Us, more or less.

Hi, we’re Laura and Chris Marshall, and between us we’ve spent most of our working lives around drinks and hospitality.

Laura ran restaurants and hotels for years, at Michelin level and in smaller, more boutique places too, learning the trade from both ends of it. Chris works in psychology and finance, and alongside that founded Snowdonia Distillery in 2014, which went on to become one of the most awarded artisan spirit companies of the following decade.

Champagne got under our skin somewhere along the way, not just as a drink to pour, but as a whole world of growers, villages, and small details most people never stop to notice. This site is where we write it down.

Recent Musings

News, houses, cuvées, and cellar tours.

The hidden language of Champagne

August 6, 2026

I went to see Pierre-Eric Jolly in 2017 for reasons that had nothing to do with Champagne. I was there for a barrel, hunting for a used cask I could bring home and fill with gin for a limited-edition release under the Forager’s label, and someone had pointed me south, down into the Aube, to a family estate in Landreville that had been working the same land since 1737. What I actually walked away with was a barrel and, tucked in somewhere behind it, a proper education in the two tiny letters printed on every Champagne bottle I’d ever opened without once looking at them closely. Pierre-Eric took over the domaine from his father in 2000, and everything that comes

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A Lighthouse With No Sea in Sight

August 5, 2026

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I were staying at Champagne Collery, working our way through six of their cuvées over the course of an evening that had, by the fourth glass kind of stopped being a tasting at all. It was somewhere around cuvée number five that our host mentioned, almost in passing, that there was a lighthouse nearby. For those a little unsure of the geography of Champagne, where we sat in Aÿ, we were nowhere near the coast. Like 280km nowhere near the coast. But we were assured that, not far from us, stood a lighthouse standing in the middle of the vines, apparently, watching over grapes instead of ships. I wrote the name down

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2026: Ready or not, here I come

August 5, 2026

Those who know me well, know I keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge door at nearly all times. Wednesdays happen. Small victories happen. You need to be ready. So when a headline on an industry-based website reads “On commence le 15 août, tu te rends compte,” a shudder went through my torso, before I’d even finished properly translating it in my head. “We start on August 15th, can you believe it?” Those of you who closely follow the blogs and chats on here will be quite au fait with the fact that the champagne harvest happens traditionally in mid to late september. At least that is how it was in decades gone by. In more recent years it’s

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