Jonathan Ray reviews our recent Spectator Winemaker’s lunch with James Simpson MW of Champagne Pol Roger
As readers well know, Pol Roger is pretty much the Spectator house pour. Anything of note that happens at 22 Old Queen Street is marked with a bottle or so of Pol. Indeed, the fabled Spectator Summer Party the other week was awash with the stuff.
And we did pretty well at our recent Spectator Winemaker’s Lunch too. Our host – Pol Roger UK’s MD, James Simpson MW – was generosity itself and brought some cracking bottles with him. He started by explaining that Pol Roger is one of the few family-owned champagne houses remaining and that it’s also one of the smallest, producing some 1.5m bottles a year. He further told us that the UK was the company’s first export market. That it remains its biggest is helped in no small measure, he mused, by the Speccie’s titanic consumption.
Pol Roger’s HQ in the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay was dubbed by Sir Winston Churchill as ‘the world’s most drinkable address’ and many Churchillian anecdotes duly followed.
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