Laurent-Perrier Sees Grand Siècle Outperform At Champagne’s Top End

It’s been a tough market for Champagne over the past year as the category came back to Earth after booming during the pandemic, but marketers have seen stabilization lately and are finding pockets of growth. For Laurent-Perrier, the fourth-ranked Champagne brand in the U.S. at 55,000 cases, prestige cuvée Grand Siècle has been a clear bright spot.

“Grand Siècle has had fantastic pull-through thanks in part to stellar critical ratings and our media campaign featuring Morgan Freeman,” Laurent-Perrier US president Michelle DeFeo told SND. “We’re vastly outperforming our competitors in the prestige segment, which has been declining a bit more than the overall Champagne category over the last year.”

Grand Siècle, which tends to be priced at parity with Krug and Dom Pérignon, has seen a boost in momentum since Laurent-Perrier began numbering each release and offering specific information on the blend of the wine, which is always a mix of three consecutive declared vintages. “In 2019 we started to indicate the number of the blend (on the neck of the bottle),” Grand Siècle global director Edouard Cossy told SND. “At that moment, people started to collect the wines. Suddenly we saw a huge response.”

Currently, Grand Siècle is on iteration No. 26, a blend of the 2012, 2008, and 2007 vintages, which sells at around $300 and received 95 points from Wine Spectator, and also has iteration No. 23—a blend of 2006, 2004, and 2002—in-market in magnum. At the very high end is Les Réserves, No. 20, which ages for 20 years on the lees and sells at $2,000 a magnum. It garnered 97 points from Wine Spectator.

Cossy sees further upside for Grand Siècle in various regions of the U.S. “There is a lot of potential, not only in certain big cities like New York, LA, and Miami, but also Texas for example is a rising market for us,” he said.

To keep up the momentum on the brand, in addition to its campaign with Morgan Freeman, Laurent-Perrier recently backed the prestige cuvée with an experiential “Icon Room” partnership with The Peninsula Beverly Hills, where “select guests and collectors were invited to experience Grand Siècle with House ambassadors in a gorgeous private tasting salon,” said DeFeo, noting that the effort exceeded the company’s expectations. “Those who spent time with us left with a deep appreciation for Grand Siècle as a wine and a concept.”—Daniel Marsteller

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