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The Pol Roger champagne house is preparing to move racking into its new production facility, which will cost around 50 million euros. The new high-tech cellar is to be presented to the public in April 2024 with the celebrations of the 175th year of existence.
After Pol Roger passed the mark of 1.5 million bottles sold per year, the house needed more storage space as well as modern technologies and processes to simplify and speed up operations. According to Pol Roger, it stores more older vintages in its cellars than many other champagne houses. As a result, storage space has also become too scarce despite the 10 km of underground corridors, Pol Roger managing director Laurent d'Harcourt told the British magazine Drinks Business.
According to d'Harcourt, disgorging, packaging and labelling of the bottles will also take place in the new facility, supported by multi-million euro robot technology from the German company Schubert. For example, a robot will apply the neck foil and stick on the label in a precisely aligned position. Magnum bottles are still labelled by hand, but a robot lifts the required bottles onto the work surface.
Sustainability was an important factor in the design and planning of the new building, d'Harcourt explained. Rainwater is collected on the roof to irrigate the freshly planted gardens. In addition, the building will be "powered by biomass energy in the future".
The construction of the new production facility follows the fundamental modernisation of the winery that took place in 2008. At that time, Pol Roger installed a large number of smaller tanks - the smallest holds about 2,500 litres of wine - in order to be able to vinify the different sites and parcels of the cuvée separately.
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(uka / Source: Drinks Business)