Any drinks buyer knows the importance of a good relationship with their suppliers. It not only means they like working together, it means a guaranteed, consistent level of a quality product they can supply their customers.
The Wine Society’s partnership with Champagne’s Alfred Gratien has a hard commercial logic to it. Gratien make The Society’s Brut NV label – the same cuvée as its own brut NV. The Wine Society buys around 80,000 bottles of it a year, about a third of the total production. This is the Society’s best-selling Champagne, a third of its overall Champagne sales.
Alfred Gratien's cellar master Nicolas Jaeger with The Wine Society's Champagne buyer Sarah Knowles MW celebrate the 120-year anniversary between the two companies. Photograph Blinky Nixon
“It’s our most important supplier relationship,” says the Society’s Champagne buyer, Sarah Knowles MW.
The Wine Society first sourced Alfred Gratien Champagne in 1906. That wine is still known as “Cuvée 33” – its number on the Wine Society’s list, since it was only the thirty-third wine it had offered its members. Alfred Gratien had founded the Champagne house in 1864, setting up business on Rue Maurice Cerveaux in Epernay; it is still there now.
Ten years later, he teamed up with Jean-Albert Meyer, starting production of sparkling wine in Saumur. On Gratien’s death in 1885, the house’s name changed to Gratien & Meyer. It has produced sparkling Loire wines under that name ever since, though the Epernay and Saumur operations are separate. In 2000 it was acquired by German group Henkell Freixenet.
When the Wine Society came to Rue Cerveaux in 1906, production was overseen by young cellar master Gaston Jaeger, appointed the previous year. Jaeger stayed in the job until 1951, when it passed to his son, Charles, who then forwarded the baton to his son, Jean-Pierre, in 1966.
After 41 years in the role, Jean-Pierre then passed the job to his own son, Nicolas Jaeger, in 2007. Nicolas, the fourth generation of his family to work these cellars, has now been at Gratien for 36 years, 17 of them working alongside his father.
Jaeger père spoke no English: his son recalls him exclaiming “la ween [wine]!” when a fax from the Wine Society came through.
Continuity and consistency
Alfred Gratien cellar master Nicolas Jaeger is the fourth generation of his family to work for the Champagne house
So there is continuity in Gratien’s winemaking. Indeed Jaeger says that his grandfather wouldn't have difficulty working a vintage at Gratien today in the sense that the key building blocks to the house style have not changed, despite innovations such as barrel room temperature and humidity control, machine riddling and a state-of-the art bottling and disgorgement line.
The house owns just 1.56ha of grand cru and premier cru vineyards, sourcing grapes from around 100 growers. Unusually, none of their Champagnes undergo malolactic fermentation, preserving their acidity. They are also still fermented in oak barriques, an approach used nowadays by only a handful of high-end producers including Krug, Bollinger and Jacques Selosse. The bottles are then matured on lees for at least 48 months. Gratien’s cellars hold over 1.3 million bottles.
“I’m not a fan of zero dosage,” says Jaeger. “Sugar has its place.”
Going against the current vogue for “brut zero” Champagnes, he says he sees a consumer reaction against wines that are too dry. Nevertheless, the average dosage in Gratien’s wines has dropped two to three grammes over his career, he says, to 9-10g/litre.
The years have seen continuity in the relationship with the Wine Society too. Marcel Orford-Williams, now retired, was Champagne buyer from 1983-2013. He remembers visiting Gratien in 1987 with then-chief wine buyer Sebastian Payne: they were served Champagnes from their birth years, 1955 and 1947.
Ups and downs
Relationships with growers are key for The Wine Society. Seeing a producer go from strength to strength is a thrill for buyers; conversely, dropping them can be painful.
Orford-Williams tells the story of how one French winemaker he had taken on switched the vineyards he leased, producing less good wine. In the end, Orford-Williams had no choice but to tell him that the Wine Society couldn’t continue buying his wine.
“I was sitting in his kitchen with him and his wife, and they were both in tears,” says Orford-Williams. “It was awful – I still remember it.”
The Wine Society is releasing some special Alfred Gratien Champagnes and Crémant de Loire wines to market the 120 year partnership. Photography Blinky Nixon
Knowles has been Champagne buyer since 2017. She is conscious of the importance of the Gratien relationship, but says that it comes down to openness and a focus on quality.
“We can’t play deep discounts and pretend that we’re going to inflate sales one year and not the next,” says Knowles. “We’ve got 120 years of playing with a straight bat. We hope that we’ve got the best pricing we can, but we have very open conversations… And we always pay on time.”
Since 1906 the Wine Society also has also sold Gratien & Meyer Crémant de Loire (as it has been known since the appellation’s creation in 1975).
Wine Society Loire buyer Matthew Horsley says that their sales of crémant are up 33% in the past year, maintaining an upward trend over recent years.
“A bit of celebration at a modest price is quite important at the moment,” he explains. “And I think people are getting around to the fact that the wines are bloody good.”
Yet the Society has not made any particular marketing push on crémant: the growth has been “entirely organic”, says Horsley. Indeed the sparkling category in general is a growth area for the Society, while their sales of Champagne have been rising as well for the past two years: growth in sparkling sales hasn’t come at the cost of champagne.
“We know that members come back time and time again for the Champagne and for the house style,” says Knowles. “As a Champagne buyer of nearly 20 years, this is the Champagne I chose for my own wedding.”
That’s as big a vote of confidence in this long supplier relationship as anyone could wish.
- Celebration 120th anniversary cuvées of selected Gratien vintage Champagnes and Crémant de Loire will go on sale from July 6 – details at https://www.thewinesociety.com/
- Andrew Neather blogs at //aviewfrommytable.substack.com/. His recent award-winning book with Jane Masters MW, Rooted in Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, is published by Academie du Vin Library.
