Moët gets good press and bad but it important not to lose sight of the fact that Moët & Chandon is a hugely significant champagne with origins hailing from 1743. To many, Moët IS champagne!
Moët’s parent, LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), is a global conglomerate of premium brands, headed by the formidable Bernard Arnault. In champagne parlance, LVMH’s houses (brands) include: Moët, Dom Perignon, Krug, Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart and Mercier. In aggregate, between 20-25% of all champagne production falls under the LVMH umbrella.
What is interesting is the way Moët looks to grow its image and market share as the World emerges from recession. Category sponsorship (champagne) of the 82nd Oscars this year might be a master-stroke.
We note that Moët chose to give away golden jeroboams
(or are they bigger?) to specific Oscar winners - which at Park Lane we know our customers also find popular as personalised champagne gifts…
AND - Moet also personalised bottles (or are they mags?) for each category winner. Not quite a fully personalised label (but then that wouldn’t be brand reinforcement) but the closest they could get. Now this is the thing: it is exactly where we wanted to come from back in 1994 when we started out - personalising a well known brand - but we couldn’t find a house to play ball with us and that included Moët which was a preferred partner.
I doubt Moët will introduce this concept wholescale in the UK but at little old Park Lane maybe we should be content by remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…
Arguably the World’s most important brand of champagne recognises the importance of personalising the bottles for the end recipient; hmmm - now where have we heard that before?!
Beware 
At the beginning of 2009 (and for the 14 years before), Park Lane was all about “private label champagne” or “own brand champagne” or maybe even “own label champagne”; never “personalised champagne”.
is what people think of when they want their own champagne - and we know this thanks to the mountain of information that Google collects, analyses and regurgitates so this cannot be wrong!
It is the little things that do count and with us the little things come as standard. If there was a measure of how far we came in 2009, it is probably not the number of bottles sold, not the conversion rate of online visitors to customers and not the cost per acquisition of a new customer. It is actually the significant number of customers who voluntarily contacted us to say how impressed they were by our levels of service, general customer care and attention to detail. All of which come as standard.
suffering with the same chill that the UK is - except that it is forecast to drop below -10c later this week. The vines are hibernating at the moment but prolonged temperatures of extreme cold can seriously damage the prospects for this year’s harvest. In January 1985, the temperature barely rose above -25c for several days and nearly 15% of the region’s entire vineyards needed replanting - 5,000 hectares in total; these frosts were retrospectively known as the “frosts of the century”.
Nope, not Google fruit but genuine champagne grape fruit!
Effectively this is pressed juice that cannot be used for a certain time and which is intended to subsidise yield in the event of a truly awful harvest in the future. 2,000kg/hectare headed to top the blockage stocks up to their maximum limit this year and the balance of the juice went off to become industrial alcohol. As it was such a prolific harvest, the producers could afford to be highly selective - hence why so many grapes were left for the birds. Interestingly, it was mainly black grapes that I spotted on the vines across the region.
as a sort of demand stimulus, particularly while the £/€ equation is so horrid.
There will be a glut of supermarket cut price champagne offers in the UK this year as we run up to Christmas. In fact, this has been the pattern for the past few years so no change there. These headline grabbers are highly restricted offers and are being subsidised by the supermarkets so they can secure our grocery purchases at the same time. Scary fact: Tesco handles 1 in every 4 bottles of wine sold in the UK as an “off” sale, according to the Daily Telegraph on Saturday!
