How does Champagne's reserve wine system actually work?

Plus, meet the bubbleheads: Queena Wong

This week, Champagne Pommery got into a spot of hot water by suggesting that Champagne’s history and reserves means it will always be ‘placed higher’ than English Sparkling wine: While the message underneath was perhaps more logical than the rather lumpy phrasing put across, it was probably not the most tactful angle to take for a producer actually investing in, and releasing, English wines.

But what exactly is it about Champagne’s reserves that is so interesting? With the help of some grapes, a hectare of land, a champagne glass and a couple of reserve tanks I made a short video to help explain.

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Meet The Bubbleheads: Queena Wong

“I met a well-known wine journalist at an industry lunch. After a few glasses he says to me, ‘So Queena…what are you?!’ A friend came up and said, ‘are you trying to put Queena in a box? Queena takes the box, she turns it upside-down, and she stands on it!’”

When you notice the person next to you has a Salon phone case it’s more than an ice-breaker; it’s an invitation to dive in and talk bubbles. That’s what happened when I met Queena Wong at a champagne tasting run by Nick Baker and Essi Avellan MW last year. As someone who has also sidled into the wine industry on a tangent, getting to know people can be tricky. The ice is thick, in parts at least. There are some people, though, that you end up sat around a lunch table with in little more than a blink of an eye.

Collector, organiser, champion of hospitality and women in wine, Wong is living proof that all of us need a few Antipodeans in our lives to grease those rusty, reticent parts of the British psychological machinery. Despite not technically working in the industry, Code Hospitality recently named her one of the 100 Most Influential Women In Hospitality. “My kids think it’s hilarious… ‘mum, you’re an influencer!’”. But influencing what, exactly?

“We need more serious female consumers and collectors”, she explains. “My view is that if we can bring more women into wine there are massive uplifts for the industry as a whole.” It’s a refreshing angle; industries tend to talk about diversity in terms of their employees, but less in terms of their customers. There are plenty of fairly derisory attempts to market cheaper wine to women, but the question here is whether the upper end of the wine market is still an arena whose discourse and disposition is overwhelmingly framed by men. Is high-end wine missing out on a fairly obvious demographic?

Wong’s Curious Vines project started as a way to address this by helping women who have the opportunity to build a collection gain the confidence and knowledge to do so. “Wine is one of those things you have to practise!”, she explains. “You can’t just attend a few tastings. It’s about those 10,000 hrs.” Curious Vines itself is not especially active any more, but it’s still the closest Wong gets to a box - even if these days it is mostly upturned and used, as promised, as a platform.

I ask whether there is ever any conflict between Queena as an investor and Queena as a wine lover. “I am a wine lover, then a collector, then an investor. People like me get into investing because we buy more than we can drink!” But would she ever buy a wine only for investment? “Not exactly. There are times when you need to buy something in order to get your allocation of the wine you really need. So yes. But then you have to know how to shift it, or the storage costs can really bleed you.”

Talk of allocations leads us on to the likes of Ulysse Collin and Cedric Bouchard, whose wines have entered unicorn orbit in terms of reputation and price. I float a question; do we really know enough about the long term age-ability of some of these rapidly-ascending grower champagnes to justify the investor-driven prices being fetched?

“I don’t buy those any more. They’re good wines, but the prices….we know that some grower champagnes do age though. I had an Egly-Ouriet Rosé disgorged twelve years ago, and it was beautiful! More importantly, nobody wants to miss the boat. I buy what I can from each Savart release now, because I love the wines. But with the way Asia is going you know you’re not going to lose money if you’ve got producer and vintage - tick, tick. Buy it, even if you haven’t tasted it. Will some of those Savarts turn into Selosse 2008s, at £3500 a bottle?”

There’s no hiding the fact that wine investment is a parallel skill to wine appreciation. Not all wine lovers are comfortable with the idea of wine investment, and some have even suggested that speculation is damaging the soul of wine itself. There’s a difference, though, between a collector who sits at home with the ticker tape and one who doesn’t think twice about raiding it for friends, new and old. “I got some stick over my bottle lineups - ‘look at her with her fancy bottles’ - from guys who play big bottles, on paper. They’re just jealous I didn’t open it with them! What they don’t understand is that it’s about friendship, not the bottle lineup.”

There’s no shortage of friends to rely on when you’ve built a network that traverses sommeliers, buyers, chefs, investors, collectors and restauranteurs. It really came into its own over Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, when Wong took her network online:

“We were all bored. So I took out a Zoom subscription and said ‘let’s do something’. By June we had Jan Konetzki doing German Riesling, Stefan Neumann MS doing Austrian Riesling, and Eric Zwiebel MS doing Alsace Riesling. The somms were telling the somms, the trade were telling the trade, all by word of mouth. We nearly maxed out my zoom subscription!” Wong also used the sessions to raise money for Hospitality Action and the Drinks Trust at a time when there was precious little support for the sector.

All this is a reminder that Covid sometimes brought about its own, peculiar sense of community. Perhaps it was actually tougher to continue engaging with it once lockdowns finished and hospitality had opened up again? The answer was to do the leg-work. “Restaurants were struggling post-Covid, and so many of the somms had returned home overseas - and they weren’t coming back. They didn’t have visas after Brexit, and restaurants couldn’t take on the costs of sponsoring them. So I found restaurants with good outdoor space and interesting wine lists, and I started literally dragging my friends out to eat, just to bring some vibe and energy. And to spend some money!”

Then came the next step. “I had a woman come to me. She was studying for the MW (Master of Wine), and she said, ‘Queena, we have a problem. There are no tastings. The MW exam is costing me £10,000 to sit, and I’m going to fail’”.

Wong called up MWs and merchants and not only managed to source past papers but also, crucially, the wines that accompanied them. “That was hard work…I got 70% of the bottles sponsored by female merchant friends who wanted to help out. We ended up with twelve women, all indoors because it was a professional setting, all studying real papers.”

There would probably be men pointing out that they were in the same boat at the time. But, as both recent research and Wong’s own events have proven, hospitality is not always an even playing field. “It’s not about not helping men; it’s about lifting up women.” Wong recently planned a night to get her network together. “I booked a room for fifty and said to all my trade friends, ‘tell your girl mates!’ We filled it out, and had a waiting list of twenty. It went viral on instagram, and I had message after message asking me what was going on.” Anyone still sceptical about inequalities in the industry needs to ask why there are so many women that jumped at the opportunity to have their own space for a few hours.

As for the Salon phone case, its days turned out to be numbered. “I upgraded my phone and it didn’t fit any more!”. Most of us would have simply shrugged our shoulders. “I emailed them to ask if they had another one the right size - they actually responded, too. It was a no, but still…”.

Don’t ask, don’t get, as they say.