120 years of companiable collaboration is worth celebrating in anyone’s book, but especially so when you’re marking the milestone with the suppliers of our finest fizz. Generations of Wine Society members have been raising glasses to toast their own significant moments with sparkling wines from Gratien Meyer and Champagne from Alfred Gratien since 1906.
To kick our celebrations off, we invited winemakers Pierre Charon (from Gratien Meyer in the Loire) and Nicolas Jaeger (from Alfred Gratien in Champagne) to lunch in Stevenage. Despite travelling over regularly to pour wine for our members at tastings, much to our surprise, this was actually their first visit to Wine Society HQ. As well as tasting through our ever-expanding range of bubbles (and some special ones created just for our celebrations), it gave us an opportunity to hear more from the people who pour their souls into making elegant fizz for us every day.
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The first thing you learn is that there is so much more to their jobs than crafting the wines (though, that’s of course where a lot of the magic happens!). ‘Winemaker’ doesn’t adequately cover everything that Nicolas and Pierre do: chef de cave (cellarmaster) – the French job title, is so much more accurate, especially in the context of sparkling wine production.
A lot about making good wine is preparing things in advance,
Making sparkling wine is complicated. It involves keeping and blending wines from multiple vintages, maintaining the house style and ensuring quality standards are upheld throughout the process, from sourcing the grapes, looking after the wines as they age, through to the more prosaic decisions around logistics. ‘A lot about making good wine is preparing things in advance,’ Nicolas says, and Pierre nods in agreement, adding, ‘it’s all about organising so that the right things get done at the right time in the right way – you have to stick to the plan, there’s no room for improvising during the making of the wine!’ Plans for change are decades in the making and the teams, now under the overall management of Katy Murarotto (read our interview with Katy here), are now realising projects originally laid out by Katy’s predecessor Olivier Dupré who retired in 2024.
I wondered to what extent it made a difference to traditional winemaking houses like these to have a new boss, especially one that hasn’t come from a wine background. ‘Actually, it’s refreshing,’ Pierre says, ‘Katy really wants to understand how things work and she is quick to see when they don’t work as well as they could. She’s very open to suggestions but questions us and helps to give a new perspective. She totally respects all the quality-driven decisions, there’s no concession there.’ Nicolas continues, ‘Katy picks things up very quickly and she’s a good taster… but in other respects she leaves us to do our own thing, just as when Olivier was in charge.’
Nicolas is the fourth generation of the Jaeger family making wine at Alfred Gratien. He took over from his father in 1990 after a 17-year apprenticeship learning his craft. Pierre started at Gratien Meyer in 2022 after nine years making sparkling wine at Ackerman, the Loire’s oldest producer. Prior to that he worked lots of vintages making still wines in the south of France and in Chile, New Zealand and Australia. He prefers the challenge of making sparkling wine though: ‘it’s more complicated, there are more steps to master… it’s a different world from still-wine production.’
While Nicolas says, ‘he does his thing, I do mine!’ it’s clear there’s great mutual respect between the two winemakers. While they don’t see each other in person that much (it’s over 450km between Saumur and Epernay), they do talk on the phone. ‘We share information, especially about vineyards around harvest time. Essentially, we are doing the same thing, it’s just that the scale is much smaller in Champagne,’ Pierre explains. They joke that the hardest part of their jobs is the people-management side of things, and they will ask each other for advice on this. You can’t escape the importance of people in this (or any!) job.
On the subject of people, it’s impossible not to talk about the issues around conditions for casual workers, especially at harvest time. It’s a subject The Wine Society has been leading the discussion on and have published guidance for our producers too. Both Nicolas and Pierre talk about how important it is to provide good conditions for your workers and to treat them well and also how important it is to attract and keep a good team: ‘By law grapes for Champagne and Crémant must by be handpicked and whole-bunch pressed – this is skilled work and we want to have the best people doing the work,’ Nicolas explains. There are those that are asking for a change in the regulations to allow for machine harvesting, but Pierre says he is against this as it will have a negative effect on quality.
The importance of good supplier relationships
Both Gratien Meyer in Saumur and Alfred Gratien in Champagne rely primarily on a network of growers for their grapes. Nicolas works really closely with his grape suppliers, he grew up ‘in the vines’ and his family have long-standing connections with growers, which is vital for ensuring a steady supply of top-quality fruit. Alfred Gratien are unusual in that they vinify grapes from different growers separately and it’s a great point of pride when the growers come together to taste the wines from their own vineyards each year at Gratien HQ.
In the Loire, Gratien Meyer have gradually been increasing their ownership of vineyards and now have some 89 hectares in production. Since 2018 they have employed a full-time viticulturist and they now also have a production facility in the vineyard, ‘we can now press the grapes in the vineyard and have far better control over quality – we definitely get the best-quality wine from our own vineyards and make a special cuvée from our own vines’, Pierre says
You can’t talk vineyards and winemaking without touching on our changing climate. As both the Loire and the Champagne regions are relatively far north in viticultural terms, Nicolas and Pierre are looking at the positives. Pierre points out that they’re lucky in the Loire to have the chenin grape: ‘It’s such a versatile grape. You can pick it a little unripe and it’s great for sparkling wine, then if it’s a bit riper you get more aromatics, which is also great. It doesn’t hurt that we’re picking a little earlier, there’s no negative effect on quality and we’ve been lucky to have good rains and very little frost recently too. As for the black grapes, in the past they could be a bit “green” we’re now seeing much more perfumed grapes, especially cabernet franc, which is good.’
As for Champagne, Nicolas told us they’d just been hit by a severe frost and will have lost around 40% of the crop. It’s a problem when you have a mild winter and bud burst comes early, making the plant more at risk from frost-damage. Otherwise, Nicolas says, that like Pierre, he appreciates extra ripeness in the grapes, ‘Champagne is a very cold region, traditionally we used to struggle to get sufficient ripeness in our grapes – the balance of sugar, maturity and acidity in the grapes is good for us – particularly as we don’t do malolactic fermentation (where secondary fermentation reduces the sharp malic acids into softer lactic acids).’ Of course, losing 40% of the crop regularly would be a disaster for producers in the long run, and both acknowledge that climate change is a big issue around the world, but they’re cautiously optimistic about the quality of grapes that they are harvesting currently.
Looking ahead, I ask Nicolas about the next generation of winemakers at Alfred Gratien. He says his 19-year-old son is currently at wine school and has really enjoyed being out in the vineyards – whether he will pick up the baton from his father is yet to be decided, ‘We’ll have to see. Will he want to? Will he be good enough? It’s not just for us to decide but it’s down to the bosses too!’ Being cellarmaster at Alfred Gratien really is a family affair though, Nicolas’ wife Delfine ‘does everything except make the wine’, Nicolas says. So all the paperwork, preparing of orders, packaging, and hosting visitors comes under her remit. We talk about the plans for a rebrand and how many years in its execution this has taken, including the building of a brand-new warehouse facility two kilometres away, which opened in 2024. This gives them so much more space to carry out processes such as bottling and riddling (turning the bottles to move the sediment to the neck).Together with a smart new reception area for welcoming visitors, this is something that Nicolas is clearly proud of.
Meanwhile, back in the Loire, Pierre is determined to ‘optimise’, as he says the wonderful old network of tuffeau cellars that they have in Saumur. ‘A lot of our competitors have new warehouses, but I feel our wine loses its identity if you don’t keep the integrity of the whole story and I think the old cellars are better for ageing the wine. This is the story of our appellation; we should preserve that and resist standardisation.’ (It’s worth pointing out that the new warehouse in Epernay is for storage, not ageing.)
He goes on to to explain that the project of optimising the old network of tunnels is one of the major pieces of work he’s carrying out currently, ‘It’s a real challenge working in an historic site, what we’re trying to do hasn’t been done before. We’re trying to optimise a space that has curved walls and ceilings, and we don’t want the wine to be disturbed. We aren’t just increasing in terms of volume but in complexity too – figuring out the logistics is a challenge.’ He says that the conditions in the cellars are exceptional for ageing sparkling wine and he doesn’t want to lose that – it isn’t just out of nostalgia, ‘I think it is important to keep doing things in the same way, in the same place, the same story …’
Tucked away in the deep chalk cellars of Epernay and the extraordinary tunnels in Saumur are some really special bottles quietly maturing, destined for the tables of Wine Society members for years to come. Among these are magnums of 2008 Cuvée Paradis (Alfred Gratien’s top wine) which Nicolas is going to disgorge especially for members in our 120th year, plus some Champagnes from the exceptional 2016 vintage. Not to be outdone, Pierre has unearthed some of our Celebration Crémant from the 2018 vintage, also in magnums (‘if I had my way, I’d put everything in magnum – it always tastes better!) These too will be disgorged just for our members.
Whenever we’ve had something special to celebrate, we’ve always been able to rely on Gratien to come up with some exceptional bottles to complement the range of great fizz that they already supply for our members. 2026 is no different. ‘For us, The Wine Society is a like our business family,’ Nicolas says and Pierre agrees, adding ‘I hadn’t heard of The Wine Society before, but it does feel like a family and working with the buyers has been great: they are always very clear about what they want and communication is so straightforward – you don’t always get this.’
Let’s return to the cellars in Saumur – the same ones that attracted a young Alfred Gratien to start out making sparkling wines in 1864, ten years before The Wine Society came into being. It’s rather wonderful to hear they still cast their spell over the current winemaker, ‘When you turn out the lights in the cellars, it’s totally black… and the silence… you can hear your heart pumping!’
Long may the sparkling story continue.
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