November 16th, 2011

Great champagne houses don’t come any greater than Bollinger. The story of how it got to be that way, growing from a small family firm into a global icon of winemaking excellence, is remarkable – as is the part played by its legendary figurehead, Lily Bollinger.

Our love for certain inanimate things – paintings, shoes, sofas, bottles of chapagne – usually has something to do with the stories we attach to them. Sometimes the stories are our own, sometimes other people’s. Champagne is perhaps unique in this respect. Not only do most of us have a particular champagne moment that we like to remember, but most of us can also remember a champagne moment as described by someone else.

And nobody ever described the champagne moment better than Lily Bollinger. “I only drink champagne when I’m happy, and when I’m sad,” she famously quipped. “Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it, unless I’m thirsty.” It is impossible to think of a wittier, more elegant or compelling incitement to open a bottle of Bollinger immediately.

Lily was one of the great characters in an industry that has produced more than its fair share of them. It is said that she had not even tasted champagne before the party to celebrate her engagement to Jacques Bollinger, great-grandson of the company’s founder, in 1923. When Jacques died in 1941, Lily, at his request, took over.

Old-timers in Ay still remember seeing her patrol her vineyards on a bicycle throughout the war. When the Germans occupied the Bollinger maison, she slept in the cellars. It was from these cellars that she emerged in 1944 to greet the American soldiers who had arrived just in time to stop the retreating German army from blowing up the entire estate.

Lily managed Bollinger until 1971, when her nephews Claude d’Hautefeuille and Christian Bizot succeeded her. The family remains closely involved in the day-to-day management of the business. Your correspondent had the good fortune to lunch with Claude’s wife, Mimi, at her home recently.

Though just a few days short of her 90^th birthday, Mimi’s memory and sense of humour were razor-sharp. She was full of stories about the indomitable Lily. Mimi recalled how she and her children would cross the street in Ay to watch The Magic Roundabout on Lily’s big old black-and-white television, and how the youngsters would discreetly stare at their aunt while she smoked and place bets on when and where the ash from her cigarette would fall.

Bollinger was, naturally, an essential feature of Mimi’s lunch menu. Each bottle opened was a mute but nonetheless eloquent reminder of the reason why Bollinger is as revered today as it was during Lily’s lifetime: it remains, quite simply, a byword for excellence in traditional champagne-making. Which both is and is not a different story.

(From an original article in Vanity Fair – December 2011 issue)