Amid ris­ing con­cerns about cli­mate change and its im­pact on crops world­wide, the Moët & Chan­don brand has in­vest­ed heav­i­ly in re­search teams to en­sure it can main­tain its icon­ic taste.

This was one of the rev­e­la­tions of Moët Hen­nessy's Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor for Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, Paul Au­ri­ol while ad­dress­ing the Ef­fer­ves­cence din­ner ex­pe­ri­ence host­ed by AS Bry­den and Sons Ltd at Chaqua­ca­bana Re­sort and Beach Club.

The din­ner is an an­nu­al event which takes place around the world, cre­at­ed by Moët & Chan­don to cel­e­brate the ef­fer­ves­cence of cham­pagne.

Au­ri­ol, who gave a de­tailed his­to­ry of Moët & Chan­don cham­pagne at the event, stressed the brand was keen to main­tain the con­sis­ten­cy it was known for de­spite the chal­lenges brought about by cli­mate change.

"We all de­pend on Moth­er Na­ture. Every year, Moth­er Na­ture give us dif­fer­ent grapes, give us dif­fer­ent wine. And the aim of Moët & Chan­don is to re­pro­duce every year the ex­act same style and the ex­act same qual­i­ties," said Au­ri­ol, "That's why we like to say in cham­pagne that big is beau­ti­ful. The big­ger you are, the more you have ac­cess to dif­fer­ent grapes, dif­fer­ent type of wine, and the more you can en­sure your con­sis­ten­cy through­out the years. The idea is that when you drink a bot­tle of White Ice Im­pe­r­i­al tonight in Trinidad, and maybe to­mor­row you will be in Mi­a­mi, and maybe for Christ­mas you will go to Eu­rope but it al­ways has the ex­act same taste year af­ter year."

He said to min­imise the ef­fects of cli­mate change, the brand is tak­ing on a ma­jor task.

"As I said, we de­pend on na­ture, and Moët & Chan­don has been set­ting up R and D, re­search and de­vel­op­ment. And one of the speci­fici­ties is that to pro­duce cham­pagne, you need to have a sec­ond fer­men­ta­tion us­ing yeast to pro­voke that sec­ond fer­men­ta­tion in the bot­tle. That R and D de­part­ment that we have that al­so I would say, im­por­tant at the mo­ment, to man­age that  as well and look af­ter the cli­mate changes and the fact that glob­al warm­ing might have af­fect­ed that, with that idea of seek­ing the con­sis­ten­cy."

Among those present at the event were Richard Pan­do­hie, the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Se­prod, the par­ent com­pa­ny of AS Bry­dens, and wife, Nicole Maraj-Pan­do­hie as well as Miss Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­verse Jenelle Thongs.