Jean-Marc Gallot’s efforts to broaden occasions when people drink bubbly butts up against tradition
In 1964, champagne house Veuve Clicquot ran an unorthodox advertising campaign pairing a bottle of its sparkling wine with a greasy, all-American hamburger. “Après l’opéra”, 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.
luxury group controlled by French billionaire Bernard Arnault, Veuve Clicquot 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.
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
’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.
’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.
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