The New Barons of Bubbly

“I love Champagne, but not enough to die for it, I’m thinking, as we jump out of the way of a careening mini-forklift loaded with pallets of unlabelled Champagne bottles in a vast warehouse that smells exactly like a bar at off hours. This is not a bar, however; it is the spanking new, state-of-the-art facility for Champagne Barons de Rothschild. The name sounds familiar? It isn’t.

“We started in 2005 from the ground up,” says Frédéric Mairesse, the affable Directeur Général of the Rothschild family’s newest wine endeavor. “It was literally a giant hole in the ground to house the first bottles of wine.” Then came the storerooms with dozens of computerized vats to hold the reserve wines, along with blending and racking rooms and everything else, step by step. Why a move into Champagne? Isn’t it incongruous, even heretical, for a family whose name is synonymous with great Bordeaux? Mairesse’s look pretty much says: Why not? Considering the Rothschild’s stature in the wine business, and the world’s unquenchable thirst for Champagne, it might be more logical to ask what took them so long.”