March seemed to flit by, notwithstanding the horrid weather.
It was a busy period at Park Lane with our plans for personalised champagne moving forward and gathering traction and shape throughout the month. If anyone knows someone who would be a super salesperson for the corporate champagne market in London, please email me - in absolute confidence.
At this time of year, the tirage is occurring in the Champagne region. Literally, this is the bottling of the previous year’s harvest according to the recipe the cellar master has devised from the juice he has to hand. The blending - or assemblage - will already have been decided. Remember champagne is a blend of grapes and, in the case of Non-Vintage champagne, a blend of grapes and years.
So each producer has decided what proportions of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier will be blended together to reproduce the house style this year. Drilling down another layer, the decision should have included what percentage of chardonnay from vineyard 1, what percentage from vineyard 2, etc., to be absolutely sure the resultant style will be as desired. In addition, how much of the juice from the different grape types (cepages) from earlier harvests (vins de reserve) will be included. Decisions decisions but these are important ones that cannot be underdone later!
And then the yeast and sugar solution (to feed the yeast) is added at the same time. The bottles have a crown cap (similar to a beer top) fitted, are shaken and then head down to the cellars for the start of their ageing in bottle.
The yeast live in the bottle, gobble up all the sugar, emit CO2 as their by-product (the source of the magic bubbles) and then die. It is argued that more lengthy ageing in bottle (the legal minimum is 15 months) gives the wine more time in contact with the yeast, and thus more opportunity to acquire complex overtones with vanilla/brioche type aromas…
I always think that the producer’s cellars resemble a medical operating theatre during the tirage period. External contractors arrive with special machines to carry out the bottling, pipes and hoses criss-cross the floors from various tanks and vats, bottles rattle through the machine with terrific accuracy, pace and noise (the operators all wear headphones), and people scurry to and fro loading bottles into crates for transportation to and laying down in the cellars. After the work is done, champagne all round; how very French!
I am off to see the champagne producers later this month so should be able to report back on the market from the cellar face, so to speak.
Until then, please find me a great salesperson!
(or are they bigger?) to specific Oscar winners - which at Park Lane we know our customers also find popular as personalised champagne gifts…
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”.
