Champagne Can Now Buy In 15 Percent. Or Can It?

Pick up a bottle of Champagne and turn it round. Somewhere near the bottom of the label, in the smallest type on it, sit two capital letters and a number. RM. NM. CM. RC. Those letters tell you who made the wine, and they are the only place that information appears.

On 12 August the Journal officiel carried the champagne purchase derogation, which according to almost every trade outlet means growers may buy in 15 percent of their grapes this year instead of 5. I read that and assumed something had changed about those two letters.

It hasn’t. And the gap between those two things is what this piece is about.

What the order actually says

The order itself dates from 7 August 2026, reference AGRT2621208A, and has been in force since 13 August. The Comité Champagne requested it on 17 July.

What it does: for the 2026 campaign it replaces 5 percent with 15 percent in article 2, points 1 and 3, of an arrêté from 2017. That earlier text governs the fiscal framework around purchases of grapes, must and wine. Buy above the ceiling and you need a second excise number for merchant activity, with separate records and separate storage.

That is where the relief sits. A grower short of fruit this year can buy up to 15 percent under their existing récoltant number, without splitting themselves administratively into two businesses.

For the growers it affects, that matters. It is also something quite different from what the headlines implied.

What it does not say

The implementing instruction to that 2017 order states plainly that the arrangement grants no derogation from labelling rules whatsoever.

Three things that routinely get conflated:

1. Excise status. Can you book this under your existing number, or do you need a second one? That is what the arrêté addresses.
2. The professional registration on the label. RM, NM, CM and the rest. The arrêté does not touch it.
3. The AOC rules themselves. Yield, provenance, method. Also untouched.

And here it gets interesting, because I had this wrong myself.

Everywhere, including in my own lexicon, you read that a récoltant-manipulant may buy in up to 5 percent without losing its status. I went looking for that rule in a primary source. I could not find one. What the Comité Champagne and the French consumer authority DGCCRF do say is that RM means wine from the producer’s own harvest. No percentage, no margin.

So that 5 percent is a fiscal purchase ceiling which has migrated in common usage onto the label, where it never belonged. A producer who vinifies bought fruit as their own Champagne falls, by the nature of the category, under NM.

“Growers can now buy 15 percent and stay RM” is therefore wrong twice over. Not because the ceiling sits elsewhere, but because the ceiling governs something else entirely. The arrêté says which excise number you may book under. It says nothing about which two letters may appear on your bottle.

What it means for your bottle

Less than the headlines promised, and still something.

More bought-in wine will circulate this year, because the harvest was small. Bottles from 2026 will more often contain material from someone else’s parcel. What the RM designation promises does not change with it: it still stands for own harvest, and this order leaves that promise alone.

What you cannot see: whether a given bottle contains 0, 2 or 5 percent bought-in fruit. The order creates no disclosure duty toward the drinker. That was never its purpose, and it is why I stay careful here. I cannot tell you which bottles this touches, and nobody else can either.

The real story is the repetition

This is where I got curious. The derogation was presented as an emergency measure for a disaster year.

Look back and it is the fourth time since the 2017 framework has existed. Fifteen percent also applied to the 2020 harvest, to 2021, and last year to 2025. Three of the last seven vintages, and the last two in a row.

In 2003, the year 2026 keeps being compared to, I found no trace of anything similar. The current mechanism did not exist, and the Union des Maisons de Champagne’s own harvest record describes second and third generation fruit and heavy use of reserve wine.

A measure that returns in three years out of seven is no longer an exception. It is structure. And structure announced each time as an emergency deserves a sharper question than it gets.

Why there is a fight about it

Underneath this rule sits a real conflict, which makes it more interesting than a tax detail.

In March 2026 the Vignerons Indépendants of Champagne argued that the 15 percent buying option is expensive. Growers selling their own bottles have to buy costly Champagne fruit to serve their customers while the collective yield stays low. Their proposal on 2 March was a Besoin Individuel Commercial: a five-year trial letting producers who sell their entire harvest as finished bottles pick against their previous year’s sales, capped at 15,500 kilos per hectare.

Maxime Toubart of the Syndicat Général des Vignerons called it incompatible with the current cahier des charges: Champagne is built on one yield for everyone, and the collective interest comes before the individual one. David Chatillon of the Union des Maisons de Champagne said it looked contrary to the spirit of the AOC, while reserving judgment until the proposal had been set out in full.

Seen that way, the 15 percent is a compromise: it helps stock-short growers supply their customers without letting them take more off their own land than their neighbour. Elegant on paper.

Two things that chafe

Permission is not capacity. The rule applies to everyone, but Champagne grapes cost money. A healthy estate uses the room; an estate already struggling looks at it. The measure therefore helps hardest where the need is smallest, which is precisely the criticism the Vignerons Indépendants made.

And the large houses feel nothing. For a négociant-manipulant that 5 percent was never the binding constraint; buying is the business model. The region’s 410 houses do not need this derogation. Its 16,460 growers do, or at least some of them.

What you can do with this

Turn that bottle round again and find the two letters.

RM means the maker is also the grower, and that the wine comes from their own harvest. NM means a house that buys fruit, which says nothing about quality and plenty about provenance. CM is a cooperative, RC a grower who delivers to a cooperative and takes bottles back under their own name. MA is a shop’s or restaurant’s own label, made by someone else.

On a supermarket shelf you will find almost nothing but NM. For RM you go to a specialist merchant or importer, and you usually pay more. Whether that is worth it depends on what you want: with a grower you buy one place and one hand, with a house you buy consistency across years.

Neither is better. But you are entitled to know which of the two you are holding, and that sits in those two letters. Not in the press release.

Sources

• Primary source: Arrêté du 7 août 2026, JORF n°0187 of 12 August 2026 (NOR AGRT2621208A)
• Additional: Arrêté du 4 août 2017 on the fiscal framework for purchases of grapes, must and wine, Légifrance
• Additional: Instruction technique DGPE/SDFE/2017-777, French Ministry of Agriculture
• Additional: Champagne: le plafond d’achat de raisins passe de 5 à 15%, L’Officiel des Métiers
• Additional: Arrêté du 10 septembre 2020 (2020 harvest derogation), Légifrance
• Additional: Arrêté du 5 août 2025 (2025 harvest derogation), Légifrance
• Additional: Les Vignerons Indépendants de Champagne proposent le BIC, Vitisphere
• Additional: Filière Champagne 2026 (key figures), Comité Champagne
• Additional: Champagne: connaître le langage des étiquettes, DGCCRF
• Additional: Savoir lire une étiquette, Comité Champagne
• Additional: Parliamentary question and answer on the 5 percent purchase tolerance (2008), Assemblée nationale