Émilien Boutillat takes over as Bollinger's cellar master

Émilien Boutillat has taken over as Bollinger cellar master this month, moving across from Piper-Heidsieck to run the blending and ageing of one of Champagne's most traditionalist houses.

The appointment took effect on 1 October, eight months after Bollinger first said it needed a successor to Denis Bunner, who left the house on 1 June. Boutillat spent the summer finishing his work at Piper-Heidsieck, where he had been cellar master since 2018 and where he also ran the rival group's prestige label, Rare Champagne, from 2022.

Both houses sit under EPI Group, the French holding company that also owns Clinique La Prairie, which made the move an internal transfer rather than a poach. Bollinger has not said who will replace him at Piper-Heidsieck.

Bollinger didn't hire a cellar master to change the house style. It hired one to make sure nobody else does.

A Pinot Noir specialist trained outside Champagne

Boutillat trained at Montpellier SupAgro and built his early career outside the region, with stints at Château Margaux in Bordeaux and Domaine de la Solitude in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, plus vintages in New Zealand, the United States, Chile and South Africa. He is best known in the trade for his work with Pinot Noir, Bollinger's dominant grape, and the International Wine Challenge named him Best Cellar Master of the Year twice, in 2021 and 2023.

That outside experience sets him apart from a house that has leaned on continuity for most of its 193-year history: Bollinger has had only a handful of cellar masters since it was founded in 1829, and its style, built on a high share of Pinot Noir, barrel fermentation and reserve wines aged in magnum, has barely shifted across that time.

A mandate to hold the line before 2029

Bollinger has framed the appointment around continuity rather than change. The house wants Boutillat to preserve and develop its style as it approaches its 200th anniversary in 2029, language that reads as a brief to protect the recipe rather than rewrite it.

He arrives at a tense moment for the region. France's 2026 grape harvest was its smallest in decades, which leaves Bollinger's reserve wines, the deep stock of older vintages blended into each non-vintage release, doing more of the work than usual. Houses with smaller reserves have less room to manoeuvre in a thin year; Bollinger's new cellar master inherits one of the deepest in Champagne.

Rivals have used a similar season to chase headlines of their own: Pavyllon's chef and sommelier recently won Gosset's Matchmakers pairing award. Bollinger, by contrast, is betting that its new arrival changes nothing anyone can taste.