Louis Vuitton City Guide - Reims

Jérôme Lefèvre, the conspiratorial cellar master

It's hard to escape eight generations of Champagne winegrowers.
Jérôme did, however, try to escape his destiny. After attending the Reims School of Fine Arts, he became an art critic, exhibition curator, and teaches art history. Everything seems to indicate that he has managed to gain perspective. But no. About fifteen years ago, his passion for his native world came back to him like a boomerang.
He convinced his mother, who sold her grapes to the big houses, to make her own biodynamic champagne. After the success of the first vintage, released in 2013 under the name Éliane Delalot, the house simply took the name Champagne Delalot. In 2020, Jérôme produced new champagnes, in his image, confidential, radical, and demanding, under the name Maison Jérôme Lefèvre. At the same time, with five friends, spirits fans, they stirred up an idea that quickly gained traction: to create a distillery. It would be the great work of this band of conspirators, and Jérôme would be its cellar master. In 2021, after completing training, our man settled with his stills in Nogent-l'Artaud, in a former and immense red brick factory, ready to take on his role as an alchemist. He experiments like a visionary, imagining terroir gins made with his own Pinot, Chardonnay, and Meunier musts. He invents a fine gin, crafts a malt spirit with peaty and smoky notes, and prepares, in the secrecy of his oak barrels, a whisky that will reveal its aromas in 2025, in just five hundred bottles. The six friends are thinking far ahead, as the eye in their logo suggests, envisioning, among other things, welcoming the public for tastings, concerts, and more.

The name of their distillery? La Conspiration, obviously.