Maison
A name from the chalk.
Maison
A name from the chalk.
It began with a book.
A summer evening in Épernay, three hours from Paris by TGV, an antiquarian's shop on a side street off the Avenue de Champagne. On the table lay a quarto in beige linen, the spine cracked, the title page dated Reims, 1903. A study of the Champagne houses, their foundings, their mergers, their bankruptcies.
In the last third, a plate. Twelve names, finely engraved, ordered by the year 1834. Twelve maisons that had met in May of that year to defend the méthode champenoise against plagiarisms out of Saxony, the Piedmont and Crimea, to agree on common marketing standards, and to assert Champagne for the first time as an internationally recognised place of origin.
Eleven of the names I knew. They appear today on the lists of the three-star houses between Tokyo and São Paulo.
One I did not know.
Lecureux & Cie.
The eleven who remained
We do not name them here. Anyone who knows Champagne knows them. Their labels stand in the vitrines of the hotels; their names stand on the champagne lists of the world. They are what Champagne is.