TIMELESS WINE

In Australia to launch Champagne Pommery’s latest cuvée, Nathalie Vranken knows a thing or two about powerful women bubbling to the surface in a male-dominated industry, writes Natasha Dragun.

When Nathalie Vranken walks into a room, you feel her presence immediately. We meet in a Sydney restaurant one afternoon. She is confident and calm, eloquent and concise – despite the fact she has just hosted a long sommelier’s tasting session to launch Champagne Pommery’s new Cuvee Louise 2005 Parcelles. There are a lot of empty bottles around the room. “It helps that I have a natural authority,” Nathalie laughs when we sit down to coffee (her) and champagne (me).

The co-owner of VrankenPommery Monopole – a family company of which her husband, Paul-Francois Vranken, serves as president – Nathalie has had plenty of lessons in persistence over the course of her life.

Born in Paris, she launched her own communications agency when she was just 22. She fast became a member of the Montaigne Committee – an association of luxury retailers on Avenue Montaigne – rose to director and went on to launch a number of prestigious events.

It gave her power and respect in a world traditionally dominated by men.

In many ways, her career trajectory parallels Champagne Pommery’s founder, Madame Jeanne-Alexandrine

Louise Pommery. After the death of her husband in 1858, Madame Pommery took control of the champagne house.

Over the next three decades, she transformed it into one of the largest and most prosperous of its kind in the world.

Her list of achievements is long: adding the finest vineyards to the estate; pioneering underground limestone and chalk pits as cellars; and (famously) creating the world’s first brut (dry) champagne in 1874. 01 Nathalie Vranken, co-owner of Champagne Pommery

Today’s Pommery makers still replicate the style, although have expanded the brand’s releases to include a suite of nuanced and delicate cuvées, produced at Domaine Pommery in the French city of Reims, the unofficial capital of the Champagne wine region.

The estate’s chalk quarries – 30 metres below the ground – are still intact to this day, and have 18 kilometres of interconnected galleries, which now hold 25 million bottles.

Here, the wine is left for a minimum of three years to develop the fine bubbles associated with the brand today, and some even stay here for decades.

These are the kind of bubbles that inspire joy, she says with a smile.

“Champagne offers moments of happiness.

When you drink it, you want that emotion, that beautiful moment back in your life.”

Indeed, the fizz as I drink is light, almost like peach fuzz, with notes of lime and pear. It’s fresh and elegant, and it goes down way too easily.

I begin to understand all the empty bottles around the room and I sense that Nathalie is watching me as I sip.

“Don’t worry about others watching you – champagne is all about you,” she says. “Nothing else matters when you drink it.” champagnepommery.com

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