As much as I love Champagne, I sometimes find it challenging to differentiate between big houses and growers. An article I just read got me thinking about it again. This is a list of Grandes Marques houses by Vinepair. They included:
Ayala Billecart-Salmon Bollinger Canard-Duchêne Charles Heidsieck Deutz Gosset Heidsieck & Co Monopole Krug Lanson Laurent-Perrier Louis Roederer Mercier Moët & Chandon G. H. Mumm Joseph Perrier Perrier-Jouët Piper-Heidsieck Pol Roger Pommery Ruinart Salon Taittinger Veuve Clicquot
They didn’t include:
De Venoge Henriot Nicolas Feuillatte Philipponnat Vranken
Here are the criteria for Grandes Marques Champagne Houses from The Union des Maisons de Champagne (UMC)
Are any missing or incorrectly included? The distinction between grower Champagnes and major houses is becoming less defined. For example, Louis Roederer, which primarily uses estate-owned vineyards. Many producers I’d expect to be classified as Récoltant-Manipulant (RM), like Egly-Ouriet and Tarlant, are technically Négociant-Manipulant (NM), yet I still consider them grower Champagnes.
Here’s how I think of the classifications:
Grandes Marques / Négociant-Manipulant (NM) / Big Houses are large, generally well-known houses that primarily source from growers.
(e.g. Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Perrier-Jouët, Pommery, Taittinger)
Blend of NM and RM or “Estate-Focused NM”. Big houses which own and manage most of their vineyards (technically NM but operate more like growers)
(e.g. Louis Roederer, Philipponnat, maybe Bollinger)
Grower NM. Classified as NM but mostly a grower
They may purchase some grapes but are mostly grower-producers
(e.g. Egly-Ouriet, Tarlant, maybe De Sousa)
True Grower – Récoltant-Manipulant (RM)
Independent winemakers producing Champagne exclusively from their own vineyards.
(e.g. Vouette & Sorbée, Ulysse Collin, Chartogne-Taillet, Pierre Peters, Vilmart)
Am I overthinking this? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The traditional NM vs. RM distinction no longer reflects the reality of Champagne production. Many grower-style producers (like Egly-Ouriet) are classified as NM due to minor grape sourcing, yet they have little in common with houses like Moët. At the same time, some grandes marques (like Roederer) operate more like growers. If you’re passionate about Champagne, I think it’s worth exploring these nuances.
To me, there’s so much to unpack regarding NM and RM, classifications like CM, SR, MA, and RC seem less relevant, at least to this discussion.
I agree that it doesn’t really matter and it can often be misleading. I think Terry did a great job out of selling the concept of RM. There was a time around 2004 when all the cool kids first checked the label to make sure it said RM before they would give a particular wine a nod of approval. NM simply equated to bad and vineyards that were sprayed with agent orange in their eyes.
To cite an example of where the tag is pretty meaningless: I used to work with Guiborat. Fairly small holdings under 10 ha total IIRC. Definitely a true RM grower. After I stopped being ITB I was told they had to change to NM. I can’t remember just what it was but I think it had something to do with French inheritance laws and there was something that put ownership of some of their vineyards with a relative or something like that. Guiborat technically had to buy grapes from them and legally had to use NM on the labels at that point. I could very well be a little off on the details (maybe I am even confusing Guiborat with someone else!) but I know I am not too far off on the main point that essentially nothing changed in terms of who farmed the vineyards and made the wine.
The line between terroir-driven grower-producers and large houses blending for consistency is more blurred than ever, but (IMO) there’s still value in distinguishing between big houses and smaller growers. It just depends on what you’re looking for. Many growers can no longer use the RM designation, yet RM Champagnes still tend to showcase single-vineyard expressions, terroir-driven styles, and small-batch production. Meanwhile, the NM houses I love offer a consistent house style, blending expertise, and meticulous sourcing year after year. As I’ve said, the distinction isn’t as clear as it once was, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.
SVD’s are SVD’s regardless of the designation. Houses of any size call those out for several reasons.
As one of the cool kids that looked for this designation for a while during the ‘grower’ wave 12+ years ago, I always found it a bit arbitrary and meaningless. It seems to me a smart house would buy good fruit if it can get it hands on it. If the winemaking is good then I hope they will make more wine than just what the family plot offers.
I think its important to remember that this is a code for a business structure and to try to leave any feelings about quality or meaning aside. Its easy to want to use it for some measurement of quality or purity. Kind of like the ABV number. But these are merely about business and tax. Not about wine distinction.
There are also other designations for co-ops and other arrangements. Here is a nice, short explanation of the 6 codes:
They’re officially NM, but in my mind, they are clearly growers. I put them in the classification “Grower NM”.
Maybe I didn’t make my stance clear. In my view, NM and RM can be divided into four subcategories, something like:
1. True NM – Large houses (Grandes Marques) that primarily purchase grapes rather than relying on estate vineyards. (e.g., Moët & Chandon) 2. NM House Grown – Blend of NM and RM. Big houses that technically qualify as NM but own and manage most or all of their vineyards. (e.g., Louis Roederer) 3. Grower NM – Blend of RM and NM. Producers classified as NM but operating more like growers, with the majority of their production coming from estate fruit. (e.g., Egly-Ouriet) 4. True Grower (RM) – Small producers making Champagne exclusively from their own vineyards. (e.g., Vilmart)
This is where it starts to run into problems for me. The differences between 2 & 3 here seem arbitrary to me. They appear purposely squishy in order to be able to set aside the cool ones outside of the uncool ‘big houses’.
What is the purpose? It seems to me the easiest thing is to stop using the designations if they do not categorize producers in a way that one would want to. Its not what they are meant to do after all.
I get where you’re coming from, and I agree that the lines between categories 2 and 3 can feel blurred. There’s no perfect distinction. But I don’t think the goal is to arbitrarily separate the “cool” producers from the “uncool” big houses (I personally own a roughly equal amount of both). Rather, it’s about acknowledging that some NM producers operate in a way that makes them fundamentally different from the classic négociant model.
Take Roederer and Egly-Ouriet. Both are NM, but Roederer owns and farms nearly all its vineyards, while Egly-Ouriet technically buys a small percentage of fruit. Roederer still functions like a major house, producing large quantities with blending as a key stylistic element. Egly-Ouriet, on the other hand, behaves like a grower, focusing on site-specific, lower-production wines with minimal blending.
So, while the official NM vs. RM classification serves a regulatory purpose, it doesn’t fully capture how a producer actually works.
I’m not trying to redefine the system. I’d like a more practical way to describe how producers source fruit and make wine. If the legal categories don’t help us make meaningful distinctions in a way that reflects the wines, I don’t see any harm in expanding the conversation beyond them.
I stand corrected. I just checked one of the 2022 disgorged VP’s, and it is indeed RM as you mentioned. Thanks for pointing out my mistake and for double-checking with Peter Liem’s website.
Production volume is probably the best way to distinguish the growers vs the grand marques. Even the smaller grand marques seem to produce several orders of magnitude more than your typical grower.
I agree with a lot of what’s been said here. NM and RM don’t tell you much at this point, and quality varies across both segments. If I had to generalize based on the bottles I’ve opened in the last year, a good grower’s entry level bottling often outperforms a grand marque’s entry offering. But when it comes to the tete de cuvées, I often find the opposite, where the grand marques pull ahead, and I suspect the deep reserves at the Grand Marques is a key contributor to that.
Again, that’s a massive generalization, and I can think of plenty of examples that break with that (eg Cedric Bouchard, etc.).
I think I read somewhere buying a mere 5% of grapes results in a classification of NM. That makes the distinction, never one I cared much about, completely useless to me.
I think a lot of this is tied into the commercial, marketing and branding aspects of Champagne. One of the winemakers from a grand marque said to us at lunch that they do not want to stop buying grapes, because they believe it is important to them for various reasons, including being connected to developments in Champagne and the ability to have a lot of the lower end production be available to as broad an audience as possible to maintain brand presence, which would be hard to do with domaine fruit only.
So, I’m not sure someone like Louis Roederer would want to be seen as a “non-true NM” - they’re a grand marque because of what that means for branding and perception purposes. Cristal may techincally be grower Champagne, but that’s not the image of Cristal Roederer generally wants (other than to wine geeks). Whereas Selosse’s Rose is thought of as grower even though it’s technically not - but Anselme and Guillaume certainly don’t think of themselves as a grand marque. I suspect as producers in other regions get purchased by larger brands we’re going to see this play out more often; for example, Bouchard (the Burgundy one!) has just given up its negoce operation after being purchased by Artemis, but it’s going to take a generation for consumers not to think of them as a “big negoce house”, if they ever do! The perception of a “big negoce” in Burgundy is different, of course (and likely why Artemis had Bouchard drop the negoce line).
There are a lot of soft labels like this that float around the world of wine. Are you a “family-owned winery” or a “corporate winery?” Are you a traditionalist or a modernist? AFWE or Parkerized? Minimalist or interventionist? Natural? Biodynamic? Terroir driven? Clean farmed? Hedonistic? Grower-producer?
Most of them have some meaning some of the time, maybe to the point that they aren’t completely useless as a shorthand. Plus, people like to slap labels on things to keep them simpler and more organized in their heads. I do it sometimes too.
As @Cris_Whetstone correctly points out, there is usually (not always, but usually) some current of “one label good the other label bad” in there. Family owned = good, corporate owned = bad.
I guess my view would be just not to take them too literally or seriously. Maybe “big house” and “grower” are like the drawers you put your golf shorts and your other shorts in, but there are some shorts that are harder to categorize as one or the other, and ultimately, what matters is the specific pair of shorts is and whether you want to wear them that time rather than which drawer they came from.
