Champagne maker Pol Roger unearths 19th century vintage
Henry Samuel
in Paris One of the world’s oldest Champagne makers has just struck liquid gold.
Pol Roger, the French Champagne house whose wine was famous for being Sir Winston Churchill’s favourite tipple, has unearthed a treasure trove of bottles lost in the ruins of collapsed cellars for more than a century.
Experts say the 26 bottles so far recovered could still be drinkable, and that there may well be many more from the million or so lost at the time.
The fate of the bottles has been the stuff of “dreams and nightmares for generations of the family and cellar masters”, Laurent d’Harcourt, Pol Roger’s chief executive, said.
The story began on February 23, 1900, when two floors of cellars collapsed overnight. Le Vigneron Champenois, the local trade paper, reported at the time that at 2am “a dull rumble similar to the sound of thunder” awoke Maurice Roger, who had taken over the house with his brother Georges from their father Pol in 1899.
Another “much louder noise” ensued, prompting Roger and his chef de cave to get up. To their horror they found part of the huge cellars had caved in, along with the adjoining buildings. Thankfully nobody was hurt. But in terms of Champagne the loss was devastating, as around 1.5 million bottles and 500 casks had been buried in the process.
The Roger brothers mulled tunnelling to retrieve the wine. But when a neighbour’s cellar collapsed the following month, they ruled it was too risky and chose to give up the hunt for the lost vintages. Instead, they built new cellars on Avenue de Champagne.
The wine was not forgotten but previous salvage bids came to naught. However, more than a century later, a project to build a packaging facility on the site of the historic cellars gave the fifth generation of the family another crack at locating them.
On January 15, construction workers digging underground found a “void”.
Dominic Petit, who retires next month as cellarmaster, and his successor, Damien Cambres, widened the cavity. “We found a lot of broken glass. Then we found one bottle on the first day, six the second and 19 on the third,” said d’Harcourt. “We think we’ll find more.”
Encrusted in chalky soil, the handblown bottles are in good condition. The wines are clear and the levels are correct, according to Pol Roger. The corks, held in place by a metal staple, have withheld the test of time.
Records suggest the vintages are between the years 1887 and 1898. Many would have been destined for Britain, Pol Roger’s prime market then as now.
A fair few may well have ended up drunk by Churchill, who ordered his first Pol Roger, a 1895 vintage, in 1908, and, it has been claimed, drank 42,000 bottles in his lifetime.