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Laurent-Perrier ups the emphasis on its prestige cuvée

10 October 2023 By Patrick Schmitt

There’s change afoot at Champagne Laurent-Perrier, with a new cellar master and a team that’s been built around promoting the brand’s prestige cuvée: Grand Siècle.

For those who know Laurent-Perrier, particularly in the UK, it tends to be for its rosé – a non-vintage pink Champagne that combines class-leading quality with beautiful and distinctive packaging.

Indeed, within the famous, stubby, dark green bottle is a fizz made using only Pinot Noir, which gives the wine its colour due to a brief skin-contact with the black grape – an unusual approach when the vast majority of pink Champagne is made by blending a touch of red wine with white.

But less well-known within the Laurent-Perrier range is its pinnacle expression. Called Grand Siècle, it too comes in a distinctive and beautiful bottle, and also eschews convention in Champagne – when almost all prestige cuvées hail from a single harvest, Laurent-Perrier’s top fizz is a blend of vintages.

In fact, it is always a combination of three years, chosen for their complementary qualities. And there are a further two aspects to the prestige cuvée: it is Chardonnay-dominant – using grapes from a selection of 11 grands crus – and it spends a minimum of 10 years ageing on its lees.

The result is a Champagne that has enough depth to make it instantly-appealing, as well as the freshness to give it a long-life post-release: Grand Siècle ages extremely well.

While the product and its appearance are exceptional, Grand Siècle’s level of fame is low – at least relative to its competitive set, which includes great names such as Dom Pérignon, Cristal and Krug.

And it is this comparative lack of awareness that Laurent-Perrier is focused on fixing, particularly now the house has a new person in charge of the winemaking: in July this year, Maximilien Bernardeau was appointed cellar master and wine manager of the Laurent‑Perrier Group, following six months of working alongside former cellar master, Michel Fauconnet (who is still keeping a watching brief on the company’s Champagnes).

To help raise the profile of Grand Siècle, Laurent-Perrier has now formed a team to promote the prestige cuvée, headed up by Edouard Cossy, who holds the post of global director, helped by Lucie Pereyre de Nonancourt, who acts as brand ambassador for the expression, which was created by her grandfather, Bernard de Nonancourt, in 1959.

Lucie told db in summertime this year that her legendary forebear had opted to make the ultimate Champagne using three harvests “to create the perfect expression that nature could not provide him with”, before commenting, “And we now have a dedicated team to explain this concept.”

For Edouard, Laurent-Perrier has a two-pronged task for Grand Siècle, as he explained to db in late August. “The challenge we have is to increase the notoriety, which is still at a very low level, and to explain the vision: the idea that we have created something that nature cannot achieve on its own.”

Continuing, he said, “When consumers think about prestige cuvées, they don’t automatically think about Grand Siècle, which is why we are making a lot of efforts to make it more famous, and we have everything in hand to spread the message.”

This will involve focusing on improving distribution for the top-end expression in key markets, such as Japan, Germany and Italy, as well as the UK – where Laurent-Perrier is being helped by longstanding employee of the house, David Hesketh MW, according to Edouard.

It will also see the Champagne promoted via fine wine merchants as each ‘iteration’ is released, with Grand Siècle carrying a number to signify the different components of each mutli-vintage expression – a move made back in 2019.

Ahead of the unveiling of the latest Grand Siècle – which is no.26, to represent the 26^th release since the prestige cuvée was created – Edouard stressed that while Laurent-Perrier had created “a dedicated team” for the top expression, “with the right resources behind it,” the group was not going to turn Grand Siècle into a standalone brand, in the way that Rare Champagne is now a separate entity from the house that launched it, Piper-Heidsieck.

“There is no plan to extract Grand Siècle from the range, it is still part of Laurent-Perrier, like Cristal is to Louis Roederer,” said Edouard.

He also told db that there won’t be any repositioning of the prestige cuvée in terms of price, nor changes to the packaging.

In short, the work now being carried out on Grand Siècle is focused on marketing the cuvée, both to raise its awareness, but also to promote its particular credentials.

As Lucie said of the multi-vintage top-end blend, “We are not like the others, we are different, and we want to occupy a niche.”

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