The merchant they called Champagne Charlie

Champagne Charlie was jailed as a Confederate spy

Charles Heidsieck was trying to get home to France. Instead, Union soldiers arrested him near New Orleans and charged him with spying for the Confederacy.

He was no stranger to America. Born in Reims in 1822, Heidsieck founded Charles Heidsieck (champagne) in 1851, at 29, and sailed for the United States the next year. He became the first champagne merchant to sell his own wine there in person. New Yorkers loved him. One newspaper nicknamed him "Champagne Charlie," and the name stuck through three more transatlantic trips.

The Civil War changed everything. Heidsieck's American agents owed him money, and when the war choked off trade, he went south to collect it. He got trapped behind Confederate lines. Trying to slip back out through New Orleans, he was seized as a spy and sent to Fort Jackson, a Union prison in Louisiana.

He spent months there before pleas reached Washington. In November 1862, after appeals that reportedly reached President Lincoln, the Union let him go. Heidsieck sailed home sick and broke. His business survived only because one American debt was repaid in land instead of cash: acreage in a place called Denver, Colorado. A silver boom hit soon after, and the useless deed became a fortune large enough to save the house that bore his name.

He aged wine in Gallo-Roman chalk quarries

The house Heidsieck rebuilt outlasted him. He kept buying chalk quarries around Reims. These were old pits first dug in the Gallo-Roman era. He aged his wine deep in their tunnels. He died in 1893 with the business sound again.

## A grave marked by a Japanese gate

Alfred Gérard rests beneath a Japanese gate

Alfred Gérard died in Bezannes with a fortune that had nothing to do with grapes. His grave here carries no plain headstone. It sits under a stone torii, a Japanese gate. Three ornamental lanterns flank it, carved with Japanese inscriptions. Nobody local put a torii over a French grave by accident. Whatever Gérard made abroad, he chose to be buried under its symbols rather than spend it and move on.

## Old rivals from Épernay

Old rivals from Épernay built on Russian trade

A few hundred feet from Heidsieck's old ground, another champagne family was already trading. They had been trading for over a century before he was born. Champagne Chanoine Frères opened in Épernay in 1730. It was one of the oldest houses in the region. Its money came from Russia. The Chanoine brothers built a clientele across the Tsars' court. They later named a cuvée, Tsarine, in tribute to that market. Revolution and war eventually shut it down. The house survived by finding new buyers. This was the same problem Heidsieck's own agents caused him when a war cut their trade dead.

## A war that flattened the plain

Artillery flattened the plain of Bezannes

Bezannes paid for other people's ambitions in a different currency. Artillery hit the plain of Bezannes through the First World War. Fighting left fortifications scarred across it. The commune was awarded the War Cross 1914–1918 afterward. This was official recognition of what the ground had taken. Nobody here was chasing a fortune in 1914. The war simply arrived and stayed for four years.

## An independent house built from nothing

Bruno Paillard built a house on his name alone

Bruno Paillard started as a broker in the champagne trade in 1975. He worked other people's vineyards and other houses' wine. In 1981 he founded a house under his own name. He had no inherited land behind it. He bought his first vineyards only in 1994. By then the house was already producing hundreds of thousands of bottles a year. It did this on borrowed grapes and his own name alone. It is one of the few champagne houses left that answers to nobody else.