It’s hard to talk about a champagne boom in India. And yet, interesting things are happening in the champagne market. At one level this makes sense. Champagne is the most famous wine in the world. Nearly everyone who drinks wine (and even many of those who hardly ever touch much alcohol) has drunk champagne at some stage, usually as soon part of a celebration.
The association of champagne with celebrations has worked to the benefit of the makers of champagne, making it the best-selling expensive wine in the world. But it has also worked against appreciation of the qualities of various champagnes.
But first the basics: champagne is a sparkling wine (usually white though some rose is also bottled) from the Champagne region of France. The French guard the name with a zealous intensity. Thanks to international treaties no other sparkling wine in the world can be called champagne.
There are, of course, many other good sparkling wines all over the world but they cannot be called champagne. Because champagne can be expensive, a market has now developed for cheaper sparkling wines such as Prosseco from Italy. Many countries, including India, produce their own sparkling wines but even those that are French owned (such as India’s Chandon) do not pretend to be champagne.
Such is the association of champagne with luxury that all good airlines will offer it in their premium classes (except Air India which, bizarrely enough, has abandoned champagne after decades to serve a cheaper, nasty and vulgar Italian sparkler in premium class cabins) and top restaurants will offer you a glass as an aperitif.
Some of this is just snobbery but the truth is that champagne is made by a complex method that requires several years while cheaper sparklers can be made through industrial processes. This gives champagne its cachet.
Much of the champagne we are likely to drink is a mix of several vintages, blended to a uniform house style. But there is also more expensive vintage champagne made from a single year’s harvest. And there are the premium champagnes made with the best grapes.
Though there are many champagne brands, the market is dominated by a single conglomerate LVMH which owns Moet et Chandon (which sells around 40 million bottles a year), Krug (smaller and more prestigious) and Veuve Clicquot. Most champagne houses have their own premium brands though the best known is Moet et Chandon’s Dom Perignon which, despite a vast production (about six million bottles) maintains an unusually high quality.
In recent years, the global focus has shifted away from the big brands to what are known as ‘growers champagnes’. This is more in keeping with the tradition in other French wine regions where the best wines (say, the great châteaus of Bordeaux) are bottled by the people who grow the grapes.
Champagne has always been the exception to this tradition because the big houses buy grapes from hundreds of farmers and then make the wine themselves. Now, the people who grow the grapes are refusing to sell to the big brands and are making their own champagne, often in very small quantities.
This has happened as some of the big houses are reeling from management failures of their own; this may be why you have heard so little recently from Moet which has been crippled by poor management. Also the rise of growers champagnes has coincided with a global shift towards more artisanal luxury: as good as Dom Perignon is, its vast production leads wine lovers to look for something more exclusive where they can identify the farmer and wine maker. This may be a little unfair. It’s much harder to make five million bottles worth of high quality premium champagne than it is to make a few thousand bottles from a single vineyard. On the other hand, the ubiquity of the big brands puts off wine lovers.
Several years ago, Sanjay Menon, India’s pioneering wine importer started bringing small production growers champagnes to India. The champagnes were outstanding but I wondered if he could compete with the big brands.
It turned out that India was not an exception to the global trend for small production wines and despite the fundamental illiteracy of most wine buyers at big hotels, the growers’ wines have been so successful that there is now a champagne boom at the top end of the market.
Inspired by this unexpected success, Sonarys, Menon’s company has launched a whole range of growers champagnes in India. I know a little bit about champagne but even I had never heard of many of them with such names as Francois Seconde, Andre Robert and Cedric Bouchard. These wines are named after the farmers who grow the grapes, tend the vines and then make highly individualistic wines. All of the champagnes I have tried from the Sonarys range are outstanding but I have to say that I am still a little shocked that Menon has found a market for them here.
Perhaps it’s a little bit like the story of whiskey where, as good as Blue Label is, the real top end growth is in the malt collection where discriminating buyers prefer little known but prestigious malt whiskies.
I guess the Indian liquor market is changing. And quality and craftsmanship are being valued over the glitter of big brands.
