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 on my phone, horribly misspelling Verzenay as ‘Vesinee’, but Google corrected that for me, and the next morning while the sun was still coming up sideways over the vineyard rows, we drove out to see it before we’d even had coffee.
Nowhere Near Open, Exactly Where It Should Be
It wasn’t open, obviously. After all, we were absurdly early, and the small museum inside doesn’t so much as glance at a doorknob before mid-morning, but none of that mattered. The building itself does most of the work from the outside. It rises straight out of a hilltop above the village of Verzenay, on a rise the locals call Mont Rizan, and from below it reads exactly the way it’s supposed to: a genuine 25-metre lighthouse, the kind you’d expect to find guarding a harbor, except the thing it’s guarding is several hundred acres of Pinot Noir. In the low morning light, with the mist still sitting in the rows below it, it looked less like a joke and more like the vines had simply decided they wanted their own lighthouse and nobody had argued.
Since the gate was locked, we had to make do with the view from the base, but that alone was enough to make the early start worth it. The Grand Cru slopes of Verzenay fall away in every direction, dead quiet at that hour except for the faint, distant sound of a TGV train passing along the valley floor several miles away.
An Advertisement That Outlived the Product
The joke, once you learn the history, gets better rather than worse. This was never a working lighthouse in any nautical sense. It was built in 1909 by a Champagne négociant named Joseph Goulet, purely as an advertisement. A piece of pure early-twentieth-century marketing theater, designed to be seen from Reims on a clear night and to make absolutely certain nobody driving past could avoid thinking about his Champagne house. His name was reportedly painted across all six sides of the tower so it was legible from whichever direction you approached, and for a few years it worked spectacularly: a restaurant and a dance hall sprang up around its base, along with a lively guingette that pulled in visitors from Reims and Épernay for an evening out that had, as far as I can tell, very little to do with actually buying Champagne and quite a lot to do with the novelty of drinking it under a lighthouse in the middle of a vineyard.
It didn’t last. The First World War shut the party down for good and the tower spent the war as a military observation post instead, which tracks, since a 25-metre tower with a clear line of sight to Reims is exactly the kind of structure an army wants to stand in and exactly the kind of structure an opposing army wants to shell. It passed through a couple of major Champagne houses afterward, sat abandoned for the better part of half a century, and was finally rescued by the local community in the late 1980s, reopening as a museum dedicated to the vine in 1999, at which point, in a small and slightly funny historical footnote, Goulet’s name was actually removed from the building as part of the deal, on the condition that the site never again be used to advertise anyone’s Champagne.
Watching Over the Right Neighborhood
But here’s the detail that made the whole detour click into place for me: Verzenay isn’t just any village to have built a marketing lighthouse in. It’s one of Champagne’s seventeen Grand Cru villages and proper Pinot Noir country, the kind of slope that earned its status the hard way, long before Goulet ever thought to put a lighthouse on top of it. The advertising stunt, in other words, was never really selling the lighthouse. It was pointing straight down at the actual asset the whole time, and just needed something tall enough and strange enough that people would stop the car and look.
We stopped the car. We looked. Then we went back for the coffee we should have had before any of this, and for another day of cuvée tasting.