The Champagne Snobbery We Don’t Talk About
Grower Champagne earned its moment. But somewhere along the way, dismissing Big Champagne became de rigueur. Moët & Chandon may be the most instructive example of what this mindset gets wrong.
For most of my wine career, grower Champagne – that is, wines made by producers who farm their own vineyards and bottle under their own labels, rather than blending broadly-sourced fruit in the grande marque model – has been the darling of the sparkling wine world. It’s what sommeliers pour when they want to display their certifications. It’s what “wine people” talk about when they want to showboat their street cred. God forbid you bring either of them a bottle of Veuve.
To be fair, grower Champagne deserves plenty of praise, and the attention the category has gotten over the years has helped pull Champagne away from pure prestige branding and put it back into conversations about farming, place, and producer identity.
But sometimes shifts can turn into overcorrections, which end up calcifying into orthodoxy. This has been the case with Champagne, where, at least among certain audiences, “grower” has become synonymous with “authentic,” while “big” Champagne houses get treated as over-marketed and too familiar to be worthy of serious attention. It’s as if, somewhere along the way, we got so distracted by caviar bumps, hip hop moguls, and polo matches that we forgot about the wine itself. But this binary is more problematic than useful.
While grower Champagne can offer some of sparkling wine’s most singular, site-transparent and perhaps even emotionally charged wines, the grandes maisons are doing something no less demanding. To be able to work at the level of composition – blending across villages, crus, grape varieties, reserve wines, and vintages – then shape all of that into something beautiful, recognizable, and, dare I say it, alive is equally impressive. Unfortunately, familiarity can make this type of winemaking look easy, and scale makes it look impersonal. But neither is the same thing as simplicity.
The Rigor Hiding in Plain Sight
Moët & Chandon may be the most obvious example of this trap. It’s easily one of the most recognizable names in Champagne and, for that reason, one of the easiest to pigeonhole. The label is so culturally overexposed that it often gets discussed as a symbol rather than as a wine. I recently got to spend some time with the house in Épernay, walking (and working) among the vines, at its Essentia conservatory, and inside the Mont Aigu winery. Through the experience, I was reminded that conversations around “proper Champagne” can sometimes miss the rigor hiding in plain sight. Moët & Chandon spans 1,300 hectares across six estates, with roughly 50 percent classified as Grand Cru and another 25 percent as Premier Cru. In a region where those categories account for around 15 percent of total vineyard land each, this is not an inconsequential detail.
At Mont Aigu, Moët’s modern winemaking facility, this access – and what they do with it – is revealed. During harvest, the team says they can receive close to 100 tanks a day, comprising 500 different qualities of juices. The winery has capacity for 400,000 hectoliters, around 19 kilometers of rigid pipelines, and around 2,000 automatic valves. Fermentation is monitored minute by minute through captured CO2, allowing the winemaking team to track and adjust the process with incredible precision. Out of context, these figures float like bubbles in a glass of Champagne but they’re not meant to paint a picture of factory-esque sterility and sameness. They’re meant to underscore the difficulty of managing diversity without losing identity.
For a certain type of wine enthusiast, blending still carries a faint whiff of compromise, as though a wine’s truth must always be singular, fixed, and utterly drowning in terroir. But Champagne has always been fluent in the language of assemblage. It’s not the absence of identity. In many ways, it is its identity.
Benoît Gouez, Moët & Chandon’s Cellar Master, uses a term for this razor-sharp care: technicity. “In my vision of winemaking, there is a balance between technicity and sensitivity,” he says. “I’m really into precision. It’s super important to me. But, at the same time, every single decision I make in terms of creation is based on blind tasting … I do my best to use both and I think both are needed to achieve greatness. If you rely only on technicity, you will make good, but never great. But technicity is needed.”
His perspective gets at something the grower-versus-big-house debate usually misses. The issue isn’t whether or not technical control is romantic. It isn’t. I myself have often wondered if a wine can be too perfect. The issue is whether technical control, reserve wine depth, and blending prowess can produce wines of complexity, character, and genuine pleasure. In Champagne, the answer is obviously yes.
Scale Isn’t the Opposite of Soul
Sergio Licea, co-owner of Flor Wines in Portland, Oregon, has a similar take. “Yes, we love grower Champagne too, but there is this perception that the wine is somehow better because of the producer’s involvement from vineyard to bottle, which is simply not the case,” he says. “I think the consistency of the grandes marques is underappreciated. For us, we view the grandes marques like a signature dish that’s always on the menu and the main reason you try or revisit a restaurant. You may get tired of it if it’s all that you order, but it is undeniably the gateway for discovering the other menu options.”
The grower movement made some drinkers more attentive to farming and a sense of place, which is great for any beverage category. But, like wineries touting their “clean” credentials somehow signifying that all other wineries are “dirty” by default, this created a lazy set of assumptions. Some of the most serious long-term work in Champagne today is being done by houses with scale to think well into the future.
At Essentia, Moët’s conservatory project created in 2022, the house says they are preserving biodiversity across Champagne’s core grapes by maintaining 600 different individual selections each of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Meunier, all sourced from older vineyards planted before 1970, before the era of clonal selection. The team is studying them for differences in bunch size, leaf shape, growth habit, disease resilience, ripening patterns, and response to drought and frost. “[Essentia] is truly a library of everything we can find, and everything we could find in the past,” explained one team member as we explored the conservatory. “The idea is to preserve it here, study it, and adapt our vineyards for the future.”
Essentia forms part of Natura Nostra, Moët’s broader biodiversity program. The team describes regenerative agriculture as “the only viable path” if Champagne is to keep producing wines for centuries to come. To that end, they have planted 1.5 kilometers of hedgerows as part of Natura Nostra and say that biodiversity planning is now integrated into every vineyard replanting cycle, every 40 to 50 years. It’s not that these large Champagne houses are thus morally superior. But it does mean that we need to think twice when we assume scale automatically means being less connected to the land.
Two Categories, One Ecosystem
Blaine Ashley, longtime sparkling wine ambassador and founder of New York Champagne Week, argues that the relationship between growers and grandes marques is less oppositional than many think. “I love grower Champagne for its terroir-driven diversity, while grandes marques blend across many plots to deliver consistent, signature styles and a marketing muscle that elevates the entire Champagne category,” she says. “When consumers keep buying big brands, they indirectly support the ecosystem – funding events, education, and visibility that help small growers and reach new drinkers.” In building New York Champagne Week, she says she began with smaller houses, “but to scale and promote Champagne 365 days a year, we ultimately needed larger partners.” That partnership model, she adds, creates room to champion both categories.
Gouez, who came to Champagne from outside of the region, admitted that before working there he, too, misunderstood what the category really was. “From outside of Champagne, I had a feeling that Champagne was a global category with very little diversity … people were doing the same wine every year, so I couldn’t perceive the challenge.” Once on the inside, he says he discovered something else entirely. “Champagne is the wine region in the world that offers the most diversity in styles.”
Perhaps this is the most important point. What the grower movement nailed was that Champagne is not a monolith. But what parts of the wine world get wrong is imagining that the solution to a monolith is a new hierarchy. If you only celebrate growers, you miss one of Champagne’s deepest expressions of craftsmanship: the art of building a house style that is neither static, nor generic, but assembled from hundreds of decisions most drinkers never see.