the bottle is an impenetrable black, with nothing to distract attention from the gold coils around it. The centerpiece is gold adorned with 500 tiny diamonds, swirling around a one-carat diamond and gemstone centrepiece. Depending on the bottle, this can be a ruby, an emerald or a sapphire. Designed in collaboration with French jeweller Mellerio, Piper-Heidsieck’s Rare Le Secret High Jewellery Champagne arrived on the market in October 2018. Three magnums are currently on sale at Harrods, for a mere £115,000 ($150,600) each.
Traditional European markets are declining, so the Champenoise are focusing on Asia, the US and other emerging markets – which means new approaches are needed.
Enter the bling.
New audiences
The global turnover for Champagne set a new record in 2018 of close to €4.9bn ($5.52bn), according to the Comité Champagne. “Demand is most dynamic beyond the European Union,” says Thibaut Le Mailloux, director of communication for the Comité Champagne. The figures speak for themselves: the USA takes 23.7m bottles (up 2.7%) and Japan 13.6m (5.5%). The Chinese triangle – China, Hong Kong and Taiwan – may only buy 4.7m bottles a year, but that represented growth of 9.1% in 2018.
New approaches are needed in traditional markets like the UK, where volume and value are declining, so targeting Millennials is a priority. “Generations Y and Z are increasingly important to Champagne,” says Françoise Peretti, director of the Champagne Bureau UK. “Last year, we ran a successful activation in the East End, backed on social media, called: ‘On Your Bike’, where we met and engaged with younger consumers. I frequently met 20 to 25-year-olds via our Champagne Masterclasses, and Comité Champagne ran an international influencers activation called ‘My Champagne’.”
While many brands use social media to engage Millennials, the concerted efforts to attract younger, tech-savvy drinkers is a relatively new tactic for the Champenoise. “Champagne as a category is in danger of alienating younger drinkers who typically align themselves with brands which give them a sense of freedom. Champagne’s image as it is right now does not do that,” says Belinda Stone, head of marketing at Castelnau Wine Agencies. “This is why we have repositioned Champagne Castelnau aesthetically with the aim of attracting the attention of the next generation of Champagne buyers (trade and consumers) while keeping the same quality cues that our existing customers are used to. Our new branding incorporates clean, eye-catching contemporary labels that should appeal to younger consumers.”
Others are going down a very different path. Firms such as Louis Roederer and Piper- and Charles Heidsieck have released tiny volumes of über-expensive, limited edition bottles. This approach to marketing Champagne, focusing on the lavish design of the bottle rather than the branded liquid inside, reached its zenith last year when Piper-Heidsieck launched two new limited edition deluxe cuvées, the Rare Le Secret High Jewellery and Rare Le Secret Goldsmith. The former is beyond exclusive; just 10 bottles of the zero dosage Champagne (1997 vintage) went on sale worldwide, including a diamond and sapphire edition in the US and a diamond version in France. So why do it?
“Back in 1997, our Rare Champagne cellar master Régis Camus had a moment of inspiration,” says Benoît Collard, global executive director for Piper-Heidsieck. “The harvest was difficult and the house had decided not to release a vintage, but he saw something unique in some of the base wines; so he decided to secretly blend a small quantity of this cuvée, ageing it in magnums within his private cellar.”
Ted Sandbach, owner of the Oxford Wine Company, has a different theory. “It’s simply fallout from the Armand de Brignac effect,” he says. “For years, the houses decried and distanced themselves from this type of bling marketing, but they’re realising that there is a willing audience for these lavish, exorbitantly expensive Champagnes. What’s inside the bottle hardly comes into it, at least from the buyer’s point of view.”
The groundwork was laid in 2013, when Louis Roederer teamed up with luxury designer Philippe di Méo to create a limited edition Jeroboam design for its prestige cuvée Cristal 2002. Two hundred of these Jeroboams went on sale with a global retail price of £18,000 each. Now it’s a growing trend. Family-owned Champagne house Edouard Brun launched a limited edition porcelain bottle costing €8,000 in October. The Aÿ-based producer collaborated with German porcelain producer Reichenbach and American artist James Rizzi on the bottle, designed to protect the liquid from ultraviolet light.
It’s a clear change of direction. The infamous interview Louis Roederer’s president Frédéric Rouzaud did with The Economist in 2006 is still talked about today. Asked whether Cristal’s association with the “bling lifestyle” of the rappers who drank it might sully the brand, Rouzaud replied: “That’s a good question. But what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it.” Cue a well-publicised boycott by rapper Jay-Z, and accusations of racism directed towards Rouzaud.
“It’s a newer approach to marketing, but in the context of Rare Le Secret I must admit that I have not spoken or written about Piper-Heidsieck at any other point in my career,” says Cedric Nicaise, wine director at the Eleven Madison Park restaurant, New York. “So maybe the new cuvée is accomplishing exactly what they were hoping it would – recognition.”
Peter Mitchell MW, the wine buyer for Laytons, the wholesale arm of London retailer Jeroboams, says, “These releases are attracting a new sort of consumer into their brand through the perceived rarity and expense of these wines, rather than through any intrinsic quality. I have not seen any benefit among more traditional Champagne customers.”
Meanwhile, sales of vintage Champagne remain static. Perrier-Jouët made the decision to stop producing a standard vintage expression altogether, instead focusing on the more lucrative Belle Epoque prestige cuvée. Similarly, venerable brand Ruinart no longer distributes its vintage R de Ruinart in the UK. “The entire industry has an issue with the vintage category – sales across all our markets of Moët & Chandon Grand Vintage are typically stable rather than rising, and in some cases are totally flat,” says Moët & Chandon’s chef de caves, Benoît Gouez. “In a sense, we’ve become a victim of our own success; the rising importance and hype surrounding prestige cuvées has blinded consumers to the extraordinary value offered by vintage Champagnes.”
Will Moët & Chandon and other houses follow Perrier-Jouët’s lead and abandon the vintage category? It’s too soon to tell, but in 2015, Moët & Chandon released a new prestige cuvée onto the market, the MCIII. For decades, Dom Perignon was marketed as Moët & Chandon’s signature prestige cuvée; however, in recent years it has been sold and promoted as a wholly separate brand. Therefore there was a gap to fill, and that niche was filled by MCIII. “Of course, we will continue to produce standard vintage expressions, but I wanted to launch a new luxury product that fits the spirit of the age,” says Gouez. “People no longer directly associate Dom Perignon with Moët & Chandon, so there was a gap to fill in creating a new prestige cuvée for the house.”
Not everyone approves of this development. “These new products are aimed at the super rich; a fickle market, at best,” says Anselme Selosse, owner of Jacques Selosse, a name synonymous with exclusive grower Champagne; Selosse’s entry level brand costs more than Krug’s Grande Cuvée.
Sommelier Roberto Della Pietra, brand ambassador for French Bubbles, adds: “People today want either Prosecco or the luxury associated with prestige bottling.”
The other end struggles
Smaller Champagnes producers are threatened by cheaper alternatives, from which the top end is largely immune. “Prosecco clearly poses a massive headache for Champagne; however, this threat is felt most acutely by the cheaper end of the Champagne spectrum, which explains the decline in sales of BOB [buyer own brands] across supermarkets,” says Nielsen analyst Alison Lock.
This year, the Syndicat Général des Vignerons de la Champagne (SGVC), which represents the region’s grower-winemakers, launched a new promotional campaign with the strap line: ‘Réservé à Toutes les Occasions’ (Reserved for All Occasions). The positioning is a dramatic departure from the traditional positioning of the Grande Marques. Maxime Toubart, president of the SGV, said, “We just want to say that Champagne is for all the people, for all the moments, not just for ceremonial occasions – that Champagne is wonderful, and you can make an occasion wonderful by drinking Champagne.”
This attempt to reposition Champagne as an accessible drink was decried by CIVC co-president Jean-Marie Barillère as a “desacralisation” of the category. He also made it clear that the big houses were not part of the SGVC’s campaign, which he dismissed as unhelpful to “value creation”. But growers who market lesser-known brands of Champagne have welcomed the initiative as a chance to promote Champagne in a fresh, innovative way, and increase its reach.
“Keeping the luxury image is more likely to benefit the Grande Marques, as it has always done, to the detriment of small Champagne growers,” says Kate Goodman, owner of Reserve Wines, a UK wine merchant. “From that perspective, putting a little distance from the luxury image of Champagne is likely to benefit the small growers and the independent sector.”
Naturally, opposition to the move from the Grande Marques is likely to remain, particularly as many of them are repositioning Champagne not as a celebratory tipple, but as a wildly expensive, luxurious commodity. The growers control the raw materials, but the conglomerates set the global marketing agenda. This is the modern paradigm: Champagne is becoming increasingly schismatic and polarised, with the marketing and distribution gap between growers and major producers set to widen. But from the perspective of the industry-defining Grande Marques, one thing is certain. Discounting and underselling have historically done the big brands no favours – Champagne, as the hype over Rare Le Secret so aptly demonstrates, must aim for the stars to compete in a changing world.
