The champagne winemakers – style – SZ.de

When Vitalie Taittinger climbs the stairs with the wrought-iron railing to the Château de la Marquetterie, she always feels a little reverent. Your company headquarters is anything but ordinary, the noble estate with the dark blue shutters and the many brick chimneys breathes French history; History made by men, of course. The Château was built in 1734, in the Louis XV style. Before the Revolution, thinkers like Voltaire frequented it, and during World War I it was the headquarters of a French general. The Château has been the headquarters of the renowned Taittinger champagne house since the 1930s.

Vitalie Taittinger grew up on the winery. “When I was a child, the wine presses were still here, and we were always allowed to taste the fresh grape juice at harvest time.” She particularly fondly remembers her teenage dinners with the harvest workers, when 150 people sat at a long table after their hard work and it was very happy. “At that time I would never have dreamed that one day I would run this house,” says the 42-year-old, who has been the head of the family business as “Madame la Présidente” since the beginning of 2020.

How could she have seen this coming? After all, there is hardly an industry that is so strongly influenced by gender clichés as that of gourmets and wine lovers. It’s a world of contradictions, still. This includes the fact that it is estimated that more than 90 percent of all food on this planet is prepared by women, only where it rains prices and stars are suddenly almost exclusively men in the kitchen. Another famous paradox is that some people still consider champagne to be a drink for women (a particularly silly prejudice, by the way), but in the famous châteaus, where a lot of money and prestige are at stake, men traditionally set the tone.

This is what Anne Malassagne experienced when she left her position as controller at L’Oréal overnight at the age of 28 in 1993 and took over her family’s winery because her father was seriously ill. Since then she has been the boss of the AR Lenoble champagne house, a small revolution at the time. One with tough fights. “The first ten years were really tough,” says Malassagne. When she visited customers with her younger brother, who studied oenology and took over the work in the cellar, she was usually mistaken for the assistant: “At wine tastings, people thought I was there to open bottles and pour glasses.” The winery boss tells how lonely she often felt as a woman in her branch; and that she wanted to help save her younger colleagues from having this experience.

Open detailed view

It is definitely the case that more and more women are interested in a job in viticulture. This is one of the reasons why Anne Malassagne had the idea three years ago to offer the “femmes de champagne” a platform where they can exchange ideas without thinking about competition or hierarchy. That is why she founded “La Transmission” – in France the term stands for the transfer of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. It’s about a group that should give women in the champagne business more visibility and facilitate their way into management positions. The network also organizes round tables and tastings or workshops on topics such as sustainability and climate change. Do women work differently? One would of course like to know. “The nice thing about our exchange is that it is never driven by individual egos,” says Malassagne enthusiastically. “We are working together for the future of Champagne, our own corporate interests remain in the background.” That sounds almost too good to be true, of course.

Do women work differently in the vineyard? Yes, more cooperative. Claim the women

However, one has to admit to Malassagne that her network of women is a novelty in the conservative wine world. And that the many successes of women in the champagne business are striking. In addition to Vitalie Taittinger and Anne Malassagne, “La Transmission” also has other château bosses as members, including Maggie Henriquez, CEO of Krug Champagne, and Alice Paillard, director of the Bruno Paillard house named after her father in Reims. They have all understood that they also have to demand leadership. And they can refer to role models. To the famous “champagne widows” who shaped the growing area around Reims significantly. At that time it was perhaps not always voluntary and often in secret, but it was very successful.

Open detailed view

The most famous role model is Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin, who took over the business in 1805 as a young woman after the sudden death of her husband and became a legend as “Veuve Clicquot”. As an early marketing talent, she brought the previously unknown wines of the house to the Russian court of the tsars. She invented the distinctive yellow label that adorns the bottles to this day and bears her signature, as well as the shaker, an indispensable instrument in champagne production ever since. Jeanne Alexandrine Louise Pommery also set standards when she invented “Brut Nature” in 1874, at a time when champagne was still a very sweet drink, a drier variant that paved the way for the style we know today. After all, Lily Bollinger, who ran the house of the same name for 30 years from 1941, was what is called a brand ambassador today: always traveling around the world to promote her wines. Their preference for Pinot Noir and their striving for independence – the house is still privately owned and 60 percent of the grapes come from their own vineyards – shape the famous address in Aÿ to this day.

Open detailed view

It is also thanks to such role models that a lot is happening in Champagne today in terms of equality, says Vitalie Taittinger. She herself was fortunate that her father took her into an apprenticeship as a matter of course. He brought her to the winery in 2007 after studying graphic design and has supported her to this day. She gives him great credit for never exerting pressure to join the family business, “it was my free decision”. And that her brother, who is a year older than her, accepts her as “Madame la Présidente” and works as a matter of course for her as General Manager. All of this means that Taittinger can now say things like: “In Champagne it is no longer a handicap to be born a woman. Those who do a good job are respected.”

The boss is also proud that she is not the only woman in a management position in her own company: Christelle Rinville plays a key role as vineyard director. She personally knows every vine in the 288 hectares of her own vineyards; and nobody would doubt her knowledge if she explains in detail how exactly the five grand cru locations of the Côte des Blancs shape the style of the house and why the soils in Chouilly produce slightly more fruity wines than in Avize, while the wines from Mesnil- sur-Oger tend to be more mineral. Christelle Rinville is also sure that today she will finally “no longer be judged by gender, but by my skills”.

More and more winegrowers are hiring cellar masters

But even for this development, role models were always needed: It was Carol Duval-Leroy, long-time boss of the champagne house of the same name, who appointed the first female cellar master in the region in 2005. Sandrine Logette-Jardin still shapes the style of the house to this day. In the meantime, women are in charge of the cellar in such well-known establishments as Krug, Ayala, Perrier-Jouët and Henriot. A negligible proportion, yes, but: a sign has been set.

Fewer and fewer obstacles are being put in the way of the younger generation in the network. For 30-year-old Charline Drappier, for example, it goes without saying that she will one day run her family’s winery together with her two brothers: “I was fortunate that my grandmother was a very strong personality. Her role model made it easier for me to get into to claim the family space that was due to me. ” But “we still have to fight,” says Drappier’s colleague Mélanie Tarlant, 41, who runs the “Champagne Tarlant” house together with her older brother Benoît. For the Tarlant boss, networks and the visibility of women are therefore important issues. After all, despite individual successes, women’s claim to leadership has been pushed back again and again.

If the men were at the front, the women ran the business alone

Mélanie Tarlant remembers how shocked she was as a girl when her great-grandmother said that until World War II she was not allowed to enter the cellar when she was on her days – it was believed that this could harm the fermenting wine. When her husband was at the front, she was able to throw such old wives’ tales overboard – and managed the company on her own for six years. Another example is her grandmother: “She was a strong personality and made all the decisions in the vineyard. But when the tractor became fashionable, the men drove it.”

The granddaughter says today that she is lucky enough to live in a different world, but she still has to prove herself over and over again. The Tarlant house in Oeuilly is known for its very individual champagnes. Each parcel is grown individually in the “Ultra Brut” style, i.e. very dry without any added sugar. Brother and sister make all important decisions in the vineyard and in the cellar together. Both of them participated in every harvest from an early age and benefited from the knowledge passed down from their grandparents and great-grandparents. Nevertheless, Mélanie Tarlant, who studied marketing after school and also takes care of the sales area, felt the need some time ago to complete an official viticulture training at evening school – in order to be accepted by her father as a full-fledged interlocutor, especially on the technical side to become. “We still have to do more than men to make our voice heard.”