Champagne Sanger

Champagne Sanger is unique as the students of Avize Viti Campus produce Champagne Sanger with their cellar master.

On November 3rd 1927, the gates of Avize winter wine school opened for the first time to 13 students between 15 and 16.

These students committed to following, every Thursday afternoon during the 3 winter months, a training in wine-growing, wine-making, but also tree growing, barrel-making, and basket weaving.

Champagne Sanger is unique as the students of Avize Viti Campus produce Champagne Sanger with their cellar master.

This school was the outcome of deep thinking resulting from a strong need for increased knowledge and skills after the 19th century phylloxera crisis.

This dream came true, with the donation made by Puisart family, and this started the wonderful story of the Champagne wine growing school of Avize.

After a first failed attempt of donation by Jules Arthur, a Champagne wine merchant in 1911, his widow, Louise Eugénie Puisart, bequeathed in 1919 this same property (houses, press house, garden, park, and 400 000 francs) before her death in 1920, with a single demand : the creation of a winegrowing school.

The school eventually opened at the beginning of November 1927, thanks to the donation and with the help of the French Ministry of Agriculture.

Every year and until 1939, it welcomed from 13 to 29 students from the “Montagne de Reims”, the Marne Valley, and the “Côte des Blancs” who most of the time biked from their home to Avize.

In 1945, after World War II, the school re-opened.

In 1952, 16 former students got together, and revived the former student association which had been created in 1939; finding absurd not to be able to train to Champagne making within the school, the school vineyard being so small, while having at their disposal the wonderful cellars bequeathed by Puisard family, they decided to bring to the school still wines, tools, bottles and corks….. and their enthusiasm and they volunteered to make wine with the students in the school.

The former students cooperative was born, having for values equality and a strong school identity. For them, the cooperative and the school should be one single entity (its manager should be the school’s headmaster and only former students as cooperators).
It is still the case today with the 104 former students representing almost all the different areas of winemaking Champagne, with more than 40 villages and 4 counties. This constitutes a extraordinary oenological wealth, with a yearly production of 130,000 bottles, the profit earned going to the current and future student generations.

Meanwhile, from the end of the 50s, the school could buy or rent vineyards in the neighborhood of the school, to reach its current surface of about 10 Ha.

The school now owns, thanks to the help of the Local Council of Champagne Ardennes, property assets of more than 20,000 square meters in a perfect state of repair. At the end of the 80s, bachelor degrees were added to the program, the size of the estate increased to reach its current size, and 1985 saw the creation of the Agricultural Vocational Training and Promotion Center which became in the late 80s one the of the biggest in Champagne Ardennne.

With a nearly 100-year-old history closely related to winegrowing in the Champagne area, with its opening toward many partnerships, and with the help of the ministry of agriculture, the Champagne wine trade, and of Champagne Ardenne regional council, Champagne winegrowing school became Avize Viti Campus in 2012 and now aims at becoming the role model of a 21st century winegrowing teaching centre.

www.sanger.fr