In the village of Chouilly, in Champagne's Côtes des Blancs, brother and sister team Anne and Antoine Malassagne are the fourth generation to helm family-run Champagne house AR Lenoble. 2020 should have been a year of celebration: the centennial of the family house. Instead, the pair faced off not just with the global pandemic but with continued issues linked to climate change.

Despite her family history linking her to the region, Anne's journey has been an unorthodox one, but with fortitude and creativity, she has persevered in maintaining her family legacy. In a recent conversation we chatted about her thoughts on sustainability, trends in winemaking, and what it means to be a woman in this historic French wine region.

Emily Monaco: In 1993 you took over as the fourth generation of your family to head up AR Lenoble, making yours one of the rare Champagne houses to always be a continuously familial endeavour. Was this your dream from a young age? Did you always think that Champagne was your destiny?

Anne Malassagne: Not at all. I was not attracted to wine, or to Champagne. I moved to Paris for my studies, which were more in finance, management, and organisation. My dream, on the contrary, was to get out of Champagne, which, at the time, was a bit closed off for my liking, in its mentality and approach. I didn’t see myself here at all.

EM: So what changed?

AM: In the 80s, the price of Champagne skyrocketed, and so the price of grapes by the kilo went up quite a bit as well. Winemakers wanted to take advantage of this period of euphoria. Everyone increased their prices, and everything went well… until 1990, 1991. With the Gulf War, sales fell, prices fell, and we were left with very expensive bottles languishing in the cellars.

EM: I imagine this is what was happening at AR Lenoble, which your father was running at the time?

AM: Yes. As a result, other family-run Champagne houses were being bought up by large companies, and Lenoble was gearing up for the same thing. My father was prepared to sell the vineyard. So he discussed it with his children. My older brother was a doctor in Paris; my younger brother Antoine was still a student. And then there was me, very far from the world of Champagne. I hadn’t studied wine or Champagne. I wasn’t destined to come back.

EM: You were working in the finance department at L’Oréal, in Paris. What made you decide to leave that job for the wine world you had left behind?

AM: I was doing what I loved, but cosmetics didn’t really suit me. And coming back to the Domaine, keeping this Champagne house in the family, returning to these strong values that remain anchored within me… it gave me purpose. I said to myself: I can keep travelling, and instead of selling cosmetics, I’ll sell Champagne.

EM: But it wasn’t easy at first, was it?

AM: No, my father fell ill quite quickly. He pulled out of the business, and he never came back. I was all alone, just one year after arriving. I had no choice but to learn. Quickly.

EM: Other small family Champagne houses were sold off, but you remained resolutely independent. What was your secret?

AM: I said to myself: if we want to remain a small, independent, family house, we have to do what neither large international groups who need lots more money than I do, nor supermarkets who will get buyers thanks to low prices, can do. I’m in the middle.

I said to myself: I need to work in that niche and make wines with personality, made exclusively—or nearly-exclusively—from our Grand Cru and Premier Cru terroir.

EM: You don’t have a background in wine. In fact, your brother, Antoine, came to manage that side of the business with you in 1996. Does your alternative background bring anything special to the table?

AM: The fact that I have no theoretical or scholarly background in wine was a point of strength, for me. Because I never forbade myself anything. I spoke a lot with Antoine when he came on board, as he has a more scientific background. And sometimes, he’d say to me, “No, that’s not possible.” And I’d say, “Well, have you tried?” And he’d say back, “No, but we can’t do that.” And I’d say… “But… have you tried?”

EM: Do you have an example where this worked to your advantage?

AM: Being in Chouilly, I very quickly understood that if we didn’t master the actual vinification, here, we’d have this buttery, creamy aroma typical of the area, but we’d have finishes that were a bit heavy. So one of the things I did early on with Antoine was to describe my dream Champagne to him. I told him I wanted energy.

“Yeah, but that’s not Chouilly,” he said. “That’s Avize. In Avize, you have minerality. You have energy. That’s not Chouilly’s personality.”

And I said, “No, of course, we’re going to highlight Chouilly’s butteriness and creaminess. But we can improve the finish.”

And one of the first tools I zeroed in on was the malolactic fermentation [a winemaking process by which tart malic acid is naturally converted into the milder-tasting lactic acid].

[I asked] “Why don’t we start blocking them?”

And he replied, “No, all at once, our clients won’t recognise our style. Our wines will be super closed, instead of our old style, which was extremely generous.”

So I said, “Well what if we only kind of did the malos?”

And he said, “No, we can’t mix wines where we’ve done them and wines where we haven’t. It’s not stable.”

And I said… “Well, have you tried?”

EM: And that worked out to your advantage! You ended up with wines that balance the rich, buttery quality of Chouilly with a fresh finish. This is particularly true with your Mag line, which, as opposed to traditional Champagne, where reserve wines are aged in tanks, barrels, or foudre, uses magnum bottles. Can you tell me a bit about that innovation?

AM: The magnum has slight microoxidation because it’s aged under cork, so that lets air into the bottle. So when the yeast dies, it gives off a much richer aromatic palette. It’s just ideal.

We wanted personality-driven wine with a balance of power, elegance, and precision. And we knew that the best vessel for this balance was the magnum. So we started thinking about it back in 2008 and started, in 2010, ageing our reserve wines in magnums.

Four years later, so in 2014, we opened the magnums one by one, by hand. We emptied them and poured this four-year-old wine into a tank, and we mixed it with the new harvest.

EM: Climate change is becoming a huge problem in Champagne—and in wine growing regions throughout France. You have taken great strides to improve the sustainability of your vineyard through biodiverse practices that have led you to receive one of the very first HVE (Haute Valeur Environnementale) certificates in the region in 2012. Can you tell me about your philosophy?

AM: We wanted to have the most natural approach possible. And of course, to keep from using chemicals to excess, like previous generations—including my father—did. That generation had seen the shortages of the 50s, with harsh winters, with no grapes. So the whole generation had an eye towards intensive production. I remember when I was a child, my father’s main thought was: quantity. So intensive agriculture made sense.

When my brother and I came on, our generation, we didn’t know that lack. We never lived through it. So that’s not at all our mindset. Our thought isn’t quantity but quality.

So Antoine and I did the total opposite. We said to ourselves: we want grapes with a personality. Very healthy, very ripe. Grapes are just like people. If you don't want to get sick, you have to create an environment and a healthy diet. You won't go out without a jumper; you'll eat healthily.

And I started to think that vines are the same. For the vines to be strong, to resist illness, to keep from needing chemical treatments, we need to make it strong. So we reduced our yields so that we have fewer grapes. When it rains in Champagne, there's wind, after the rain. And if there are fewer grapes in the vines, the wind will circulate more easily after the rain. It will dry the grapes, and keep mould and mildew from developing, so keep us from needing to use fungicides.

And then we said so that the vines grow strong, we need to feed them, so we started scarifying the land, to make the vines grow deeper into the soil. So there, we're trying to enrich the life of our land and encourage biodiversity.

EM: What effects does climate change have on your wine, and how do you manage them?

AM: We kind of anticipated it without knowing it, because magnums actually retain the freshness of [the] wine. And in 2010, we aged a large quantity of our wines in magnums. Today, when we bring in the harvest, we’ve been blocking 100% of the malolactic fermentation, because the acidity was almost not enough. Once you’ve blocked 100% of the malolactic fermentation, there’s not much else you can do for freshness.

The new harvest was always supposed to add freshness to wines, but with this trend of warmer years, we’re getting harvests with less freshness, and the new harvest is, on the contrary, making it heavier. We could even find, one day, that reserve wines are going to be adding freshness to the new harvest! So this incredible paradox made the freshness of reserve wines an important topic to consider.

So it’s a bit lucky that, without knowing it, we were prepared, with the Mag line.

EM: In your work towards more sustainable winemaking, have you ever sought an organic label?

AM: We don’t really think about labels when we’re making our decisions. We make them based on our personal convictions. And in Champagne, we need to make decisions based on where we are. We have rain. Cold. Wind. We don’t have the same climate as Provence or Alsace.

Our enemy number one in Champagne is mildew. Our only organic option is copper sulphate, in high proportions, which kills the soil and goes against everything we believe in.

EM: Do you dislike the organic label and philosophy?

AM: Not at all. But we need to stop using it as a shorthand, saying “organic is good, not-organic is bad.” Organic has become a marketing label without any explanation behind it. People don’t ask themselves questions anymore, and I find that very disquieting. They’ve lost that distance, that critical, common sense. There’s a real job to be done, to teach people who shop at organic supermarkets who buy cherries at Christmas.

EM: What do you think of sulphur-free wine?

AM: For me, sulphur is vital… in small doses. It just protects the wine. For me, it’s all about responsibility. And the right information. Let’s stop treating consumers like children, like idiots. Wine is also about pleasure, so sometimes, there are products that, in small doses, are not at all bad. Why should we deprive ourselves, if we want to preserve that pleasure in tasting them? Instead of drinking natural wines, some of which are undrinkable.

““There’s no high dosage or low dosage… there’s just the wrong dosage and the right dosage.””

— Anne Malassagne

EM: Right now, Zéro Dosage [Champagnes made with no added sugar, also be called Brut Nature] is another big trend in Champagne. What are your thoughts?

AM: Dosage is a subject I know by heart, because when I came on board in ’93, I had this idea of the Champagne of my dreams, but I realised that for the first five or six years, I had to sell what was already in the cellar. So I talked to the oenologist and to my father—who was a great winemaker, but who made wines in the style of the time, that is to say, very abundant—and they suggested working with dosage. And I said, “But dosage is nothing! It’s just this tiny quantity we add during disgorging.” And they said, “But it changes everything!”

EM: So what did you discover ?

AM: There’s no high dosage or low dosage… there’s just the wrong dosage and the right dosage.

We brought out our first Zéro Dosage in ’99, because it seemed to me that when your grape is healthy, ripe, and sweet, it’s like a ripe apricot in an apricot tart. If your apricots are full of flavour, there’s no reason to add sugar to the tart. So this was the same. We’d worked the vines, we had healthier and healthier grapes, sweeter and sweeter grapes, so we could reduce the sugar and extend the ageing time in the cellar.

EM: So you did this before the trend really caught on?

AM: We reduced sugar, not for any trend, but because it was coherent with the personality-driven wines I wanted, with powerful, elegant finishes. We got the power from the ripeness of the grapes, and the elegance from the management of the malolactic fermentation and from dosage.

In Champagne, if you have amazing grapes that come from good soil, that you worked your vines, that you leave your wine five, six, eight years in the cellar, why would you add sugar?

That said… I do demi-sec too!

EM: These sweeter Champagnes have a rather poor reputation. What made you decide to produce them?

AM: When I was learning about dosage, the oenologist said to me, “Balance in a demi-sec is about the balance between the sugar and the wine.” If demi-sec doesn’t sell, today, it’s because people are taking poor-quality wines and hiding them with sugar. So you have bubbles, sugar, and you end up with this bubbly syrup. It’s monstrous.

So I started vinifying great vintages as demi-sec. And the balance is incredible. I dose for at least six years—I have ’96 wines I’ve dosed for six years—and you get this beautiful balance. The sugar has completely integrated with the wine. You don’t have sweet wine. You have something else. You have this balance that’s perfect for cheese, for example. For spicy food. Thai food. Grilled chicken.

EM: If you had just one value to highlight that has brought you success, what would it be?

AM: Courage. I was recently writing about my family’s history, as this is our 100-year anniversary. It was interesting to see how the current situation, the pandemic, was linked to what my ancestors had to overcome.

With lockdown, we are in a world that we’ve never had to see before. But each of my ancestors had to face their own difficulties. And with conviction, and courage. Like my father, who carried this house and worked as a doctor without ever knowing if one of his children would take over, like my grandfather and great-grandfather, who faced issues linked with the wars, with harsh winters, with deportation… and the house is still here.

““...people kept saying, you’re a woman. You’re young. You don’t know anything. You don’t belong here.””

— Anne Malassagne

EM: How do you see yourself as a woman in Champagne today?

AM: Well, it’s very different than it was 27 years ago! Today, there are women taking over domaines by choice, but in my generation and the one before me, women took over by accident. Because the fathers died, because the brother died, because a daughter happened to be there, and, lacking a brother, a father, the girl stepped in. So it wasn’t always easy, especially because I didn’t have any specific winemaking training. So I had everything to prove.

My ten first years here were very difficult. I had to manage a lot of personal difficulties. My father was ill. My older brother as well. Both passed away. And I still had to manage this house. And learn everything. I worked nights, weekends. And especially because people kept saying, you’re a woman. You’re young. You don’t know anything. You don’t belong here.

EM: You are one of the co-founders of the group “La Transmission,” which unites women from all different areas of Champagne in order to pass down your traditions. How do you situate yourself in the history of femininity over the course of Champagne’s history?

AM: That question always makes us smile! References to Bollinger, Pommery, Clicquot. Because we say… but you’re always talking about the widows! Let’s talk about modern women, too! Of course, they were inspiring. They were inspiring and amazing in their time. It’s hard to imagine how hard that must have been. But this association can help open doors and show young people—our key demographic—that it’s not just widows here. Let’s demystify that. There are modern women working in Champagne, and you can have a place here, too. Come!

EM: Lockdown has ended in France [This interview was conducted in July 2020—Ed], but this is still a very unique time to be making a luxury product. How are you coping with the post-lockdown period, in France?

AM: For many, Champagne is a festive product. But in reality, it should be something that we’re enjoying, now, when we’re no longer going to the movies, to restaurants, traveling, meeting up with friends, throwing parties. We can’t do any of those things… but we can open a bottle of Champagne from time to time, just to have a moment of pleasure.