What’s in a name
How the farmers of Champagne eventually made their way onto the bottle, in spite of one or two challenges
For much of Champagne’s effervescent history, growing grapes and making Champagne were two quite separate businesses.
The growers owned the vineyards. They were farmers. They planted, pruned, tended and harvested the vines. The Champagne houses bought those grapes, made the wines, blended them, aged them and, perhaps more importantly, sold them to a world they had rather successfully seduced with marketing: Champagne was chic, Champagne was for celebrations.
That arrangement still shapes Champagne today. Growers own and tend nearly 90% of Champagne’s vineyard area, while the houses remain responsible for more than two thirds of Champagne sales and the overwhelming majority of exports.
So how did one of the world's most famous wines end up with the farmers and the famous names so distinctly separated?
Champagne problems
Making sparkling Champagne was never particularly straightforward.
When the first Champagne houses began to emerge during the eighteenth century, producing sparkling wine required technical knowledge, expensive equipment, strong bottles, enormous cellars and a lot of nerve. Bottle fermentation was unpredictable. Bottles frequently exploded. Wine needed to sit in cellar for extended periods before there was anything to sell.
The Comité Champagne rather neatly describes the early houses as businesses requiring both genuine know-how and “substantial means”. Emphasis on the “substantial means”.
A farmer with a few hectares of vines could sell grapes every harvest and receive an income. Turning those grapes into Champagne meant tying up money in bottles, cellars and stock for years. You needed someone with resources.
Enter the merchant houses.
They also became extremely good at something Champagne would eventually make its calling card: blending.
The great houses learned to assemble wines from different vineyards, grapes and vintages to create a recognisable house style. The weather might change, but the bottle bearing the house name would remain reassuringly familiar.
By the nineteenth century, the great Champagne names were being carried through royal courts, restaurants and fashionable dining rooms across Europe and beyond. Champagne became not simply a wine but a symbol.
Some very clever marketing helped (you might recall “Champagne Charlie”, aka Charles Heidsieck, who advertised himself and his Champagne in America in rather spectacular fashion, before briefly being arrested as a spy during the American Civil War, going bust, and then finding a fortune via land in Colorado he’d received as payment for an unpaid debt. Normal).
The growers supplied the raw material for one of France's greatest exports, but for the most part their names remained back in the villages.
Riots, destruction, and other typically French pursuits
At the end of the nineteenth century phylloxera arrived, and proceeded to tear through Europe’s vineyards.
The insect devastated Champagne's vineyards, forcing growers to pull out vines and replant onto resistant American rootstocks. For small growers, it was financially devastating. By 1898 growers and houses had begun organising together to tackle the crisis, and the growers established their own Syndicat Général des Vignerons in 1904.
But the question of who controlled Champagne was becoming fraught.
Demand was growing. Grapes were scarce. Some merchants sourced grapes from outside the region, while growers complained about low grape prices and what they saw as fraudulent Champagne.
By 1911 the argument spilled into the streets.
Growers rioted. Cellars were attacked, barrels smashed and wine poured down the drain. In the Aube, protests also erupted over whether the region itself would even be included within the official boundaries of Champagne. One banner from the demonstrations read Champagne ou la Mort. Champagne or death.
It sounds wonderfully dramatic a century later, yet the issue underneath it was serious. If Champagne was valuable because of where it came from, then the people farming that place wanted their stake in it recognised.
Rules surrounding Champagne's origin were progressively established in the early twentieth century, the AOC system arrived in the 1930s, and in 1941 the Comité Champagne was formed to represent houses and growers together.
None of this immediately created the grower Champagne movement we know now. But it established something fundamental: the vineyard mattered.
Time to make some wine (or: in which the farmers of Champagne engage in a radical concept)
Even then, most growers continued doing what their families had done for generations. They grew grapes and sold them.
According to the Comité Champagne, until the middle of the twentieth century almost all Champagne growers were still supplying fruit to the houses rather than making Champagne themselves.
The big change came from the 1950s onwards.
Cooperatives expanded throughout the region, giving growers access to presses, tanks, cellars and winemaking equipment that would have been prohibitively expensive to own individually. Suddenly, making the stuff themselves became possible.
Some growers went a step further and handled the entire process themselves.
On a Champagne label you can spot them by two little letters: RM, for Récoltant Manipulant.
An RM grows the grapes, makes the Champagne and sells it under their own label using grapes from their own vineyards.
It seems completely normal when you put it like that. In Burgundy, Barolo or the Mosel, we hardly bat an eyelid at the farmer making wine from their grapes.
Yet in Champagne it represented a substantial change.
The grower's name was finally on the bottle.
You’re so special
One of the clearest signs of growing confidence came in 1971.
A group of grower producers formed what became the Club Trésors de Champagne, the first association in Champagne established by growers specifically around producing wines of exceptional quality.
Their top wine would carry the words Spécial Club.
The important thing was not simply that these were small producers. Their stated ambition was to show individual personality and the particular character of their terroir.
That language sounds very ordinary now.
In 1971, it was radical.
Champagne had spent generations perfecting the art of making the vineyard disappear into the blend. Here were growers suggesting that perhaps the vineyard itself was what we should be tasting.
The grower becomes the point
By this stage, putting the grower’s name on the bottle was no longer quite so radical. What was changing was how those names, villages and vineyards were being understood.
Paul Bara is a neat example. The family had been tied to Bouzy and its vineyards for generations before beginning to bottle Champagne under their own name in the 1950s. Today, those same vineyards produce everything from their Brut Réserve through to a Spécial Club bottling.
Further south, Serge Mathieu tells a different version of the same story. The family can trace its history in the Côte des Bar back centuries, but it was Serge who began making the family’s own Champagne in 1970. Rather than disappearing into somebody else’s blend, the fruit of Avirey-Lingey could now carry the Mathieu name.
That was increasingly the appeal of grower Champagne. It was not simply about who made the wine. It was about being able to follow that wine back to a family, a village and a particular patch of Champagne.
By the 1990s and particularly the 2000s, adventurous importers, sommeliers and restaurants began carrying these wines further afield.
Champagne drinkers started learning village names.
Avize. Cramant. Bouzy. Ambonnay. Aÿ. Mesnil.
The conversation was changing from which brand? to which place?
So what the hell is Grower Champagne?
The simplest answer is Champagne made by the people who grow the grapes.
But there is a little more to it than the letters RM.
RM is a legal producer category, not a quality classification. It does not mean that every grower Champagne is brilliant, natural, organic, single vineyard or particularly small. Equally, being a Champagne house does not mean a wine cannot be vineyard driven.
Then you have producers such as J.B. Hery, which sits on the other side of those two little letters. Hery is officially NM, Négociant-Manipulant: Jean-Benoît Hery owns vineyards of his own, but also buys fruit from other growers to make his wines. It is a useful reminder that the initials tell you how a Champagne producer operates, but not necessarily everything about the scale, philosophy or personality behind the wine.
Likewise, many of the great houses increasingly make wines from individual vineyards and villages.
So grower Champagne should not really be treated as a battle between little virtuous farmers and enormous faceless corporations.
It is more interesting than that.
At its best, grower Champagne gives us another way of looking at the region.
The great house tradition asks: how can we blend different places and years into something greater and consistently recognisable?
The grower tradition often asks: what happens if we let this particular place speak?
Both can produce extraordinary Champagne.
They simply start with different questions.
That is what makes grower Champagne so interesting to drink.
Champagne is not one enormous chalky vineyard surrounding Reims. It is hundreds of villages and nearly 281,000 individual vineyard plots, spread across markedly different soils, slopes and exposures.
Once growers started bottling those differences rather than blending all of them away, Champagne came into sharper focus. And perhaps that is why grower Champagne has found such an audience. It has not replaced the great houses, nor should it. Instead, it has added another layer to a region we thought we already knew.
For generations we learned Champagne through names. Now, increasingly, we are learning it through people and places.
