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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pierre-Eric took over the domaine from his father in 2000, and everything that comes out of that cellar is grown, pressed, and disgorged on the same handful of hectares his family has farmed for generations, by hand, without freezing, which is rarer than you’d think even among growers who like to talk about doing things the old way. He didn’t lecture me about it. He just handed me a glass, pointed at the front label, and asked if I knew what “RM” meant. I didn’t. I’d been drinking Champagne for years without once wondering why some bottles carried a name and address I recognized, and others carried a code I’d never bothered to decipher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It turns out those two letters aren’t decoration. Every bottle of Champagne is legally required to carry a producer code (two initials followed by a registration number, issued by the Comit\u00e9 Champagne), and once you know what they stand for, a wall of bottles in a shop stops being a wall of bottles and starts being a wall of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pierre-Eric’s own bottles carry RM<\/strong>, short for R\u00e9coltant-Manipulant<\/em>, a grower who farms the vineyard and makes the wine on the same property. It’s the code people mean when they say “grower Champagne,” and by law it requires the fruit to come almost entirely from the producer’s own vines. There’s a real romance to this one, and Pierre-Eric, to his credit, didn’t oversell it. He talked about the vineyard the way you’d talk about a piece of family furniture, with plenty of pride, but none of the performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of what actually fills the shelves, though, carries NM<\/strong>, short for N\u00e9gociant-Manipulant<\/em>. This is the code for the grand houses whose names you already know: they buy grapes, sometimes wine, sometimes both, from growers across the region and blend it into a consistent house style, vintage after vintage. Consistency is the whole trade here. NM houses are in the business of making sure a bottle bought this year tastes like the one you remember from three years ago, which is a harder trick than it sounds and the reason those houses employ people whose entire job is tasting hundreds of base wines and deciding which few hundred belong together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there’s the cooperative world, which nobody outside the trade ever seems to have heard of and which is doing an enormous amount of quiet, unglamorous work. CM<\/strong>, short for Coop\u00e9rative de Manipulation<\/em>, is a cooperative that makes and markets wine from its members’ pooled grapes, usually under the co-op’s own name. A grower belonging to that cooperative can instead take the wine back at some stage of its life and finish and sell it under their own name, at which point the code on the label changes to RC<\/strong>, R\u00e9coltant-Coop\u00e9rateur<\/em>. A smaller, less common variant, SR<\/strong> (Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 de R\u00e9coltants<\/em>), covers a handful of related growers sharing a winery while keeping their fruit and their labels separate: close cousins farming the same barn, essentially, but refusing to blend their crops together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two remaining codes are the ones worth knowing precisely because they tell you what a bottle isn’t<\/em>. ND<\/strong>, short for N\u00e9gociant-Distributeur<\/em>, is a merchant who buys already-finished bottled Champagne and puts their own name on it without growing a single grape or touching a single ferment. MA<\/strong>, short for Marque d’Acheteur<\/em> (a buyer’s brand), covers Champagne sold under a label that belongs to whoever bought it: a supermarket, a restaurant group, an airline. The wine behind an MA might be perfectly decent, occasionally excellent, but the name on the front tells you nothing whatsoever about who actually made it, which is a strange thing to accept from a drink this expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this makes one code inherently better than another. Pierre-Eric was right about that. An NM house has resources, blending skill, and library reserves that most growers can only dream of; a CM cooperative can turn out lovely, honest wine at a fair price; a careless RM grower can bottle something as flat as anything mass-produced. What the code buys you is honesty about where the bottle actually came from, which is more than most drinks bother to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you’ve worked out who<\/em> made the bottle, there’s a second, entirely separate question worth asking, and it’s the one that actually determines what you’ll taste: is it vintage, or non-vintage?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-vintage, NV on a label, sometimes rendered as Non Mill\u00e9sim\u00e9<\/em>, is a blend of wines from several different years, built deliberately to taste the same, year in and year out. This is the house style I mentioned a moment ago, and it’s the harder achievement of the two, whatever the price tag might suggest. A cellar master blending an NV cuv\u00e9e is drawing on reserve wines set aside from previous vintages specifically so that a poor growing year can be quietly propped up by better ones sitting in tank. It’s less “this is what 2022 tasted like” and more “this is what our house tastes like, regardless of what 2022 threw at us.” Most of the Champagne you’ve ever drunk, at a wedding or a bar or standing in someone’s kitchen, was NV, and there’s no shame whatsoever in that. It’s the format the whole region is actually built around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vintage Champagne, Mill\u00e9sim\u00e9<\/em>, is the opposite instinct entirely. It’s made from the grapes of a single year, declared only when that year was genuinely good enough to stand on its own without the safety net of reserve wine, and the year itself is printed right there on the label. Houses don’t declare a vintage every year (some skip several in a row), and that restraint is the point: a vintage bottle is a producer telling you, in writing, that this particular harvest was worth setting apart. It’s usually aged longer before release, tends to cost more, and drinks less like “Champagne” as an idea and more like a specific place and a specific season, for better or worse depending on what that season actually delivered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither one is a lesser version of the other. They’re doing genuinely different jobs, one engineered for reliability, the other for a single, unrepeatable expression of the year, and a producer’s skill shows up in both, just in opposite directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That afternoon in Landreville, once we’d finished with the barrel and the talk had drifted properly onto wine, Pierre-Eric opened two bottles side by side without telling me which was which: a non-vintage blended from several years’ worth of reserve wine, and a vintage he’d only made because that particular harvest had earned it. I guessed wrong, of course, picking the blend as the single year. He let it go more gracefully than I deserved. I drove home with a barrel that would eventually become gin, and, buried somewhere in the same trip, the ability to finally read the fine print on a bottle of Champagne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/champagneinsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Other Question: Was It One Year, or Several?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Quick reference<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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