For our 33rd episode, the Wine Makers Show goes to meet Edouard Roy, cofounder of Champagne EPC. A new, innovative house carrying a vision for developing the terroir, Edouard tells us all the secrets of creating such a brand and revisits the wonderful world of Champagne. No doubt about it, the release of an episode like this is a good excuse to open a bottle of champagne. Enjoy listening.
Hello Edouard. Can you start by introducing yourself?
Beyond the fact that my name is Edouard, I’m going to turn 30 in the coming months and I’m hugely passionate about two things: French products of the land on one hand and entrepreneurship on the other. I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, I started at school, during my post-baccalaureate studies, I set up my first company, we made sushi in Corsica. After that came the development of another company, this one in real estate, which we still have. Before landing in this big pool of champagne, but which has a real connection for me since my mother is from Champagne and my grandfather took part in founding a cooperative in 1967 in the Champagne terroir. One thing led to another and we arrived at Champagne EPC and its premises, which house a great team. Today this team really lets our brand develop at full throttle.
Thank you for that introduction. How did this passion for wine in general and for products of the land come to you?
I think we have a bit of that in us to begin with. On the other side, I’ve always liked good products, eating well, drinking well, I’m hugely passionate about cooking. And in the end, the family heritage, the fact that we have a bit of vines in the family, that we’d always drunk champagne. There was one year, in 2010, when I started to take an interest in champagne, telling myself “but what exactly is champagne?”
How old were you?
I was 20. The idea was to tell myself “what’s in this drink, what exactly is it?” At first it was very light, I was only vaguely interested. Until the day we decided to vinify our own wines with my father. It was the genesis of EPC. We wanted to see what we were capable of doing. It was by digging a bit at that point that I learned an enormous amount about champagne. That’s when I understood that there were négociants, that there were cooperatives, growers, cooperatives that vinify, cooperatives that don’t, and so on. It was through that that I had the spark of wanting to create a champagne brand. It was a very basic desire at the start, but it was when I understood how champagne was made that the desire was confirmed. I was quite surprised when I learned that when you buy big champagne brands, in 99% of cases you have wines made from numerous blends, whether different wines, but also different terroirs, different years. When someone told me about several hundred wines blended into a bottle of big-brand wine that you buy in all the most well-known stores, I found it a shame and told myself “it’s a bit of a shame to want to always give the same taste to wine every year, like a spirit,” whereas champagne for me should be a wine. I told myself “maybe there’s a reason.” I started by tasting wines from terroirs other than the one where my family is based. We realized that indeed a blanc de blancs from the Montagne de Reims has nothing to do with a blanc de blancs from the Aube, which has nothing to do with a blanc de blancs from the Sézannais or the Côte des Blancs. I told myself “in fact we have a super rich heritage, there are great things to do.” That’s how we started to create a first brand that only made vintage blanc de blancs, with very few resources. The interesting thing when you build a brand with very few resources is that you feel all the pain points of the value chain attached to it. Because you do the delivery, because you handle the packaging, you handle everything. We did that every weekend and it worked rather well. We told ourselves “but maybe there’s something to do.” I had this intuition and this desire, but my father was an employee in the private sector, champagne isn’t his main activity. I had a job too, but I had this desire, I talked about it with my wife. The problem was that I didn’t yet have the right partners, I was all alone, I needed one or two partners to set the thing up. Life is still very well made, since it’s made of very beautiful encounters and I had the chance to successively meet Jérôme and then Camille. Jérôme, former sales director of a big champagne house. Camille who had a background very far from champagne, who was at Procter & Gamble and had a very marketing, very brand background. The fruit of that meeting gave EPC. We had the shared desire to reinvent this value chain, because it’s not just an EPC brand, it’s a new production model, it’s total traceability.
I’d like to come back to that period, between 2010 when you start to take an interest in champagne, even wine in general, tasting a bit, and today, at the end of 2020. There were 10 years in between. What happened for you during those 10 years? Is it linked to wine or not at all?
I continued my studies, I worked, and the interest I had in champagne grew steadily. My knowledge in 2010 was close to zero. It started with that learning phase. From 2016 we work on the vinification project with my father. We’d already started thinking about the project before, but it’s really in 2016 that we accelerate the project. In the end, the first commercialized bottle of Champagne EPC arrives on September 1, 2019, so a little over a year ago. The acceleration really happened from November 2018, when with Camille and Jérôme we started to really launch this project.
It’s an interesting element in the world of wine and the products associated with it: generally, between the moment you decide to launch and the moment you really commercialize, there’s an important period of tension. You need time for the grapes to come, once the grapes are there, you have to harvest them, then vinify them, and so on. That can create durations that are long, especially if you have aging, if you have to replant vines, the time it takes for them to reach maturity. So I suppose it can’t have been easy during those few years?
We had quite a bit of luck. The first project we’d done with my father had led us to have wine vinified for some years already. The vinification of the first cuvée was 2011. So we’d started a long time ago, but without knowing what would happen afterward, that’s what’s pretty great. We didn’t stop vinifying during all those years, and we ended up being able to release cuvées with EPC fairly quickly. The other thing is that our vines weren’t enough, so we’d planned for the ramp-up, to partner in vinification with a small group of winemakers. The majority are acquaintances, even family. The other luck we have is that we’re on the slopes of the Sézannais, for our brut, blanc de blancs and extra brut cuvées, and in fact this terroir has a pretty incredible aptitude for chardonnay, it offers very fast maturity. That is, you see a wine from the Côte des Blancs, premier or grand cru, those are wines that need to stay in the cellar very long to be able to express themselves. Whereas a wine from the Sézannais slopes, if you give it more than 60 months of aging on the lees, it’s going to be really less good than if you give it 30 or 36. The typicity of this terroir let us be more agile. It was a bit of a stroke of luck in the end. Success was there and we had to adapt quickly in terms of volumes.
I’d like you to detail one element about the champagne value chain. What’s the traditional value chain and how at EPC do you change that, or give a different service?
In Champagne, there are three royal grape varieties: chardonnay, which offers very light, very fine wines, and which today is the most fashionable grape in Champagne, which offers the blanc de blancs appellation when there’s only chardonnay; pinot noir, a black-skinned grape, which offers slightly more powerful wines, also very interesting; and pinot meunier, also a black-skinned grape, which offers extremely interesting wines as well. On the other side, we have several statuses. We have winemakers who vinify, the grower-producer. We’ll see cooperatives, which also vinify. There’s what we call among ourselves sector cooperatives, which stay on one and the same terroir, or the slightly bigger cooperative, which will go look for grapes all over Champagne. Finally, there are négociant-producers who buy, either grapes or vin clair, that is a still wine, or even they buy bottles on the lees so almost finished. EPC is a contemporary brand with a convivial, modern consumption experience and with perfect traceability. We only make blanc de blancs with a single grape variety, a single year and a single terroir in each of the cuvées. We have the reflection of a terroir and a precise moment. On the other side, we minimize sulfites. Our champagnes could all be extra brut: we never exceed 6g of sugar in our cuvées. The last aspect is the new model with the winemakers. I was a bit disappointed to learn that when I bought a brand champagne, we were necessarily on a mass trading model. We’d have several hundred wines blended into a single bottle. At the start of the project, Camille only listened to the market and in no way her intuition. We did an enormous amount of studies. The two main obstacles are: if I bring a bottle of champagne to a dinner I’ll be told “what are you going to announce to me?” and on the other side if I go get a glass of champagne at a bar I’ll be told that I’m showing off. So we had to create a simple and convivial brand. The other barrier that came up was on “what is champagne?”. We told ourselves we had to create a model that’s the perfect reflection of Champagne. We can take a leap in history but Champagne experienced a tremendous boom up to around 2008 globally. That boom translated into the big brands constantly developing and buying grapes or still wine at higher and higher prices. Which meant a lot of winemakers started selling everything to the big champagne houses. This model created strong dependencies in the sector. EPC’s model is one of relocating champagne production by using the brand-new tools dating from that boom, we’re going to make wines at the winemakers’ places from their terroirs, their grapes, in cooperation with our cellar master. Our model will better compensate the winemaker and will serve the consumer, who benefits from total transparency. For us, that’s the trade of tomorrow.
How does it work to work with EPC?
We have precise specifications to identify winemakers and offer them to work according to our model. In 100% of cases, they’re in the same situation as the others: a heavy economic dependence on a single client. The COVID crisis greatly reinforced this risk of dependence. We pay the winemakers for all the services and their wines will never be blended. This model serves all parties.
Each bottle is marked EPC but also carries the winemaker’s name?
Exactly. Next year we’re releasing a cuvée with David Faivre. He’s on his own and self-employed. We immediately believed in him and we’re going to make a cuvée together: it’ll be Champagne EPC and David Faivre. We have to have this talent-revealing side because otherwise Champagne is going to stagnate: witness the breakthrough of other sparkling wines. We have to bring information to consumers without falling into complexity.
Do you remember your first bottle sold?
Yes, we remember very well. We had a pre-agreement with Cafés Richard, who believed in the project very early. They trusted us right away. So we did a launch with them from the start and I thank them because it got us off the ground. Today we have other clients but Cafés Richard really helped us. Today we’re not in large retail for several reasons. First, all our cuvées are at the same price (because it doesn’t cost more to make one or the other). We want to offer the best value for money. If we lower our prices, we reduce the winemaker’s compensation so that made us uncomfortable. If large retail were ready to accept the business model, we’d of course look into it. Then, EPC is still a small brand so we’re present at wine merchants, in fine grocery stores and in the hospitality network.
What does EPC mean?
First, we didn’t want to have a patronymic name. We want to be the link between the best of the Champagne terroir, and its winemakers, and consumers. We took up the Latin phrase E pluribus unum, which means strength through unity. To show that we didn’t want to take ourselves seriously, we arrived at E Pluribus Champagnum, which we translate as “Unity makes the champagne.” It was very polarizing to choose this name because it can please or not but everyone remembers it. Likewise, we wanted to bring back the blida (Champagne glass): everyone remembers EPC thanks to that.
Can you tell us what the blida is?
The blida is a 10cl tea glass. I’ve always drunk champagne from the blida. It’s a very simple glass, that you put in the dishwasher, that’s hard to break and that you can take anywhere. Why did it arrive in Champagne? The Champagne people are known for being great glassmakers. The city of Blida had asked glassmakers from Reims to make their tea glasses. The Champagne people discovered this glass and kept it. Instead of innovating in the bottle’s shape, we chose the authenticity of the glass. We’re not uncomfortable with that because, obviously, to taste a Champagne, nothing beats a nice wine glass. But between a flute and a blida, there’s no difference. That’s the story of this little glass that goes with us everywhere.
You also have an online shop?
Our website has a fairly original advice dimension for each person who wants to order champagne for an event, an evening, a dinner. You just go on the site and we’ll advise you on the right cuvée, the right number of bottles and we’ll give you a few gifts. Another innovation is that finding the champagne buyer in companies is always difficult. We created an in-house tool called Dave that automates the prospecting phase. We realized the buying cycles: everyone buys champagne. Dave lets you multiply the effectiveness of our salespeople by 5 to 7. Then, we have augmented reality on our labels so the label comes to life and tells the bottle’s story. We also have a thermo-sensitive sticker on the bottle that indicates when the champagne is chilled. It used to be on beers originally. We had this spark because we had the memory of someone bringing a bottle of champagne that was too warm. We want to create a modern, uninhibited consumption of champagne.
It’s super interesting, your desire to demystify champagne consumption.
The narrative of champagne has changed a lot. My parents’ generation it was “I bring a bottle from a very well-known house” when I go to a dinner for two reasons: to show that I have a bit of money and that I made a nice gift. Our generation wants to bring a bottle that’s close to our heart and that I’ll be able to explain to you.
I have the vision of a rather closed world in Champagne, locked down by important players. What were your difficulties?
It’s hard to have very, very big leaders but at the same time it’s good because without them Champagne wouldn’t be where it is. The model we’re developing is the one of tomorrow. We’re on the eve of an important transformation. I prefer to be in a competitive market. The market needs to transform and with a crisis like this, it’s necessary for things to move. It’s thanks to the presence of these big players that things will move even faster. Our relations with the big houses are very benevolent. We’re a drop of water to them. We make more than 100,000 bottles but on their scale that’s not much. You have to hear this growth and listen to the market. We’re lovers of the terroir.
Do you think EPC’s model is replicable in other wine regions?
Yes, I’m convinced of it. The opacity we can see in the Champagne market exists in many appellations. If France wants to keep its place as a leader in wine and the valuation of its products, it’s going to have to offer transparency. Today we already have a lot of work in Champagne but we’ll see for what’s next. It’s true that the rosés of the south could interest us but there’s no plan at the time I’m speaking to you.
How were you received by the CIVC?
We talked a lot. There was a lot of goodwill. At the start we were a bit afraid of it but our model is so benevolent for Champagne that they understood that well.
Wanting to create a new champagne house seems pharaonic. What was the first stone of the edifice?
The very first was to have a team. With Jérôme it was total chance. He lived at the end of my street and we connected on LinkedIn by chance. I wrote to him and we met. We gave ourselves several months to get to know each other and we realized we had a lot of shared values. Then, we were missing someone with a marketing vision. Camille is the marketing expert, she was in Switzerland. One thing led to another, she joined the project. Then, the second step was to really understand the market with major studies. We have three values: transparency, benevolence and passion. We want to be transparent about everything, even inside the company: we hide nothing. Everyone can have access to everything. Benevolence and passion, you’ll have understood why. These three values help us a lot and that’s why our trio keeps growing.
Did you imagine yourself president of a champagne house at 30?
We see ourselves more as entrepreneurs and passionate people. What’s certain is that we’re in a magical world. It’s a job that’s so human in which know-how is so important, and it’s a job in which you put yourself on the line every day. If we make the slightest mistake, we’ll lose you. It’s a constant commitment to make Champagne. The moment of consumption influences your tastes so much. It makes the thing even harder: you can disappoint a person even though you made the best wine in the world.
What does your daily life look like?
On average I’m one day a week in Champagne. My daily life, like any entrepreneur, is managing problems. Cédric Siré, the founder of Webedia, had told me “the more the company grows, the bigger the problems.” Indeed, he was right. My role is also to make sure all the projects move forward and that all the teams are happy at the office. When you sell a product that’s this incredible, everyone has to be able to flourish.
You spoke of augmented reality on the label?
On our Facebook page, you can scan the label and you have a voice that makes the bottle speak and describes the cuvée to you. I’m sure that tomorrow if you scan the bottle at a dinner everyone is going to remember it. The QR code works very well too but there you live an experience. It’s of course limited in time.
Are you also present abroad?
We’re lucky to be present in 6 countries. These are the countries that came to us so it was very nice for us. Starting in 2021 we’re creating the export division. We have to hope the health crisis calms down and then we go for it. The US market is very big, England, Japan. China is in a phase of evangelization, which makes it a very big potential market.
What was the biggest difficulty since the start?
Let’s say we learned a lot of things. The most important is to have the right team. We made a few mistakes. You need particular profiles to join a champagne house that’s launching. It’s very hard to recruit. Today, we’re convinced we have the best possible team and it shows in the figures. We’re going to have crazy growth even though we recovered 0 in revenue compared to last year.
Do you have a book on wine to recommend to me?
I recommend Une Certaine idée du Champagne by Hervé Saint Julien. It’s the story of the Ayala house, about the philosophy they carried to develop their champagne house and to develop it well.
Buy Une Certaine Idée du Champagne
Do you have a recent favorite tasting?
We’ve worked with David Faivre since his very first day. He has a 100% Meunier Champagne. It’s a grape variety that’s not necessarily very well known in Champagne and I found this cuvée really well made. I recommend it because the value for money is also very good.
Who should be my next guest for my podcast on wine?
I’m going to stay with David Faivre, who has a real down-to-earth vision of wine. His story is very interesting because he made a big bet and he made lots of videos about what he does. He has a superb YouTube channel and he’ll bring you a very terroir dimension.
