Beyond the bubbles: Inside the lives of Champagne's cellar masters

The job of winemaking is a fairly simple concept: vinify a harvest.

For Champagne houses, though, being in charge of winemaking means much more than simply taking in the year’s grapes and guiding them to bottle, especially when it comes to the non-vintage wines which make up over 90% of the region’s production.

In Champagne, complexity begins in the vineyard.

The houses themselves own only 10% of the land, and the rest is divided between more than 16,000 individual growers, from which the houses buy grapes and wines.

The assembling of hundreds of these wines, coupled with the use and maintenance of multiple reserve wines from previous harvests, makes this one of the most demanding jobs in the field.

But what exactly does a cellar master – known in French as chef de caves – do?

Steering the ship

‘My goal is to stay true to the house style,’ says Séverine Frerson, cellar master at Perrier-Jouët.

As she illustrates, their first responsibility is to the wines themselves.

While they may not to get too heavily involved in the daily tasks of basic cellar management, they are the masterminds behind the all-important blending sessions once the base wines have fallen still after fermentation.

They work with a winemaking team to present blends composed of hundreds of individual wines to a committee, who vote on whether these fit the style and quality goals of the house.

In family-run houses such as Billecart-Salmon, cellar master Florent Nys presents potential blends to a committee that includes other winemakers and family members.

Elsewhere, in more corporate structures, the cellar master is more like a chief executive, having the last word on decision making: ‘I come with the blends 97% complete, and the remaining 3% we discuss as a committee,’ says Krug’s Julie Cavil.

‘In 20 years it has never happened that we are not unanimous.'

And when it comes to the final all-clear?

At Krug, it’s Cavil who has the casting vote: ‘I say OK!’ she laughs.

The committee is often called back for another job, too: deciding the dosage before release.

‘There’s always a tasting committee for the dosage,’ says Nys, who has built a mini-winery of 51 different dosage liqueurs based on different grape varieties, vinifications and ageing profiles.

The minutely calculated additions of these liqueurs is the final flourish from the hand of the winemaking team before the Champagne is shipped.

Masters of the reserves

Beyond the complexity of blending the year’s harvest lies a very Champagne-specific skillset.

Tank-by-tank knowledge of the reserves, the library of wines kept back from previous harvests for blending.

This is a house’s secret store cupboard. Its most prized wines which, depending on the way they are kept and the way they age, bring huge amounts of character to the final blends.

‘Knowledge of the reserves is critical to the job,’ says Laurent-Perrier cellar master Olivier Vigneron, who keeps 300 individual tanks from previous harvests.

Depending on the house’s approach, some reserves might be kept in smaller oak (faster maturing but full of character); some may be kept in large stainless steel, developing slowly for a decade or more; or some may even be part of a complex perpetual reserve system incorporating multiple harvests.

Consistency is key for Moët et Chandon’s Benoît Gouez, where the reserves, kept relatively young, are used more to ‘reinforce the potential of the wine’ than add noticeable aged characters into the wines, says Gouez.

Production size means that pre-blends (wines blended from multiple villages) are made before the final blends that make up wines such as Moët et Chandon’s Brut Imperial.

‘When you have a good year, I prefer to keep a lot of pre-blends in reserve,’ he says, confident that wines can be combined without any problematic ingredients tiring too early.

A weaker year, for example following a troublesome growing season, means more care is needed, and the reserves have to be specifically put together so as to be sure not to include wines which might not age well.

It’s a perfect example of the sort of crystal ball a cellar master holds, judging how these embryonic wines will behave after the lengthy, multi-stage process involved in turning them into Champagne.

In front of the cameras

The idea of a 19th-century cellar master being asked to sail the seas, meet clients, develop business and present their wines to markets would have been preposterous to the cellar-dwellers of the time.

Today, though, the role is increasingly ambassadorial.

‘I like to say it has made me a collector of shoes,’ Krug’s Cavil says, ‘one moment I need my boots to visit the growers. The next I am in heels to talk to journalists, and then I’m in flat shoes to go to Paris and discuss the budget!’

Some, such as Louis Roederer’s Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, are equally at home in front of a masterclass or press tasting as they are in their own cellars.

Other houses such as Laurent-Perrier, Pol Roger, Taittinger, Billecart-Salmon or Deutz, maintain a more traditional role, with cellar masters rarely seen in front of the camera.

The demands placed upon cellar masters to emulate the likes of Lécaillon – boundlessly travelling the world representing both technical and communication prowess – aren’t suited to everyone.

Although it’s normal for cellar masters to play ‘musical chairs’ – moving between different houses through the course of their career – some cellar masters in the prime of their working lives (at houses such as Bollinger and Charles Heidsieck) have quit the game entirely over the last two years.

A team sport

What’s clear is that, despite being thrust into the limelight as individual geniuses, winemaking itself is a team sport at this scale.

At Ruinart, the winemaking team even has its own Instagram account, where they discuss the more technical aspects of the job.

Ruinart's cellar master Caroline Fiot, previously a member of the wider winemaking team, says that technicality rests at the heart of the role.

‘I need to keep feeding my skills, to be innovative,’ she says, ‘I’ve worked on everything from microbiology, strains of yeast and massal selection, to singularisation of the vineyards and microvinifications’.

Even for a born technician, though, it’s hard to complain when days in the laboratory are broken up with a good deal of the glitz and glam of a Grande Marque like Ruinart: ‘It’s 360 degrees, and there’s no routine,’ says Fiot.

‘But I love this job!’

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