The world’s most expensive personalised champagne

Extreme Expense?

A personalised, limited edition 12-bottle boxed set of Perrier-Jouet Champagne went on sale last Thursday after a glitzy launch party at Paris’ Opera Garnier,
with a price tag of 50,000 euros, ( $79,000, £38,000).if that seems a bit pricey, consider a single bottle at 4,166 euros, or $6,600, £3150).

Sales are limited to a “community of super-rich” consumers in the United States, Britain, Japan, China, Russia, Switzerland and France.

Says Olivier Cavil, head of communications at Perrier-Jouet:

“We are going to sell these box-sets to 100 people around the world who will have a chance to customise their own champagne, the ultimate luxury. Each buyer will come to Epernay” in eastern France “for a one-on-one meeting with our cellar master Herve Deschamps, and will personally add a ‘liqueur’ to personalize the bottles.”

A combination of sugar and wines from different years, the liqueur will put the finishing touch on bottles of Perrier-Jouet’s 2000 Belle Epoque champagne.

Buyers are offered a storage nest in Perrier-Jouet’s cellars, to hold the bottles for another eight months, to give them time to fully prepare their own cellars!

Buyers will also be offered a haut cuisine dinner and an overnight stay at Perrier-Jouet’s Belle-Epoque mansion in Epernay, home to 200 pieces of original modern art.

Will it sell?

Many of the 100 box sets available have already been snapped up by celebrities including former Bond girl Sophie Marceau, singer Marianne Faithfull and actress Victoria Abril

Is it worth it?

Good question. You would have to be quite an expert to taste the difference between the regular 2000 vintage and the “personalised” version. Most of the contents will be the same, and even the liqueur will made from wines with the same house style.

More importantly, the bottle will look pretty much like a normal bottle of vintage Perrier-Jouet. So how will it impress your guests?

It would be a lot cheaper and more visually impressive to buy a top quality personalised champagne with your own specially designed label on it. Euromarque offers Hachette rated premier cru champagne with your own personalised label for less than 40 euros, which is a lot better value than the 4166 euros for the Perrier-Jouet.

Another tax rise

So it was Budget day this week. The Chancellor is short of money so decides to hit the innocent drinker.

After several years of steady increase, 4p a bottle for the last few years, this time it went up 14p. On sparkling wine and champagne the increase was 18p.

This hits the ordinary wine drinker the most, after all 14p on a Mouton Rothschild isn’t like to be noticed, but on a £4 Vin de Pays it is. Of course its not the wine drinkers that go on for town centre binge drinking. And wine is not the tipple of choice for underage drinkers. But their cider and alco-pops only go up 3p.

So come when you give your dad a bottle of wine with personalised fathers day label, or a personalised whisky you are likely to have chipped in a bit more to the national coffers.

For our corporate personalised wine we will be reviewing our prices in April. For the retail personalised wine labels we will review in May. We filled the warehouse before the budget to avoid any early hits, but when we run low on existing wine stock the price must rise. Sorry

Personalised Labels – what are they made from?

One of the key elements in personalised wine is the quality of the label material. You may think it’s just a piece of paper but unfortunately its more complicated than that.

Depending on the requirement we use a range of different label stock. Some include various substrates for special roles, such as extra adhesion or heavy duty.

Your ordinary 80gm office paper is not in the same league!

We have been looking to reduce our environmental footprint throughout the business. When it comes to label stock it’s a bit tricky.

Recycled paper has improved greatly in the last few years. It’s gone from being only suitable for newsprint and scrap paper to being good for most all office purposes. Unfortunately its not easy to make it into top quality art paper and labelling stock from recycled paper pulp, and we haven’t yet managed to find anything suitable.

The next best thing is to source from the most sustainable sources.

Our principle label stock is a premium heavyweight product.

We source The virgin pulp is well managed from Nordic forests. The pulp is elementary chlorine free. The mill itself has ISO 14001 certification and is EMAS registered, the EU’s Eco Management and Audit Scheme.

The paper carries the Nordic Environmental Label or the “Swan label” is a multinational environmental labelling scheme which also has close co-operation with the EU ECO-label system, being a “Competent body” in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Norway). The Nordic environmental label is a neutral, independent label which guarantees a certain environmental standard. Only products which satisfy strict environmental requirements on the basis of objective assessments are allowed to display this product label.

Is all the wine packaging necessary?

Packaging gets a lot of attention nowadays, with the media assuming it a bad thing to have. However it is an integral part of getting your product to the consumer in usable condition.

In a business that uses a lot of glass packaging is a key issue. When you have a fragile bottle you become very aware of the risk of breakages.

Sending in bulk is easy as we use pallets, which don’t get dropped. Even so the bottles must be in cardboard boxes. Ideally boxes with dividers for safety when the customer unpacks the pallet at the other end. All this cardboard then becomes considerable pile of waste when the bottles are used. Unfortunate but inevitable, you can’t allow the bottles to break.

Smaller deliveries use much more packaging. When you ship by courier the risk of breakage soars, and if 1 bottle breaks it ruins all the personalised labels on the other bottles. At peak simes such as Christmas you know that the couriers are so busy that that will not even notice if the box is labeled fragile. So for simple business reasons we resort to the following.For a case of 12 bottles we pack to heavy duty boxes with dividers containing 6 bottles each. We add neck protectors to hold the bottles rigid. These 2 boxes are then packed together into a large heavy duty cardboard box, covered with fragile and breakable stickers. As a Christmas bonus each individual bottle is put in a bubble wrap bag first.
A mountain of waste for the recipient, but at least they get their personalised champagne bottles intact.