Every Bottle a Magnum

There was one rule on the roof that night, and nobody had to announce it. Every bottle was a magnum.

On October 16, 2026, La Fête du Champagne brought its Apéro au Champagne to the Greenhouse at Nine Orchard, on the Lower East Side. The invitation said five thirty to eight, a convivial evening apéritif, in their own words. What it did not say was that there would not be a single standard bottle in the room. It was a walk-around party, with sommeliers pouring, music, and small bites, and a program that promised magnums, jeroboams, and even a six-liter mathusalem.

We have been to a lot of events. This is the one where we kept stopping mid-sentence just to look around.

It started as a bank

You cannot talk about the room without talking about the building.

Nine Orchard opened in 1912 as the Jarmulowsky Bank, built by a Russian-born rabbi who came to New York by way of Hamburg. His idea was simple, and at the time almost radical. The big banks of the era would not touch the immigrants arriving by the thousands on the Lower East Side, so he built one for them. It held their savings. It sold them steamship tickets so they could bring their families over, the way so many of them were trying to.

The bank did not survive. The building did.

The building outlasted the bank, and it was restored and reopened as a hotel in 2022. Walking through it now, you feel what it was built to be: a place of ambition for people who were told they did not belong in the rooms of power. A century later, we were standing at the top of it with a glass in our hands.

A temple on the roof

At the top there is a tempietto, a small domed temple in stone, restored when the building reopened. It sits above the city like a punctuation mark.

We drank champagne under it while the sky went from gold to blue. That is not a figure of speech. If you have never watched Lower Manhattan change color from a rooftop with something cold and very good in your hand, we cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Greenhouse

The room itself is a greenhouse set on the roof, all glass and painted steel, looking straight down Orchard Street and out toward the bridges. At night the glass doubles every light in the room. The skyline sits behind everything, and the bubbles in the glasses catch it.

There is something about drinking champagne in a greenhouse that feels correct. Champagne is a product of cold ground, chalk, and patience, and here it was in a house made of light.

The people who built the night

La Fête du Champagne was created by Daniel Johnnes and Peter Liem and debuted in October 2014.

Johnnes is the sommelier who started La Paulée out of Montrachet in Tribeca, and who runs wine for Daniel Boulud's restaurants. Liem writes from Épernay, in the heart of Champagne, and has written, quite literally, the book on the subject. He is a James Beard winner.

Put those two together and you get an event with no pretension and total authority. They do not need to tell you the wines are serious. They pour them, and they let the glass do the talking.

The rule of the night

Every wine, on every table, was poured from magnum.

It is worth pausing on why that matters, because it is the quiet secret of the whole evening. A magnum holds double the wine against the same column of air in the neck. That means the wine ages more slowly. The bubbles come out finer, the wine stays fresher far longer, and the whole thing develops with more grace. A magnum is what a house pours when it wants to be remembered.

When the bottle in front of you is twice the size, the whole pace of the evening changes. Nobody is counting. Nobody is rationing. You pour a little, you talk, you pour a little more.

The houses

Across the three tables we filmed, twelve houses were pouring, and many more names joined the night. The tables were numbered at least to eight, so there were more on the roof than we captured, but this is what was legible on the cards at the three we filmed.

Table three

• Drappier, Millésime Exception 2016
• Geoffroy, Empreinte 1er Cru Extra Brut Pinot Noir 2015
• Pierre Gerbais, Champ Viole 2011-2021
• Henriot, L'Inattendue 2016

Table six

• Moët & Chandon, Grand Vintage
• Famille Moussé, Eugène Base 2022
• Pierre Paillard, Bouzy Grand Cru Blanc de Noirs 2021
• Joseph Perrier, Cuvée Royale Vintage 2018

Table eight

• Piper-Heidsieck, Vintage 2018
• Rare, Millésime 2012
• Eric Rodez, Blanc de Blancs, Ambonnay
• Louis Roederer, Collection 244

Also in the room

The three tables we filmed were only part of the roof. Krug and Dom Pérignon, two of the most storied names in Champagne, were part of the night as well. So were Salon, Philipponnat, Tarlant, Savart, Marie-Courtin, Leclerc Briant, Jean Marc Sélèque, Fleur de Miraval, Bérêche, and La Caravelle. None of them were on the tables we filmed, which is exactly why we are glad we kept track of who was there.

That makes this a night with houses, growers, and everything in between, all in large format.

Maisons and growers

Here is the part that made us fall in love with the format.

Moët and Roederer, two of the grandes maisons, stood on the same tables as families farming a few hectares in villages like Bouzy and Ambonnay. Drappier, Geoffroy, Pierre Gerbais, Famille Moussé and Pierre Paillard are small family estates, the growers who make wine from their own vines. Henriot, Joseph Perrier, Piper-Heidsieck, Moët and Roederer are the historic houses.

There is a detail worth knowing about Rare. It began as the prestige cuvée of Piper-Heidsieck, and it has since become a house in its own right. Finding both on the same table is a small, delightful flex.

All of it was poured from the same size of bottle, in the same room, with no hierarchy. A grower's Blanc de Blancs next to a Grand Vintage from the biggest name in the world. That is the actual story of the night. The label did not matter. The glass did.

A few notes on the bottles

Louis Roederer was founded in Reims in 1776 and is still family-owned, now led by the seventh generation. Its Collection 244 is the house's 244th blend, built on the 2019 harvest with reserve wines behind it, a multi-vintage idea that treats every release as its own edition.

Moët & Chandon traces back to 1743, when Claude Moët began shipping wine from Épernay to Paris. The Moët & Chandon name came in 1833.

Rare's Millésime 2012 is a Chardonnay-led blend with Pinot Noir, held at least ten years on the lees. In an unusual move, the house released its 2013 before the 2012, giving the older wine extra time in the cellar.

Krug was founded in Reims in 1843 by German-born Joseph Krug, and its Grande Cuvée blends more than 120 wines from ten or more vintages, a house built on the idea that the best Champagne is a blend across years.

Dom Pérignon made its first vintage in 1921 and released it in 1936, and it is made only in vintage years, from grapes harvested in a single year.

Tarlant is the grower side of the story at its purest. The Tarlant family has been in Champagne since 1687 and in Oeuilly since 1780. Benoît Tarlant and his sister Mélanie are the twelfth generation, farming about fourteen hectares in the Vallée de la Marne, and most of their wines are bottled without dosage, so the vineyard speaks without any added sugar to soften it.

Salon makes exactly one wine: a Blanc de Blancs from Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, 100% Chardonnay, made only in exceptional years. Eugène-Aimé Salon made his first vintage in 1905 for friends and family, and the wine did not go on sale until the 1921 vintage. The house is now owned by Laurent-Perrier.

Philipponnat has been in Aÿ since 1522, and its signature is the Clos des Goisses, a steep, south-facing, walled vineyard of about 5.5 hectares that the family acquired in 1935. Charles Philipponnat runs the house today.

Marie-Courtin is Dominique Moreau, a single 2.5-hectare parcel in Polisot, in the Aube, farmed organically and biodynamically and named for her grandmother. Her wines are made without added dosage.

Leclerc Briant began as a family estate in Cumières, became a true Épernay house in 1955, and is known as a pioneer of biodynamic viticulture in Champagne.

Fleur de Miraval is billed as the only Champagne house devoted entirely to rosé. It came from the Perrin family, Brad Pitt, and the Péters family of Pierre Péters, with a first release in 2020.

What was on the table besides wine

Champagne is better with company, and the company here was extraordinary.

There was Haute Caviar, served straight from the tin on crushed ice, an arm's length from the glasses. There were oysters from Taylor Shellfish, opened to order all night by people wearing gloves, working a tray packed in ice that never once got to sit still.

And then there was the man with the knife. A cortador from Cinco Jotas stood at a station carving acorn-fed ibérico ham by hand, slice after slice, all evening, with Manhattan lit up behind him. If you have never watched someone carve a leg of jamón ibérico, it is a quiet kind of theater. The knife is long and flexible, the slices are almost translucent, and the fat melts the second it touches a warm hand. Cinco Jotas has been making ham in Jabugo, in southwestern Spain, since 1879, and works only with 100% ibérico de bellota, the black-label grade: free-range pigs raised on acorns.

Caviar, oysters, ham, and magnums of champagne. We know how that reads on paper. In person, it reads like someone who understood exactly how you want to feel at the end of a long week.

Thank you

We want to say this plainly.

To Max Goldberg Liu. To Jaime Dutton. To Daniel Johnnes and Peter Liem. And to every single person working that roof, the ones pouring, shucking, carving, carrying, and smiling at a roof full of guests as if they were old friends. Thank you.

Nobody treated us like press. They treated us like guests, which is a much harder thing to pull off.

They had us from the very beginning

There is a part of this story that is personal.

La Fête has had The Innovators Den in the room since 2023, back when the Den was barely an idea. They opened the door before almost anyone else did. That is not something we forget. When you are building something from scratch and an organization with their standing decides your seat at the table is worth saving, it changes how you carry yourself afterward.

So this is our thank-you, in the only form we know how to give one: we wrote it down, and we told the story.

If you love wine, go to their other two events. La Paulée is their celebration of Burgundy, and La Tablée is the one for the Rhône. Between the three of them, they have built one of the most generous wine calendars in New York.

Your turn

Grower or grande maison, which one are you reaching for? Tell us in the comments, and send this to the friend who belonged in that room.

Follow @theinnovatorsden.

📍 Nine Orchard Greenhouse, Lower East Side

Follow the people and houses behind the night: @lafetenyc, @peterliem, @danieljohnnes, @maxgoldbergliu, @krugchampagne, @domperignonofficial, @louisroederer_, @piper_heidsieck, @rarechampagne_official, @moetchandon, @champagnepierregerbais, @champagnegeoffroy, @champagnedrappier, @haute_caviar, @taylorshellfish.

Invited guest of La Fête du Champagne.