In 1964, champagne house Veuve Clicquot ran an unorthodox advertising campaign pairing a bottle of its sparkling wine with a greasy, all-American hamburger. “Apres l’opera”, or “After the opera”, the copy read, which appeared in magazines such as the high brow New Yorker.
While the pairing of high and low culture has become mainstream in recent years, at the time it was a subversive notion in the rarefied — and at times stuffy — world of champagne.
“It’s an association that means you’re just in the moment, in pleasure, because it goes very well together,” says Veuve Clicquot chief executive Jean-Marc Gallot. “Suddenly it’s no longer sacrilege to drink a glass of champagne with a burger — that’s magical.”
For Gallot, who will celebrate his 10-year anniversary leading the revered champagne house in September, the spirit of that 1960s campaign has been the inspiration behind his strategy to grow the company.
As part of the LVMH luxury group controlled by French billionaire Bernard Arnault, Veuve Cliquot does not publish numbers on its performance as a brand. But it is already among the biggest champagne houses in the world in terms of sales and volumes produced, and “by very, very far the biggest champagne house in the US”, Gallot says. To continue expanding, the chief executive’s goal is to multiply the occasions where people think to drink champagne.
“The future of champagne is not to be a drink reserved for certain people and on certain occasions. A huge opportunity for growth for us — particularly in North America, the United States, Canada, but also in Asia, Japan or south-east Asia or Africa — is with people who haven’t had the opportunity to drink champagne other than for occasions that were very formatted,” he says.
“In short, let’s break the chains and be much freer in our approach to consuming champagne.”
That attitude has not always been shared by others in the industry — reflecting a French penchant for tradition and the proper way of doing things. About eight years ago, the chief executive and his teams launched a line of champagnes that was designed to be drunk on ice — a big no-no for purists — adjusting the sugar dosage to account for dilution as the cubes melted.
They pushed the idea further, suggesting drinkers could add ingredients such as cucumber or grapefruit to make champagne-based cocktails. “We tested around a hundred ingredients that will allow you to have a new and surprising experience,” says Gallot.
Many disapproved. “A good half of my colleagues or competitors cried foul, saying, how can you do such a thing?” he says, admitting that the majority of people “are very classic in their approach to champagne”.
But Gallot was undeterred, especially when he saw the idea seemed to be appealing to a different set of customers looking for a less traditional approach to the drink. “I think some may have had the regret of not having done it and or the jealousy that this was created by someone other than them,” he says.
The incident sums up the working environment Gallot is trying to create at Veuve Cliquot — one where people “work seriously without taking yourself seriously”. It marks a shift in tone from the formalities of the tight-knit champagne world, in which production is restricted to a delimited area of France centred around the towns of Reims and Epernay.
The chief executive has spent his entire career working in luxury, but only came to wine and spirits later on. He started out in marketing at Richemont-owned jeweller Cartier, then did stints at Italian shoemaker Ferragamo and silversmith Christofle, before joining the LVMH group in 2003 as president for North America at its flagship brand, Louis Vuitton. After six years at the fashion label that included overseeing a reorganisation of its operations in Europe, Gallot was asked what else he was interested in doing.
“I answered: wines and spirits, and in particular champagne,” he says. In 2009, he was appointed president of LVMH’s champagne house Ruinart.
At first, the learning curve was steep. Fashion brands and wine and spirits houses operate on very different schedules, with the former releasing new collections every few months and the latter taking years to bring products to market. Managing teams that ranged from sales people interacting with top clients and five star hotels, to agricultural experts was a different challenge — one he has tried to address by emphasising communication and encouraging teams to spend more time talking to each other.
It is a lesson he learned while managing Ferragamo in the US after the September 11 attacks — a time he describes as “the most difficult moment of my professional life” — as the business plunged and staff processed their fear and grief. “When difficult decisions need to be made, you have to communicate, communicate, communicate . . . you have to meet everyone, you have to be a visible and sensitive interlocutor,” Gallot says.
Now, whether he is working at his office in Paris or in Reims where Veuve Clicquot’s production takes place, he starts his day checking in on the vineyards, calling his managers if he thinks the weather could affect the grape harvest.
“You must be extremely curious and humble [as you] discover this history and this expertise. When you talk to a chef de cave [cellar master], when you talk to a winemaker, when you talk to someone in production — they have jobs that you wouldn’t have imagined,” he says.
Gallot is a believer in flexible management, preferring to keep the door of his office open and preventing his agenda from becoming packed with a minute-by-minute schedule so he can walk the halls and spend less structured time with his teams.
“For me, a day is having plans, yes, and organising meetings, handling subjects that are essential, but above all it is important to leave free and open time for the unexpected and what I call the gratuitous act. You walk, you meet someone, you talk about a subject. This is where a great idea or project can come from.”
He says the common expectation of executives across the group is “to have the ability to work with creatives.”
Whether at a fashion brand or a champagne house, the creative director or chef de cave “is the one who will drive a vision, a style and a direction for the house . . . What is expected of us, what is expected of me, is to have the ability to put the creator in the best possible conditions to work”.
A particularity of the champagne business is its high dependence on nature to determine whether a harvest will go well. “We are not in control of what will happen this year . . . It’s a great teacher of humility.”
This factor has become increasingly difficult to predict as climate change alters weather patterns and growing seasons. Last winter was one of the rainiest on record in France, for example. In the Champagne region, harvests in the 20th century used to take place in mid-October, but by the end of the century were taking place in September and more recently in August, according to Gallot.
“We know it’s coming, we are doing a lot of work on the soils, on the grape vines too. We are only just beginning because we do not yet have all the elements and we do not yet have all the solutions. But we know that our profession will evolve,” he says.
“Will we one day do mechanical harvesting at night instead of human harvesting during the day? It’s possible,” he adds. The key is to remain agile and inquisitive “trying to capture everything that is happening and making the best use of it”.
In the shorter term, the champagne industry is contending with softening sales after a two-year boom as people indulged at home during the pandemic. LVMH’s wine and spirits division was the only one where sales fell last year, largely due to a sharp drop in demand for cognac in the US, but there was also pressure on champagne.
Gallot says sales are “still well above” 2019 but that 2024 is “not going to be completely straightforward”. “Sales levels may be slightly below what we have experienced in recent years, but for me it is a fairly simple adjustment. I am not pessimistic.”
The pace of winemaking has also taught the chief executive to take a broader, longer-term view. “If only because the bottles spend between three and 10 years in the cellar depending on the vintage, the relationship with time is very different in spirits and wines than it is in fashion. So it teaches you to put things in perspective,” he says.
