Champagne has never let a little thing like accuracy get in the way of a good marketing campaign. Take Dom Pérignon, whose apocryphal quote is still repeated far and wide as the origin story of Champagne. Never mind that M. Perignon would have considered carbonation a fault in his wines, or that even when sparkling wines began to be made on purpose in Champagne around the time of his death they were reviled by the French as a wholly English trend. “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!” has cultural staying power as an origin story for what feels inevitable in the minds of consumers: the supremacy of Champagne. Of all the success stories in the history of wine, that perceived supremacy has to be one of wine marketing’s greatest achievements.
But the nature of marketing is cyclical, and the beast must be fed. Enter Grower Champagne. While the received wisdom is that the Grower Champagne trend started in the mid-90s with Terry Theise’s import epiphany, the real story goes back further. In addition to assembling an enviable stable of Récoltant-Manipulants (the official term for growers who make their own wine rather than selling the grapes to a large house or sending them to a co-op), Theise was (and still is) a clever marketer. Terms like “farmer fizz” and even “Grower Champagne” took root in the vinous lexicon only after he started his campaign for RM Champagne in the late 1990s. But RM Champagne had already been available in the US through legacy importers like Kermit Lynch for well over a decade, simply marketed as tasty Champagne rather than a separate category.
The category division continued to widen through the 2000s, and weathered the 2008 financial crash to come back even stronger in the early 2010s. Merchants and sommeliers on both coasts discovered the incredible value offered by growers in a warming climate where vintage variation was shrinking. The unshakable power of the large Champagne houses was their ability to survive Champagne’s strings of abysmal vintages without sacrificing their house style. But with vendanges horribles becoming fewer and farther between, the price-to-quality ratio of young, ambitious growers was a revelation. From 2008’s crash until today, the Grower Champagne has become firmly lodged in the mind of the American consumer.
But while the American drinker has been getting increasingly acquainted with RM Champagne, the actual grower-producers themselves have been quietly disappearing. To qualify as an RM in Champagne, you must buy 5% or less of the grapes used to make your wine, a percentage that has become a serious hurdle for growers whose popular demand has increased during the same period when vineyard land has jumped 5x-10x in price. In 2024 the average price of a hectare of vines in the Côte des Blancs was €1,631,700, making expansion to meet demand a distant dream for many grower-producers.
The resulting landscape will be familiar to those well-versed in modern Burgundy. The small domaines with name recognition have turned to purchasing fruit to expand their offerings, while the large négociants have both acquired new estate vineyards and emphasized the vineyards they already had. Bérêche, Prevost, Savart – some of the most well-known cult producers of Grower Champagne have embraced the NM designation (Négociant- Manipulant, the official term for those who purchase more than 5% of the grapes needed to make their Champagne), purchasing fruit in top vineyards they couldn’t hope to buy to expand their production without sacrificing quality.
Why does all this matter to the average (or in your case, above average) Champagne drinker? To put it simply, with the line between RM and NM starting to blur, we’re returning, in a way, to what has always been paramount in Champagne: the brand. The holier-than-thou attitude of grower-producer-only professionals is giving way to an appreciation of quality across the entire range of Champagne production. Maybe it’s time to put aside the RM/NM distinction and focus on the producers making delicious Champagne. It takes great fruit to make great Champagne. If we can really taste the difference as much as we claim, why does it matter if the same person did both jobs?
Below is a non-exhaustive list of the Champagnes that stopped us in our tracks this year, no RM or NM distinction necessary:
2016 Cedric Bouchard, Roses de Jeanne Les Ursules Blanc de Noirs
NV Marie Noelle Ledru, Brut NV Grand Cru
2008 Philipponnat, Clos des Goisses
Jerome Prevost, La Closerie Les Beguines
2007 Salon, Le Mesnil Grand Cru
2016 Savart, Haute Couture Grand Cru, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger
2012 Vilmart & Cie, Les Blanches Voies Blanc de Blancs Premier Cru