Champagne Warehouse - Buy Champagne online

Why we sell Grower champagne

Grower champagnes are our passion at Champagne Warehouse.

Buy Grower champagnes because:

• You are buying from families not factories.
• You are buying a wine with authenticity, identity, character and provenance, telling a story of place, of the distinct area it came from and of the winemaker who produced it.
• You are buying wine from a ‘someone’ who produces a few thousand bottles, rather than a mass production facility that churns out millions.
• You are buying an honestly priced champagne, based on what it’s cost the grower to produce it and make a small profit.
• If you buy Grower champagne, you are supporting the hard working grower and NOT paying for massive marketing budgets.
• You are being your own man or woman when you buy grower and not succumbing to luxury brand marketing. You can surprise your friends by showing them there’s more to champagne that Möet.
• You can get a great quality grower Grand Cru for a fraction of the price you would pay for a luxury brand Prestige Cuvée that may not be 100% Grand Cru…

Consider this:

The big brands only own around 15% of all the vines in the Champagne region. They produce 80% of all the champagne made but to do this they buy most of their grapes from growers. This means grapes from across the region are all mixed together losing the identity of the place they grew. THEN the champagne is further blended with reserve wines (from past harvests) to maintain the ‘House Style’. No wonder some many people forget that champagne is a WINE!!!!

MOST interesting of all is that Grower champagne accounts for less that 20% of total champagne production and yet around 40% of all champagne sold in France is Grower. The French know their onions……

Read what the wine world says about Grower champagne:

Andrew Jefford in his book – The New France.

Champagne is on the verge of profound change. There is a growing realization that its viticulture has become slovenly and the subtleties of its terroir have been neglected. The era of good growers and great vineyards is just beginning.  

Master of Wine Essi Avellan in her article Grower Champagne:look closely and get more fizz for your bucks. Dacanter 2/4/09

Venture beyond the big-name brands and you’ll find some spectacular, great-value Champagnes with a taste of terroir……

Burgundy, too, used to be dominated by large négociants <as in Champagne region currently, HH>. Today, the most reputed and highly priced wines are those of the small growers, as appreciation of identifiable origins is commonplace. The magic is in the land, whether your wine of choice be Romanée-Conti, Quinta do Noval Nacional or L’Ermita. Due to the blended nature of Champagne, even educated professionals often do not understand the sub-regions of the area as they do Burgundy or Bordeaux…….

In addition to identifiable origins and natural methods, authenticity also comes from the people involved. With grower Champagne, you know that the grapes have been grown and the wine made by those who have their name on the label – a rarity in Champagne…..

It is time to look beyond the ostentatious side of Champagne, and to see the wine……….

 

Andrew Jefford talking about one of his favourite subjects- in his regular spot ‘Jefford on Monday’ (Decanter 16/5/11) The Champagne Enigma:

<Grower champagne>….It’s a favourite for three reasons. The first is that small-producer Champagnes of this sort often have a personality which the necessarily crowd-pleasing offerings of the large houses don’t.

The second is that they give you a detailed peep at Champagne’s terroirs, since they are often single-village or even single-vineyard wines.

And the third is that they push the boundaries of the Champagne experience in intriguing ways – towards zero dosage, for example, or towards the controlled oxidation brought by wood handling and storage, or towards a flavour spectrum conditioned not by neutral selected yeasts but by indigenous yeasts.

Tom Stevenson, Small in size, Big in character (Decanter 30/5/07)

Delve into the niche world of grower Champagnes and you’ll find great value and a fascinating range of styles…
Growers are unlikely to dominate Champagne as they do Burgundy for the simple reason that most Champagne is consumed for celebratory purposes or served at swanky parties where, like it or not, only famous names will do. But there is a buzz for grower products among aficionados who see Champagne primarily as a classic wine. Trying to find a grower Champagne in the US in the mid 1990s was pointless. Now, however, America is awash with so many small producer specialists it’s embarrassing for the Brits, who were the first to take these niche wines seriously.

Articles of interest: Andrew Jefford Decanter 28th March 2007

We’d love your comments……