Salon was founded in 1905 by the whim of a fur trader, Eugène-Aimé Salon, who bought a hectare in Le Mesnil-sur-Orger, on the Côte des Blancs. He died in 1943, a year before the Normandy landings. Among the partisans who help the Allies is Bernard de Nonancourt, who then joins the Abbé Pierre and General Leclerc.
Bernard enters the Nest of L'Aquila, Hitler's Alpine residence, in the Bavarian Alps, in Berchtesgaden. He arrives there crossing the mountain for 139 meters on an elevator covered with Carrara marble, brought by Mussolini, together with a red fireplace. And he discovers, together with many treasures stolen from France, 500 thousand bottles. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne: Hitler's private cellar. There is a 1928 Salon match, stolen by the Nazis. Bernard tastes it and swears that Maison Salon will one day be his. Forty-three years later, in 1988, he succeeds. The former partisan, who became famous with the family business, Laurent Perrier, thus becomes the custodian of the orthodoxy of the most elite label of Champagne.
Salon is so evocative of the interweaving of history and society (when he hears the name McInerney thinks of "George Sand who entertains Flaubert and Turgenev, or Gertrude Stein who welcomes Picasso and Hemingway") that it is inevitable to associate him with great occasions. As was the Pandolfini auction at the Swiss Center in recent days (99% of the lots sold, € 420 thousand collected). To coax collectors willing to spend, with a nod to the batter, up to 6,930 euros for a bottle of 1971, there was Didier Depond, the president. With the ad of Ceretto Giacolino Gillardi, Paolo Baracchino and the ambassador of Champagne Andrea Gori. And above all there were sips of Salon 1983, 1987, 2002 (and also of Delamotte 1970 and 1999, sister cellar, identical territory, guide and property, Laurent Perrier).