Champagne tells a story. The story of a wine that has travelled the world and forged a fabulous destiny: a unique wine, made for sharing; a wine that cannot be ignored!
In the Doyard-Mahé family, Champagne is a family story!
Carole is the great-granddaughter of Maurice Doyard-Mahé, who founded the Maison in 1927. He co-founded the CIVC (Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne) in 1941. The role of the Committee, which groups together winegrowers and merchants in equal parts, is to promote and protect the Champagne Appellation both in France and internationally. The CIVC organizes the economy of the sector by regulating the harvest base yield per hectare each year, balancing production and the capacity of absorption by the market.
It was at a very young age, 11 years old to be exact, that Carole fell in love with Champagne by tasting her family’s 1988 vintage. After travelling all over the world, Carole started working in the cellar with her father in 2005, and in 2009 she took over the reins of the vineyards with the firm intention of proving herself in this essentially masculine world, alongside her cousin Juliette and a team essentially composed of women.
Carole has very little downtime: she takes on the role of cellar master, vineyard manager, HR director, negotiator, and even… sweeper! Carole runs the family business with a masterful hand. All the Champagnes she produces come from her six hectares of Chardonnay, all located on Premier Cru sites around the village of Vertus, in the southern part of the Côte des Blancs, in the northernmost wine region of France.
Carole is very in touch with environmental issues and has eliminated herbicides in the vineyard in recent years to work with compost to protect the soil. Her farm is now certified High Environmental Value and Sustainable Viticulture in Champagne (HVR VDC) without herbicides. She uses plot-based vinification to create more precise wines. To take the quality of her Champagnes to an even higher level, she uses only the best must from the grapes. The more astringent second cuts are sent to the local cooperative.
Passionate and bubbly like her Champagne, Carole has kept family traditions alive and transmits her passion with every sip she takes. She does so despite the challenges that the pandemic has caused in the industry and the market “trends” that are not always legitimate and easy to follow. In addition, with the price of a kilogram of grapes in Champagne skyrocketing, there are fewer and fewer winemakers who are making wine and prefer to sell their crops to the big Champagne houses.
If you were lucky enough to meet Carole in person during her 2019 Opimian membership tour, or at an Opimian virtual event, she will have no doubt explained the art of uncorking Champagne:
Uncorking a bottle of Champagne correctly is a ritual. You take off the lining around the cork, then the wire: you have to turn the wire six times before it opens. You must not remove it. You tilt and turn the bottle, not the cork. If you want to open it as it is intended, the cork can’t pop. Such an explosion leads to a faster loss of carbon dioxide. You will feel the cork rise, but you should press down the cork to make it come out slowly. The cork will make a ‘little sigh’ which is called the ‘erotic sigh’. Now you can enjoy it, in a tulip glass of course!
For the last seven years, we are proud to count Carole among our partners.
ACCESS WINES FROM CHAMPAGNE DOYARD-MAYÉ HERE THROUGH MARCH 22, 2022