As if to offer an acid test Gouez emphasized about his decision to delay the 2011 harvest for a week and send 800 pickers home while still paying them, apparently a first in the history of the company, according to the report by Drinks Business.
He indicated that he might have done it to improve the chances of the vintage. Being candid about it, he said, “I wanted to send a message out to the Champenoise that we care about quality.”
However, the big issue here might have been, as he admitted,” whether I could get a vintage wine out of it. It paid off, but I still haven’t decided if I’m going to declare the 2011 vintage or not.”
Although champagne is generally a Non-Vintage wine, in that wines from various vintages are blended to keep the quality consistent, during good years the winemaker may decide to declare it a Vintage Champagne, using wines only from that vintage. Vintage wines from Moet fetch almost twice as much though the incremental cost may be a fraction of the difference.
“The cost was an issue for financial people”, said Gouez. But in the process, he may have doubled the value of champagne in case it is branded a Vintage. During the past two decades, there have been hardly a couple of years when no Vintage was declared and 2011 will, most likely, not be that once-a decade year either.
As he conceded, being a big company has its advantages.” Bigger is better because it gives you access to the best grapes and buys you the luxury of choice. We were only able to stop the harvest because we’re big,” he said. What he perhaps meant was that being big they could squeeze the growers more, in terms of prices. (Remember the example of Champagne Indage- later changed to Indage Vintners).
Moet makes 26 million bottles of Champagne, about 8% of the total production of the region. At over 2 million cases it is more than the entire annual wine consumption in India, which is estimated at about 1.6 million cases including 280,000 cases of imported wines,. Moet maintains about 8% of the market share here as well and perhaps is the second biggest selling brand behind Jacobs Creek, another industrial wine, technically well-made, popular international brand.
Interestingly, while he confirmed that 2005 will not be declared as Vintage year for his company, Gouez predicts that many Champagne houses will release 2005 to cash in on the success of the 2005 vintage in Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Subhash Arora
It is important to point out that it is absolutely incorrect to call the ubiquitous champagne Mo-ye, or MoYeah. It is not a French name but Dutch name after the gentleman who started the company. Mo-et or Moe-tt are both correct pronunciations- just like Vintage shoud not be pronounced as vintaage-as it is not a French but an English term-editor |