Sacré Sexists

A sordid tale of Champenois chauvinistic and misogynist bullying

I had written and prepared another post for today, but walking past the Sacré Bistro window on my way back from the market this morning, something snapped inside of me when I saw it is still incorrectly displaying Champagne Aurore Casanova’s brand as Casanova-Robinet. It made me wonder, why does the champagne community let two sexists and chauvinist louts get away with misrepresenting a brand just because they do not want to display a woman’s name without adding her husband’s name?

Sacre Bistro Epernay incorrectly displaying Aurore Casanova as Casanova-Robinet today

For most of my life I have avoided gender fights, not because the issue is not important to me, but because I did not want to provide chauvinists and sexists with more fuel for  their next attack. In my opinion,  obvious misogynist behavior is a sign of weakness and stupidity, so instead of stooping down to their level, I have always preferred to ignore it. Nevertheless, bullying and enforcing one’s opinion onto others has always irked me, and it is a miracle I have stayed quiet for as long as I have on Sacré Bistro/Burger deliberately misrepresenting Aurore Casanova on their wine lists and restaurant window.

I first found out about it at the end of March, when Aurore and I had an impromptu Saturday lunch. I saw she was agitated when her husband Jean=Baptiste told her about dinner plans at Sacré Burger that evening. I was surprised, as I know Aurore and Jean-Baptiste have long been friends with the Sacré Burger/Bisto owners. In fact, Victor Allier et Constant Lelarge, the owners, had served burgers at Aurore and Jean Baptiste’s wedding nine years ago. However, as I found out that fateful Saturday afternoon, the friendship was not strong enough to respect Aurore and Jean-Baptiste choice to sell their wines under the Aurore Casanova name – which for the record is the official brand name the couple decided on. Oh no, the Sacré sexists decided that they would  change the name on their wine lists to Casanova-Robinet – thus opting to include Jean-Baptiste’s surname instead of listing the wine under the official brand name. By the time I heard the story, the wines had been incorrectly displayed on the list for the last three years.

Listening to Aurore I was shocked and angry – because this obviously was not a simple mistake, it had been done deliberately. Aurore told me that the last time she asked Victor to correct the brand name, he had smirked and refused retorting that he wanted his friend’s name on the label, so he had added it. I was baffled - the arrogance and misogyny in that answer is beyond imagination. I told Aurore that  if Victor and Constant did not want to listen, to just ask a lawyer to draft and send a letter demanding the brand name be restored to the correct one, reiterating that if the Sacré team had pulled this stunt with a big brand – say Moët & Chandon – this little ‘rebranding exercise’ would have backfired badly. LVMH would have had no qualms reporting the deceitful depiction of their brand to the DGCCRF (direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes) who would have promptly fined Sacré Bistro for fraudulent misrepresentation.

Aurore thus brought the subject up again the next time Victor came for dinner – and told me later that he had finally reluctantly agreed to change the name on the list. I assumed that would be the end of it.

Yet, a few weeks later, when Victor Allier et Constant Lelarge were honored with the Terres et Vins prize, the wine list and restaurant window had not been amended. To add injury to insult, the Terres et Vins team asked Aurore to award the prize to the two men who had been misrepresenting her brand for the last three years.

In my opinion, this clearly shows how ingrained sexism and chauvinism is in the region. Not one of the growers in the Terres et Vins group questioned their choice of giving the prize – which is supposed to represent the honoring of a person or people who have gone above and beyond to promote independent producers in Champagne - to two men who had been implicitly bullying a producer in their own group by refusing to correctly display her brand on their wine lists and their restaurant window. Therefore, in my opinion, awarding this year’s prize to the Sacré Burger/Bistro team implies that the eighteen Terres et Vins producers tacitly condone chauvinistic bullying and sexism, as all of them could clearly see that Aurore’s brand was not correctly represented on the wine list or restaurant window when they all gathered in the restaurant (thus bringing their patronage and financial support) after the tasting. The picture below is a screenshot of the online list taken May 23^rd which shows that even a month after receiving the prize, Aurore Casanova champagnes were still falsely represented because the sacré sexists decided that the brand should include the name of her husband. I guess Aurore should count her lucky stars that the two misogynists had decided to leave at least part of her name, in their reasoning they could have just as easily gone with champagne Robinet….

Screenshot Sacre Burger list taken May 23rd 2024 .

And it really saddens me that the producers of Terres et Vins, whom I have always respected and looked up to, are so oblivious to sexism and bullying that they decided to overlook and condone the misrepresentation of Aurore’s brand. In fact, writing this leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth, as I received the Terres et Vins prize in 2018, a mere 6 weeks after my dad passed away, and at a time that I felt so vulnerable ,this prize felt like the most coveted gift. This morning, when I saw the restaurant window still displays the incorrect name – even if the wine lists have finally been corrected – I wished I could give my Terres et Vins prize back, because today it has lost all its meaning to me.

Champagne may pretend to be gender friendly;  there are plenty of indicators that may seem to point in the right direction like the increasing number of female chef de caves, or even the fact that the SGV appointed another female director this month. However, when one scratches the surface, it quickly becomes obvious that too many Champenois males still feel superior, and as this story shows, entitled to belittle female winemakers or brands.

I know there are other reasons why the Champenois may feel it is ok to bully someone like Aurore. First of all, she is a strong and talented winemaker with an unusual background. She is the only champagne producer I know that started off as a professional ballet dancer at the highest level. Too often I have heard local people – male and female – belittle her, making Trumpian denigrating comments about her doing nothing else but ‘posing in a tutu to wow and dazzle the media’. This obviously means they do not know her, and that they are not familiar with her delicious, precise and elegant wines. The fact that Aurore comes from Paris and that she is beautiful, bright, outspoken and kind also does not work in her favor – it only fuels the empty personal attacks. However, what really bothered me in this story, is that the two men who have been misrepresenting her brand for the last three years are so called friends – it makes one wonder about the Champenois concept of friendship.

Whatever the champenois definition of friendship may be,Aurore is my friend, and has been for a very long time. She is diligent, hard-working, relentlessly looking for innovation and to improve herself and her wines, and therefore she often asks uncomfortable questions in search of a better truth. This does not please the conservative Champenois establishment who also disapprove of her talent and that the brand is slowly becoming more renowned internationally. However, her rise to fame has nothing to do with her posing in a tutu. In fact, in all of the years of friendship, I have never seen her in a tutu – but I have seen her work with Jean-Baptiste every step of the way, whether it is pruning, trellising, picking berries, overlooking the press, making wine, bottling, labeling, selling, educating, looking after her staff, or doing the administration. The couple is successful because both partners strive to better themselves and this commitment shines through in their wines.

Building a brand from scratch is labor intensive, and staying on message is primordial. This is another reason why the false depiction of the brand by the Sacré Burger/Bistro team is not a joke – it is financially harmful as well as emotionally taxing. And this is the reason I decided to out the story.

If  you, like me, believe that chauvinistic bullying and sexism should be exposed, share this story – orally or in this written format – and next time you visit one of the Sacré establishments (if you decide not to cancel them), put pressure on them to display the correct brand name on their window. Also please let them knows that this fraudulent misrepresentation is not cool, a joke or even ok – it is petty and small and it speaks volumes about the people engaged in it.

To conclude, I also hope that the Terres et Vins members put active pressure on the sacré sexists to have all references to Casanova-Robinet replaced with Aurore Casanova, and that they do a bit of soul searching to stop rewarding sexist bullies in the future.

Rant over.