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Founded in 1743, Moët & Chandon is the largest – and one of the oldest – champagne houses in existence. From the iconic Brut Impérial to the innovative Ice Impérial, its bottles are enjoyed in over 150 countries around the globe. To celebrate its 283^rd harvest, the house invited a group of international guests to its ‘Harvest Experience’ in September. An exclusive annual rendez-vous, the occasion offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in the magic behind the world’s most famous fizz. However, in 2026, the harvest was anything but typical: simultaneously challenging and rewarding, this record-breaking year will potentially re-write champagne making as we know it.

Moët & Chandon is a maison surrounded by romance and legend. In a room above its 28 km of cellars in Épernay sits a tricorn beaver skin hat worn by Napolean (one of the house’s many famous customers). Close by, the first glass made specifically for drinking champagne mingles with F1 memorabilia (the maison is credited with starting the tradition of winners spraying a Jeroboam from the podium). Today, friends of the house include Pharrell Williams, who collaborated on Ice Impérial, and Jessica Chastain, the special guest at this year’s Harvest Experience.

Yet, behind the glamour and the clink of crystal glasses, there is the graft, the craft and the passion that goes into creating every sparkling drop. In 2026, the skills that have been honed for centuries were put to the test under unprecedented conditions.

First there were the frosts. At the Loge Montaigu, overlooking the vineyards of the Côtes de Blanc region, Technical Viticulture Manager Jeanne Carlier tells us that a very mild winter woke the vines early from dormancy, making them susceptible to the cold weather that followed. In March, temperatures plummeted to -6 degrees Celsius, causing the worst frost damage in Moët & Chandon’s history and the loss of 40 percent of the vines. April and May provided respite from extreme temperatures, but just as the vines started to flower, the heatwaves and droughts began.

As the heat intensified and the grapes rapidly ripened, immediate action was required. Instead of September, the harvest began on 14^th August – the earliest recorded in Champagne’s history – and was completed in only 12 days, which is no mean feat. The house would have liked to start even earlier, but as Carlier explains, over 3,700 workers travel from numerous countries, and they must be housed and fed. Managing such logistics is a huge undertaking.

To put these timescales into perspective, Bênoit Gouez, Chef de Cave (Cellar Master), tells us that traditionally, flowering to harvest once took around 90 days. Later – perhaps due to climate change – this shrunk to 85, give or take a few days. Until now, the record had been 81, but this year, it was a staggeringly low 68.

The result of all this was an average yield of only 6,500 kg per hectare, compared to the usual 10,000, but as Gouez reveals, 2024 and 2025 also produced low yields and Champagne is now relying on its reserves. However, all is not lost. Despite the droughts, the vines are currently looking green and healthy. The surviving crop from August showed next to no disease or fungi, Carlier reports, and, although the bunches were small with hardly any water in the grapes, this ripeness was far from a disaster.  Instead, the grapes expressed a good balance of sugar and acidity. 

At the maison’s state-of-the-art Mont Aigu winery, which rivals Reims cathedral in terms of its scale, the grapes arrive already pressed. At the peak of this year’s harvest, there were 100 tankers of juices delivered daily, requiring three shifts of workers. Typically, only one type of juice would arrive at any given time, Winery Manager Daniel Carvajal explains, but the speed of this harvest meant that different varieties were delivered simultaneously. Luckily, the winery has the technology to lab test ten quality parameters in just fifteen minutes, which is done in conjunction with frequent manual tastings.

The winery also uses its own yeast, with techniques developed over generations. It had to adjust the fermentation process due to the high sugar content of this year’s grapes, and it’s still too early to know what the results will be, but historically, very hot years have produced some excellent wines, so the potential is there.

Chardonnay is the element that contributes elegance to a champagne. This harvest, it’s extremely fruity, with apple and pear notes, instead of the usual acidic citrus. Meunier, meanwhile, adds warmth and robustness. Again, it’s fruiter than usual, with peach and apricot notes, and, unusually, also tinted, providing yet another challenge in terms of extracting the colour.

Twenty percent of Moët & Chandon’s champagnes are a rosé blend. Grand Cru Pinot Noir is used for structure. Pinot Noir from Aubes is rougher, more rustic and can bring body to a blend. It adds a bitterness to the finish, which is refreshing but not overpowering, and is normally used for non-vintage, rather than a vintage or reserve. Despite extra extraction being used, the colour still came out of the skin, and the juice tasted more like blackberries than the usual strawberries. In an average year, less than 15 percent of the red is used but, this time round, it will need to be significantly lower to prevent too much intensity of colour. The wine is also far too powerful for a non-vintage.

Well, Moët & Chandon is no stranger to adaptation. While traditions are always respected, the house evolves with the customer. A non-vintage, like Brut Impérial for example, is key to meeting consumer demand. Now, the changing climate requires further interventions. This includes trying different Chardonnay clones. New methods are being trialled to protect the vines from frost, as are ways to keep the grapes hydrated and greater spacing between the rows will be introduced to reduce water consumption.

This is in addition to existing environmental measures – something that the house has been instrumental in introducing to Champagne for over a century. Its Fort Chabrol centre was set up by Monsieur Chandon in 1900 to find ways to combat disease and to develop grafting techniques. In 2021, the Natura Nostra programme was launched and focuses on three pillars: the certification of partners in the region, the provision of services to those partners – small scale growers included – and agricultural measures in response to climate change. It’s very much a communal venture. Natura Nostra relies on experts, works with public authorities and encourages collective action.

Soil that is left fallow (resting) is sowed with cover crops to improve structure and encourage biodiversity. Last winter, for example, 320 hectares were used to grow legumes and cruciferous vegetables. Certain chemical products have been eliminated, the soil is worked manually or by robots, which are less disruptive than tractors, and sheep are used in the winter to ‘eco graze’ the land. Biodiverse ecological corridors have been created with trees, hedges, bushes, beehives and nesting boxes for insects. By 2027, the goal of planting 100km of hedges will have become a reality. There is also a conservatory dedicated to protecting wine varieties and the heritage of Champagne’s growers.

There is a French saying: ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” meaning “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” At Möet & Chandon, this idea has been turned on its head. A change is in the air and the house at the helm of Champagne is ready to respond.

Find out more about Moët & Chandon here.

words. Huma Humayun
images. Courtesy of Moët & Chandon

Some bars are designed to be seen; Chiave is designed to be felt. Tucked down an unassuming stretch of Redchurch Street in London’s Shoreditch sits an intimate cocktail bar that treats music and mixology as one and the same pursuit. There is no clamour for attention here, no queue snaking down the road: only the quiet confidence of a place that knows exactly what it is.

Chiave means ‘key’ in Italian, and the name reads as a thesis as much as a label. The venue is built around the idea of belonging: of holding the key to a place that feels like home, a spot that is quietly, dependably yours. It is a romantic notion for a cocktail bar, and one that could easily ring hollow; yet it takes only minutes for the feeling to settle into place. This is a room that folds you in. The occasion was the launch of a bold new menu, a collection of inventive serves from award-winning bartender Bilal Tekec and the Chiave team, but the pull of the place turned out to be something larger than any single drink.

The cocktail bar occupies the ground floor of a handsome Victorian terrace, the kind of weathered London stock-brick building that lends this pocket of the East End its character. This is no conventional façade. Its full-height sliding sash windows rise vertically, and on a warm late-August evening the whole front of the bar lifts open. The room breathes: the hum of Redchurch Street drawn in, the music and chatter of the bar spilling out. The barstools, lined up just inside those open windows, are a prime perch for people-watching. It seats only around 20, which is much of its charm. Schön! alive arrived early on a Friday evening, when the room was still calm, but within an hour it had filled, every stool taken, with the easy conviviality of a place where no one stays a stranger for long.

The new menu rewards curiosity: each cocktail evokes a mood or season and takes its name from the song that captures its essence. Scan the QR code and Chiave’s Spotify playlist opens up, every serve with its own soundtrack. It’s a small idea with an outsized effect, turning a drinks list into something closer to a curated set. Strictly in the name of research, Schön! alive gladly made its way through Limbo, a well-judged take on the spicy margarita; Roxy, a juicy remix of a tequila sour, sharpened with citrus and lifted by a subtle green pepper spice; and Ruby Lee. But it was Stardust that stole the evening: rum, passion fruit, mint, yuzu and soda drawn into a crisp, sparkling highball that tasted like the last, best hour of summer.

What sets Chiave apart from the crowd of East London cocktail bars is not any one drink but the density of small, considered gestures. Ice cubes arrive embossed with the Chiave name; drinks rest on the bar’s own bespoke coasters; a little pot of salted pretzels arrives alongside for nibbling, with a fuller bar-snacks menu for those who linger. Even the matchbooks are personalised: a thoughtful touch for guests who gather outside to smoke. Classic cocktails, too, are given the house treatment; nothing reaches the bar without a distinctly Chiave twist. The staff are attentive without hovering, and quick to make a guest feel less like a customer than a regular who simply hasn’t been in for a while. It is, in the truest sense, a home away from home.

As the evening deepens over London, Chiave reveals its other half. Down a flight of stairs lies the listening bar, darker and more enigmatic. Here the mood shifts: low red lighting, an intimacy that borders on the illicit, and a devotion to sound that verges on the reverent. The space is built around an Arda Audio system from Copenhagen, a core part of the venue’s identity, and given over to vinyl. A rota of DJs turns the bass up as the night wears on. This month alone runs from Junki Inoue through Kerosh b2b Alex Bradley to Cem Ozden. It has the feel of a speakeasy, a hidden room that only those in the know quite manage to find, and all the more seductive for it.

Step back out onto Redchurch Street and the name makes its final case. Chiave is not chasing the spectacle that so much of Shoreditch trades in; it is quieter and more assured than that, a bar that treats music, craft and company as a single pleasure rather than three competing ones. The new menu is reason enough to visit, but the reason to return is harder to bottle: the sense, rare in a capital this size, of having been handed the key to somewhere that already feels like yours. In a city full of bars designed to be seen, Chiave is one of the few you’ll still feel long after you’ve left.

Find out more about Chiave here.

words. Olivia Cichero
edit. Huma Humayun
images. Courtesy of Chiave

Chile spans some 4,300 kilometres down the western edge of South America: from the red emptiness of the Atacama, the driest desert on earth, through world-famous vineyards and the painted hills of Valparaíso, to the blue glaciers of Patagonia. Yet the drink that best belongs to it is one the world is only just waking up to. Distilled in the northern valleys, where rain barely falls and the ripening sun gives way to cold desert nights, lies something far more discreet: Pisco, its national spirit. With centuries of heritage, and the oldest denomination of origin in the Americas, it remains, beyond Chile, a well-kept secret.

Pisco is, at heart, a spirit of place. The grape behind it is Muscat, grown across Elqui, Limarí and their neighbours, where sun and altitude concentrate the fruit into something intensely aromatic.

In the glass, it is all lift and freshness. The classic, unaged style, ‘transparent’, is floral on the nose: rose, jasmine and orange blossom. On the palate it turns to green grape and soft stone fruit, brightened by citrus peel, before a clean, gently sweet finish. Rest it in barrels of oak or native Chilean raulí, and it turns amber and altogether richer, gathering vanilla, dried fruit and a whisper of spice: one spirit, a spectrum of moods.

That range is exactly what separates Chilean Pisco from its Peruvian cousin. Where Peru’s version is distilled once and bottled undiluted and unaged, Chile’s rules allow for blending, adjusting strength and, crucially, for wood ageing, opening up a far broader family of styles. The distillation itself remains true to its roots. The wine is heated in copper alembics, with only the ‘heart’ of each run drawn off, sometimes passed through the still two or three times for purity. It is a craft the northern valleys have practised for four centuries, ever since colonial growers began distilling surplus wine to stop it spoiling.    

The spirit even takes its name from the land. Early on, it was stored and carried in elongated clay vessels known as piscos, and the word stuck. In 1931, Chile drew a legal line around it, fixing in law exactly where and how Pisco could be made – rules that still govern the spirit today.

For all that heritage, Pisco wears it lightly. It is the backbone of the tart, frothy Pisco Sour and the everyday Piscola; poured long over ice with cola. A few labels are worth seeking out, from the floral to the oak aged. Waqar is a small-batch, fifth-generation Muscat pisco of real elegance; the oak-rested Capel Moai Reservado is as memorable for its Easter Island Moai-shaped bottle as its softly spiced warmth. Richer still, Alto del Carmen Etiqueta Negra spends two years in American oak, at the whisky drinker’s end of the scale. In its homeland, though, the ritual is simpler. “In Chile, we enjoy our Pisco with asados (delicious grilled meats) while dining with family and friends,” says Nicolás Poblete, ProChile’s UK trade commissioner.

The rest of the world is catching on. Chile makes roughly four-fifths of the planet’s pisco and now ships it to more than 40 countries, with exports climbing fast – up 460% to China in a single year, 190% to Spain and 70% to Germany. Much of that momentum is down to ProChile, the Chilean government’s export arm, and its ‘Chilean Pisco: First Spirit’ campaign. “We have an incredible amount of pride for our Pisco,” says Poblete. “It is the most widely drunk spirit here in Chile.”

Out in those far northern valleys, blazing days still cool into star-strewn nights. Centuries in the making, Chile’s desert spirit is, at last, being found.

Learn more about Chilean pisco here. 

words. Olivia Cichero
edit. Huma Humayun
images. Courtesy of ProChile