#6 Peter Liem, Award-Winning Champagne Author, Presenter & Communicator

Peter Liem is one of Champagne’s most recognised and celebrated ambassadors. Known for his almost surgical approach to dissecting and interpreting Champagne’s unique terroir, he has been one of the region’s greatest pioneers in bringing our awareness back to Champagne’s sense of place. As a young wine professional in the 1990s, he got his first thirst for champagne with a bottle of 1979 Salon. That bottle of Salon, he says, from a single village of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger was no less complete than the massively blended champagnes that he and the world was used to. It tasted different, but why was it this way? That moment in time has inspired a life-long pursuit of curiosity and questioning the expression of Champagne’s vineyard origins and the concept of terroir. The ensuing decades has seen Peter become a local citizen, initially travelling a few times a year to owning a home in Epernay. During this time, he has forged an impressive career for his authorship of the multi-award-winning ‘Champagne: The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers, and Terroirs of the Iconic Region’, the online resource ChampagneGuide.net, as a lecturer for the Wine Scholar's Guild and as co-founder of the annual La Fête du Champagne event program in New York, amongst many other things. Over the past year Peter and I have spent some incredible moments together bonding over our mutually shared passion for champagne, which has been a deep personal privilege for me. It was my honour to sit down with him, during harvest 2023, for this special interview.