There are not many champagne historians around, but for Graham Harding it has been a fulfilling third career post-retirement. Graham now has a DPhil from Oxford and has written, edited and contributed to a number of books on the subject. So I became an educational publisher. That was the best career move ever for me. During this period I became fascinated by successful brands and how they were made and managed. Nonetheless, doing The Wine Miscellany re-awoke my interest in history in general and wine history in particular.
I had the sense that my uncompleted doctorate was just that — unfinished business. My first thought for a dissertation subject had been the branding of wine in general in the nineteenth century. Working for so long in marketing had given me a fascination with brands and branding. How did wine brands work? When and why did the names of the major houses get to be so important and powerful? And why the nineteenth century? It was the era of the first globalisation of wine, when Britain had probably a wider choice of wine than any other country.
London then was rather akin to Silicon Valley today: a great deal of money and power and a determination to have the best of everything. For a researcher there were also the added benefits of easier languages, more data and more legible handwriting than medieval archives. What I rapidly realised from my first weeks of reading was that if I was looking for brands in the British wine market then champagne was the drink to choose and Champagne the place to go.
In some cases these were neatly filed and ordered; in others it was a case of digging into boxes of old ledgers in draughty attics with snow drifting through the cracks in the tiles.
My fundamental research question was: how was champagne marketed in the nineteenth century and what links the wine of today with that of years ago? I was lucky. In one the most prestigious of maisons I came across the letterbooks of a man called Adolphe Hubinet, the London agent for Pommery champagne between and the mids. It was clear from his letters that here was a man who had an instinctive grasp of marketing.
