A Small Piece of News That Stuck With Me
I'm constantly stumbling across news from small and mid-sized houses that usually gets lost in the big headlines. Most of it I read, nod at, and forget again. Not this one. Champagne Collery from Aÿ is releasing a limited cuvée dedicated to a woman about whom there are hardly any records: Geneviève Collery-Herbillon. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt that exactly these kinds of stories show what Champagne is really about, not just chalk, hillside slopes and dosage debates, but people who kept a house alive across generations.
Who Was Geneviève Collery-Herbillon?
Geneviève was the wife of Pierre Collery, the son of the house's founder Jules-Anatole Collery, who established the company in 1893. During the interwar years, economically anything but easy times, the two apparently divided the work very clearly between them: Pierre worked in the vineyards, while Geneviève took care of pretty much everything else. Sales, customer contact, correspondence. In a surviving letter, she reportedly wrote, in essence, that Pierre tends to the vines while she sells the wine, "dresses it up," writes the letters, and handles the rest.
What impresses me particularly is that she apparently traveled to Paris regularly to meet restaurateurs, hoteliers, and event organizers in person. That was no small undertaking at the time. According to reports, Collery was served at the Hotel Lutetia and ordered by the renowned caterer Potel & Chabot, which apparently placed orders for several thousand bottles in the mid-1930s. For a house from Aÿ, without the marketing budget and structures that the big maisons had, that's a remarkable achievement, and she seems to have been largely responsible for it.
Surprisingly little is known about her life itself. A photo from 1943 showing her in the vineyard, a few letters, fragments. No extensive biography, no detailed archive. For me, that makes the story even more striking, how many women in Champagne's history must have been similarly pivotal without their names ever making it into a history book?
The Cuvée "Hommage à Geneviève": A Small Departure From the House Style
What I find exciting is this: Collery is generally regarded as a distinctly Pinot Noir house. Aÿ is, after all, one of the classic Pinot Noir addresses in Champagne, and as far as I know, the house ages part of its assemblages in barrel, a style that tends to be powerful, wine-driven, and traditional. For the Hommage cuvée, though, they've chosen a vintage Blanc de Blancs, meaning pure Chardonnay. For a house with this Pinot Noir identity, that's quite a stylistic departure, and I find it a lovely gesture: a more classic, presumably more elegant and streamlined cuvée for a woman who herself apparently came across as very clear-minded and determined.
Director Romain Levecque is quoted, in essence, as saying that they deliberately took their time, because the wine needed to do justice to her remarkable style. To me, that doesn't sound like a quick marketing idea, but like a project that matured over a longer period, both figuratively and literally.
Art Meets Champagne
What I especially love is the addition that the Reims painter Helen Barenton created eight watercolors inspired by Geneviève's story and the so-called "Années folles," the Roaring Twenties. One of these works is said to later inspire its own limited edition, announced for the end of the year. This connection between champagne, history, and visual art really appeals to me personally. I like it when a cuvée isn't just a product, but carries a story that goes beyond simply drinking it.
My Takeaway
There's currently no reliable information on vintage, dosage, bottle count, or price, and I don't want to make anything up here. But regardless of that, what excites me about this news is that it's a reminder that there are stories behind many champagne houses that are rarely told. Geneviève Collery-Herbillon apparently carried a house through difficult years, without her name ever becoming particularly well known. The fact that Collery is now taking the time, almost a hundred years later, to dedicate a cuvée to her strikes me, as an outsider, as a genuinely lovely form of appreciation. As soon as I find more details about the cuvée itself, I'll definitely want to get my hands on it, not just for the wine, but for the story behind it.