A marriage in 1810, a house in Épernay a year later.

Perrier-Jouët is a Champagne house based in Épernay, and its name joins two families. English Wikipedia, citing David White’s But First, Champagne (2016), says Pierre-Nicolas Perrier was an Épernay cork supplier who in 1810 married Rose Adélaïde Jouët, the daughter of a Calvados producer; French Wikipedia dates the wedding to 26 September 1810. A year later, in 1811, the couple began making Champagne under their joined names. White’s account has Adèle, as she is often called, concentrating on the vineyards and the wine while her husband handled sales.

The house looked abroad early. Both Wikipedias give 1815 for its first shipments to Britain and 1837 for the United States, and French Wikipedia says that in 1861 it became a supplier to the court of Queen Victoria, and a few years later to the French imperial court. The house’s customers in Britain later included at least one prime minister: the historian Paul Johnson wrote in Brief Lives (2011) that Harold Macmillan favoured vintage Perrier-Jouët. By 1860, according to the same article, it had assembled most of its vineyards in Aÿ, Mailly-Champagne, Avize and Cramant; English Wikipedia, citing White, notes holdings in the grand cru villages of Cramant and Avize, both known for Chardonnay.

The founders’ son Charles Perrier took over in 1854. In 1878 the business passed to Henri and Octave Gallice, nephews by marriage, French Wikipedia says. Henri ran the house in Épernay while Octave spent much of his time in Paris, where, English Wikipedia says, he met the Art Nouveau glassmaker Émile Gallé.

Four enamelled magnums and a bottle found again.

The image that now stands for the whole house came from that meeting. At the brothers’ request, Gallé drew a spray of Japanese white anemones, and four magnums enamelled with the motif were delivered in 1902, according to Jean-Pierre Devroey’s history of the house (Stock, 1999), as cited by English Wikipedia. Galerie Magazine reported in 2017 that the design was then largely forgotten until the original bottle was found again in the cellar in the 1960s.

The rediscovery became a product. French Wikipedia says the Belle Époque cuvée was created in 1964 by the cellar master André Baveret and launched in 1969 by the commercial director Pierre Ernst, in a bottle based on Gallé’s design. Galerie Magazine described the design as Japanese anemones swirling around the bottle’s sides, and English Wikipedia calls the anemone the emblem not only of the prestige cuvée but of the house itself.

Perrier-Jouët has used the Art Nouveau link as a design programme. The house says it has commissioned work from artists and designers including Daniel Arsham, Tord Boontje, Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, Studio Glithero, Vik Muniz and mischer’traxler; Galerie Magazine reported that Glithero’s piece first appeared at Design Miami in 2012 and mischer’traxler’s kinetic table there in 2014. The founders’ former home on the avenue de Champagne, the Maison Belle Époque, reopened after a two-year redesign led by the house’s creative director, Axelle de Buffevent, Galerie Magazine reported in September 2017; it holds what the house calls the largest private collection of French Art Nouveau in Europe, including lamps by Gallé. In May 2021 the house announced a Belle Époque Society programme, which it said would open the Maison Belle Époque to visitors for the first time; its 2022 commission, an installation by the designer Garance Vallée, reflected on people’s relationship with nature, the house said.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Champagne houses: Pol Roger, Billecart-Salmon, Perrier-Jouët, Pommery, Nicolas Feuillatte, Charles Heidsieck and Gosset. Champagne houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A Champagne house’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its cellars or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and aged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Mumm group to Pernod Ricard.

The house has spent most of the past seventy years inside larger groups. French Wikipedia says G.H. Mumm acquired Perrier-Jouët in 1959, and the two houses then sat together within the Seagram drinks group. Wine Spectator reported that the American investment firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst bought Mumm and Perrier-Jouët from Seagram in June 1999 and that Allied Domecq later agreed to buy both houses from it. When Pernod Ricard took over Allied Domecq in 2005, Perrier-Jouët passed to Pernod Ricard, which also owns Mumm.

Its cellars have had few keepers. In October 2020 the house formally installed Séverine Frerson as its eighth cellar master and, the company says, the first woman in the role; she had been named in 2018, The Drinks Business reported, and succeeded Hervé Deschamps, who had led the cellars since 1993. In 2015 the hillsides, houses and cellars of Champagne, including the avenue de Champagne in Épernay where the house stands, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The house also has a long paper trail. The BBC reported in March 2009 that a bottle of Perrier-Jouët from 1825, described as among the oldest Champagne in existence, had been opened and tasted. For the lettering on its labels, see our separate note on the Perrier-Jouët font.

For a design guide, Perrier-Jouët shows how one commission, a botanical drawing enamelled on four magnums in 1902, can become the defining image of a Champagne house more than a century later. Compare Mumm, its sister house in Reims, and Pommery, the Reims house of the chalk cellars. For this guide we use anemone green, enamel white and gilt with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Perrier-Jouët’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.