It’s fashionable for multigenerational family wine enterprises to make a selling point of how long they have been in business. The implicit assumption is that the brand must in some way be a repository of the knowledge and experience of the generations which came before. Longevity alone is proof only of survival. An eighty-year-old president or prime minister may have been alive for eight decades, but those years are only valuable if they have been spent listening, learning and honing judgement. In matters of wine, the past can actually be burdensome: the science of making wine is very new. Technological advances have so transformed the industry that no successful business can hope to survive simply by doing what grandpa did.
And yet..... operations which have remained in the same family for hundreds of years appear to enjoy a competitive advantage over their competitors. For a start, there’s the transmission of experience, often shared when the younger members of the next generation pay attention to what their parents discuss at the dinner table. There may also be a kind of epigenetic inheritance: resilience can be learnt, but it might also reside in the family DNA. Lessons drawn from family mythology or shared around the family dinner table might be the difference between bankruptcy and survival when your turn comes to face down a catastrophe.
Champagne Louis Roederer has just celebrated its 250th anniversary. It is owned and managed by the direct descendants of the man who founded the business in 1776. At exactly the time that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and the Committee of Five were drafting the Declaration of Independence, an ancestor of the present CEO, Frédéric Rouzaud, began an enterprise which today is the largest family-owned wine business in Champagne.
In the 250 years which have elapsed since then, his descendants confronted countless crises. In 1789, the French Revolution turned the country upside down. Then followed the Napoleonic Wars, “the year without a summer” (1816), the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War (where the battle lines were drawn up a few kilometres from Reims), the Russian Revolution (which brought the collapse of the company’s major market), the Great Depression, the Second World War and the German Occupation, the Global Financial Crisis and many lesser obstacles along the way.
There’s no doubt that in the case of the Roederer descendants, the 250 years the family has been making and selling champagne have contributed to the brand’s extraordinary success. They learnt from Louis Roederer II (who was running the business in the 1870s) the importance of innovation – for it was he who created, in Cristal, the very first Prestige cuvée. Launched in 1876 – a century after the founding of the firm – Cristal remains the jewel in the Champagne Louis Roederer crown. Made from the vineyard blocks that Louis Roederer I had set aside to make the Cristal Champagne for Tsar Alexander II, it remains a champagne of legend.
That same spirit of innovation lives on today: in 1974, Jean-Claude Rouzaud (the father of the present CEO) created Cristal Rosé. Long before anyone in champagne imagined that organic and bio-dynamic agriculture was even possible in the Champagne region, Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon began the conversion of the Roederer vineyards (the most extensive family land-holding in the region). He also runs the company’s nursery, selecting material on the basis of seeking out the best quality clones for a particular site (and increasingly on the basis of how they perform in the face of global warming).
The family’s expansion into other parts of the international fine wine trade – Roederer Estate in California, Diamond Creek in Napa, Ramos Pinto in Portugal, Domaines Ott in Provence, Chateaux Pichon Lalande and De Pez in the Medoc – has brought insights, added skills and broadened their understanding of wine in the global context.
It should come as no surprise that Champagne Louis Roederer has emerged at the top of Drinks International’s “World’s Most Admired Champagne Brands” for the past seven years, and in recent years has been crowned “Supreme World Champion” at the “Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships” on no fewer than three occasions, as well as achieving category wins for their Brut vintage and non-vintage Champagnes.
It is also at the apex of Richard Juhlin’s Champagne Guide and is the destination brand for anyone seeking the best the Champagne region has to offer.