In 1964, champagne house Veuve Clicquot launched an unconventional advertising campaign pairing a bottle of its sparkling wine with a greasy, quintessentially American hamburger. “Après l’opera,” or “After the opera,” read the text, which appeared in magazines such as the erudite New Yorker.
While the conflation of high and low culture has become commonplace in recent years, at the time it was a subversive notion in the rarefied — and sometimes stifling — world of Champagne.
“It’s a combination that allows you to live in the moment, in pleasure, because it goes so well together,” says Veuve Clicquot CEO Jean-Marc Gallot. “Suddenly, drinking a glass of Champagne with a burger is no longer sacrilege: it’s magical.”
For Gallot, who will celebrate his 10th anniversary at the helm of 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 figures on its performance as a brand. But it is already among the largest champagne houses in the world in terms of sales and volumes produced, and “by far the largest champagne house in the US,” says Gallot. To continue expanding, the company will need to expand its brand to include a new brand. chief executives The goal is to increase the number of occasions when people think about drinking champagne.
“The future of champagne is not to be a to drink “Champagne is reserved for certain people and on certain occasions. For us, a great opportunity for growth, especially in North America, the United States, Canada, but also in Asia, Japan, Southeast Asia and Africa, is with people who have not had the opportunity to drink it, except on very formal occasions,” he says.
“In short, let’s break the chains and be much freer in the way we consume champagne.”
That attitude has not always been shared by others in the industry, reflecting a French penchant for tradition and the right 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 the rocks (something totally unacceptable to purists), adjusting the sugar dosage to account for dilution as the cubes melted.
They took the idea a step further and suggested that drinkers add ingredients such as cucumber or grapefruit to create champagne-based cocktails. “We tested a hundred ingredients that will allow you to live a new and surprising experience,” says Gallot.
Many disapproved. “Almost half of my colleagues or competitors protested and said, ‘How can they do something like that?’” he says, admitting that most people “have a very classic approach to Champagne.”
But Gallot was undeterred, especially when he saw that the idea seemed to appeal to a different group of customers looking for a less traditional take on the drink. “I think some may have regretted not doing it or felt jealous that this was created by someone other than them,” he says.
The incident sums up the work environment Gallot is trying to create at Veuve Cliquot: one in which people “work seriously without taking themselves seriously.” It marks a change of tone from the formalities of the closed world of Champagne, where production is limited to a circumscribed area of France centered on the cities of Reims and Epernay.
The chief executive has spent his entire career working in the luxury sector, but later moved into wine and spirits. He started in the marketing department of Richemont-owned jeweller Cartier, then worked at Italian shoemaker Ferragamo and silversmith Christofle, before joining the LVMH group in 2003 as president of North America for its flagship Louis Vuitton brand. After six years at the fashion brand, during which time he oversaw a reorganisation of its European operations, Gallot was asked what else he was interested in doing.
“I replied: wines and spirits, and in particular champagne,” he explains. In 2009, he was appointed president of LVMH’s Ruinart champagne house.
At first, the learning curve was steep. Fashion brands and wine and spirits houses operate on very different schedules: the former launch new collections every few months and the latter take years to bring products to market. Manager Teams ranging from salespeople interacting with important clients and five-star hotels to agricultural experts were a different challenge, one he has tried to address by emphasizing communication and encouraging teams to spend more time talking to each other.
It’s a lesson he learned while running Ferragamo in the United States after the 9/11 attacks, a time he describes as “the most difficult of my professional life,” when the business collapsed and staff processed their fear and grief. “When you have to make difficult decisions, you have to communicate, communicate, communicate… you have to know everyone, you have to be a visible and sensitive interlocutor,” says Gallot.
Now, whether working in his office in Paris or in Reims, where Veuve Clicquot production takes place, he begins his day by checking on the vineyards and calling his managers if he thinks the weather might affect the grape harvest.
“You must be extremely curious and humble. [as you] Discover this story and this experience. When you talk to a cave boss [cellar master]“When you talk to a winemaker, when you talk to someone in production, they have jobs that you never imagined,” he says.
Gallot believes in flexible management and prefers to keep his office door open to avoid having his calendar filled 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 about making plans, yes, and organizing meetings, dealing with essential issues, but above all it is important to leave free and open time for the unexpected and what I call the free act. Go for a walk, meet someone, talk about a topic. From there a great idea or a great project can emerge.”
He says the common expectation of executives across the group is “to have the ability to work with creatives.”
Whether in a fashion brand or a champagne house, the creative director or cellar master “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.”
One peculiarity of the champagne business is its great reliance on nature to determine whether a vintage will go well. “We have no control over what will happen this year… It is a great lesson in humility.”
This factor has become increasingly difficult to predict as climate change alters weather patterns and growing seasons. Last winter was one of the wettest on record in France, for example. In the Champagne region, harvests in the 20th century typically took place in mid-October, but by the end of the century they were taking place in September and, more recently, August, according to Gallot.
“We know it will come, we are working hard on the soils, and on the vineyards as well. We are just starting 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 ever do mechanical harvesting at night instead of human harvesting during the day? It’s possible,” he adds. The key is to stay agile and curious “trying to capture everything that’s happening and make the most of it.”
In the short term, the Champagne industry is facing a sales slump after two boom years, when 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 United States, but there was also pressure on Champagne.
Gallot says sales are “still well above” 2019, but 2024 is “not going to be a completely straightforward year.” “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 CEO to take a broader, longer-term view. “If only because bottles spend between three and ten years in the cellar depending on the vintage, the relationship with time is very different in spirits and wines than in fashion. So it teaches you to put things into perspective,” he says.