May 7, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 53

Pol Roger Champagne: Another Look

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.”— Mark Twain

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By Daniel Mehta

Mr. Mehta, an English writer based in Singapore, is a long-time member of TCC with an interest in Churchill’s recreational side (properties, art, hobbies). See also “Still Verve in the Veuve,” FH 63: 15; Pol Roger by Cynthia Parzych and John Turner, FH 107: 27; and “Odette Pol-Roger,” FH 109: 8.

A London wine merchant, sent to appraise the Chartwell wine cellar, determined that almost the only thing of value in it was a large supply of vintage Pol Roger champagne.¹ A champagne drinker for most of his adult life, Winston Churchill was a Pol Roger devotee for over fifty years, receiving it with compliments in later life. He often quoted the words of Napoleon, whose biography he had once hoped to write: “I cannot live without champagne. In victory I deserve it; in defeat I need it.”²

An extant order for a case of the 1895 vintage, purchased in 1908 when he was President of the Board of Trade, provides evidence of Churchill’s early affection for Pol Roger. It also documents the £4/16 he paid for it.

After World War II, Odette Pol Roger, grande dame of the champagne house, kept Churchill well stocked with cases, most commonly (until it ran out) the 1928 vintage. By 1965, WSC had worked his way through to the 1934 vintage and was beginning to enjoy the ’47. He had often promised Odette he would visit Epernay, where he hoped to “press the grapes with my feet”³—a startling image, though he never made good his intention.

Pol Roger, a Champenois from Ay, established the Epernay champagne house in 1849. The company’s first shipments to England were in 1876, inspired perhaps by the outstanding vintage year of 1874, the year of Churchill’s birth. It was the beginning of a long association with England, which would result in its name becoming better known there than in France.

Upon Pol Roger’s death, his sons Maurice and Georges were given permission to use their father’s first and last name together, as the family and company name (the family name is hyphenated). Under their leadership, by the end of the century, the champagne house was one of around 20 Grandes-Marques, which would define quality levels through the present.

Currently, a fifth generation of Pol-Rogers produces around 125,000 cases annually from 85 hectares of vineyards. The house is renowned for having the deepest (and therefore the coldest) cellars in Champagne. The tunnels hold an approximate 7.5 million bottles and the company states that every bottle is riddled (turned) by hand. Even their non-vintage brut, better known as “White Foil” because of its neck wrapper, spends at least three years in these cellars before going out on the market.

Maurice Pol-Roger was the father-in-law of Odette Pol-Roger, who ran the company at the height of Churchill’s fame, and with whom he became close friends. Odette did not follow her father-in-law’s flamboyant business management when she took over the firm as unofficial head in the 1940s, while active in the French Resiastance. She devoted her energy to a role she saw as simply “to encourage people to enjoy champagne,” said The Daily Telegraph.⁴ Famous for her beauty, grace and vitality, she also managed to charm Churchill from the beginning. She remains the most widely recognised ambassador of the firm to date.

Pol Roger today produces six champagnes, from non-vintage brut through to their flagship Sir Winston Churchill Cuveé. The company devotes some 30% of its production to premium vintage champagne, against an industry standard of 6%, and enjoys a long association with the UK.

Their premium vintage brand, first named after Churchill in 1984, can only be produced in the very best years, from 100%-rated villages, and only those areas under the vine in Churchill’s day. After his death in 1965, searching for a suitable tribute for their English-market White Foil, they began bordering its label in black, and have only recently changed to navy blue, honoring the “Former Naval Person.”⁵

Churchill’s life is punctuated by references to champagne. He would name his favourite racehorse after Odette, although she was heard to remark, “Oh that mare—we had such trouble with her.”⁶ In 1915, dismissed from the Admiralty at the nadir of his fortunes, Churchill wrote to his brother Jack from Hoe Farm that he and the family were well equipped with all the essentials of life: “hot baths, cold champagne, new peas and old brandy.”⁷

Later, when working on the renovations to the lake at Chartwell in the 1930s, he would write to the absent Clementine that the working party was taking champagne at all meals.

The House of Pol Roger bridles at the suggestion that they instigated the association with Churchill. In fact, at the World War II victory party at the British Embassy in Paris, Alfred Duff Cooper introduced Churchill to Odette Pol-Roger. WSC was immediately smitten, and a friendship began which would endure through the rest of his life. He declared that Odette should be invited to dinner whenever he was in Paris and pronounced her home in Epernay “the world’s most drinkable address.”⁸ She was close enough to Sir Winston to be on the short list of personal friends invited to attend his state funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Hanging in the company’s headquarters is a framed thank-you note from Churchill, dated from 1945. It reads “I thank you so much for this most agreeable token of your regard, which I have received with pleasure, and also with the kind expression with which it is accompanied.”⁹

Long before then, Churchill’s brand loyalty was well established, and because it showed no signs of waning, Pol Roger was assured of a continued association with their most famous and revered customer.

Paraphrasing Churchill’s words, current managing director Christian Pol-Roger frequently remarks: “My idea of a good dinner is good food, good company, and champagne from beginning to end.”¹⁰

Endnotes

1. Finest Hour 62, First Quarter, 1989, “Riddles, Mysteries, Enigmas”: “…a London wine merchant, sent to appraise the cellar at Chartwell, pronounced it a ‘shambles,’ the only items of value being a large supply of vintage Pol Roger Champagne (regularly topped up by shipments from Madame Odette Pol-Roger in Epernay); Hine brandy; and some bottles of chardonnay which Churchill had bottled with Hillaire Belloc and which WSC forbade anyone to touch. The merchant pronounced the chardonnay undrinkable, along with the rest of the cellar.”

2. Apparently adapted from Napoleon Bonaparte: “In victory, you deserve champagne. In defeat, you need it.”

3. Obituary of Odette Pol-Roger, Daily Telegraph, 30 December 2000; FH 109.

4. Ibid.

5. See www.polroger.co.uk: “In 1990 the black band of mourning on ‘White Foil’ was lightened to navy blue, recalling Winston Churchill’s ‘loyalties to the Senior Service’ as a former First Lord of the Admiralty.”

6. Obituary Odette Pol-Roger, Daily Telegraph, op. cit.

7. WSC to his brother Jack, Hoe Farm, Godalming, Surrey, 19 June 1915.

8. www.polroger.co.uk

9. WSC to Odette Pol-Roger, British Embassy, Paris, 14 November 1945.

10. WSC to Odette Pol-Roger, Christian Pol-Roger to the author, 27 February 2010.