His brand emphasis is on stylish informality and his target audience is the Parisian beautiful world and the British equivalent, well represented by our bus group. I asked him what it’s like to be an entrepreneur in a sector dominated by established giants, under the burden of regulation that hits all the smaller French companies. The collective image of champagne, on which the big houses spend so much money, is actually useful for start-ups too, he says. But when it comes to bureaucracy and employment law: ‘It’s like someone else has their foot on your brake pedal all the time.’
A bright future?
This made me think of the 100-plus sparkling wine companies that have sprung up in England over the past 30 years or so, including two that are spin-offs from the Champagne houses of Taittinger and Pommery. The rising quality of English wine is well known, but will the fledgling industry ever be able to pull off a collective sales pitch that can match the eloquent self-confidence of the French?
When I see that Chapel Down, the largest English producer, has recently floated its shares on the Aim market, I wonder whether our local wine entrepreneurs – like many of their colleagues in digital technology and life sciences – will be tempted to make a relatively quick buck, rather than follow the ‘patient capital’ model of multi-generational Champagne dynasties.
But there is a much more pressing question for today: whether a new government is about to impose oppressive new layers of regulation on every promising pocket of British innovation, including the drinks sector. Writing in the Financial TimesFormer Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell cites as an example of clever deregulation the repeal of the restrictive 1751 Gin Act in 2007, which had spurred a raft of gin brand start-ups. He goes on to propose setting up ‘an independent Innovation Unit’ within government to promote ‘forward thinking’ and ‘identify barriers’ to the kind of business development that will tackle ‘the UK’s dismal productivity record’.
Behind O’Donnell’s careful Mandarin language, his intention was clear: don’t let incoming ministers stifle entrepreneurship. I raise my glass to that message – and raise it again, quickly refilled in the Lily Bollinger spirit, to Spectator cosiness, whatever the new era brings.
