An e-learning platform. Launched like a grand cru.
Client Comité Champagne
Event type Product launch
Participants 80
Date 01/05/2025
The Comité Champagne was unveiling its e-learning platform. We could have done an online demo. Instead, we gathered 80 leading figures from the wine world at Gault & Millau, with Xavier Thuizat, Best Sommelier of France, and a mentalist magician. Because Champagne deserves better than a webinar.
The challenge
Launch a digital training platform on Champagne with an event as remarkable as what it teaches
An e-learning platform can be launched with a press release and an email. Or it can be launched with an evening that makes it instantly clear to the people who matter in the Champagne world that this project is serious, ambitious and worthy of the industry it represents.
The Comité Champagne wanted the second option. 80 hand-picked guests: wine influencers, heads of hospitality schools, leading industry figures, and Xavier Thuizat as guest of honour. One venue: Gault & Millau in Paris. One goal: that everyone present leaves convinced this platform will change the way people learn about Champagne.
Our mission
Design an evening that is itself a demonstration of the excellence the platform sets out to teach.
When Xavier Thuizat, Best Sommelier of France, is in the room, you don’t present an e-learning platform.
What have we built? Our 5 Culture Makers Moments
The venue & the guest list — Gault & Millau, 80 hand-picked guests
At Gault & Millau, the venue’s credibility is part of the message. 80 carefully selected guests: wine influencers, heads of schools, key players in the Champagne industry, and Xavier Thuizat, Best Sommelier of France, as the central figure. When the venue and the audience are at that level, the evening starts to exist before it has even begun.
4 discovery and tasting workshops
The heart of the evening: four workshops designed to bring the platform’s teaching to life. Not presentations: sensory experiences, moments of active discovery, times when guests learn something about Champagne they didn’t yet know. The platform demonstrated through its own methods.
The mentalist magician: the show within the workshop
A workshop led by a mentalist magician to prove that learning can be as spectacular as it is rigorous. Magic as a metaphor for what goes on in the mind of a great taster: perception, intuition, reading the invisible. The moment that surprises everyone and gets talked about for the rest of the evening.
The chef & food-and-Champagne pairings
A chef in the kitchen all evening, serving up food-and-Champagne pairings non-stop: not a set menu, but a living, evolving tasting that follows the rhythm of the evening. Every bite is a lesson. Every pairing is a demonstration. Gastronomy as a natural extension of the platform.
Speeches, press kit & soundscape
Speeches structured to give meaning to each sequence of the evening without weighing it down. A press kit written by our partner Hémisphère Sud to extend the event beyond the night itself, into the trade media. A soundscape designed to accompany without drowning out the substance that holds the whole thing together.
Behind the scenes
Gault & Millau as a strategic choice
Launching a platform of excellence on Champagne at Gault & Millau in Paris is a choice that speaks to every professional in the industry before the invitation even lands. The venue sends a signal: this project is serious and belongs among the highest standards of French gastronomy. The venue’s credibility transfers instantly to the project it hosts.
Xavier Thuizat as an anchor of authority
Having the Best Sommelier of France present at the launch of a Champagne training platform is the strongest validation possible. His name on the guest list changes the nature of the event: it attracts, it reassures, it legitimises. But his presence has to be thought through, not merely symbolic: he was there to contribute, not to decorate.
The mentalist magician as a bold choice
Bringing a mentalist magician into a professional e-learning platform launch is a calculated risk. A risk that says something about the confidence we have in our concept: if we can afford surprise and spectacle, it’s because the substance is solid enough. And the result proved the format worked perfectly in this world.
The press kit as an editorial extension
An event of this calibre deserves a written record to match. Our partner Hémisphère Sud wrote a press kit designed for the wine and gastronomy trade media, and also arranged meetings with journalists so the evening lived on in the press after the last guests had left. The event as the starting point for wider communication.
Launching a learning tool on
You’re launching a product, a platform, a project that deserves to be noticed by the people who really matter.
We know how to create the event that makes the difference.
