Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarship: 12 Selected

Romané Basset and three fellow judges reduced 53 applications to twelve names for the 2026 Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarship, a UK wine trade award announced by the Gérard Basset Foundation on June 30, 2026.

Basset led the selection as co-founding trustee and head of operations for the foundation, working alongside Nina Basset FIH (co-founding trustee and team leader), Christian Holthausen (head of communications), and Preston Mohr (managing director of the Wine Scholar Guild). Together they chose twelve UK-based wine professionals for a programme built around Champagne study, a day-long negotiation and sales masterclass, and a tutored tasting hosted by Laurent-Perrier.

It is the second year Nina Basset and Romané Basset have partnered with Champagne Laurent-Perrier on the scholarship, and the shape of the award tells you where the foundation has placed its attention: not on a dinner, not on a medal ceremony, but on course work, tasting discipline, and the commercial skills that decide whether a bottle reaches the right list, shelf, or guest.

The announcement matters because education in wine rarely sits at a distance from money. Course fees, travel, time away from the floor, and access to producers all influence who gets to deepen their knowledge and who has to learn only in the cracks between service. The Bassets and their foundation cannot solve that whole problem with this scholarship. No single programme can. But their structure gives twelve working members of the UK wine trade a route into Champagne study through the Wine Scholar Guild Champagne Masters course, with Laurent-Perrier adding a tutored tasting session.

The Twelve Professionals Basset's Panel Selected

The cohort begins with named working roles, which is the right place to begin. Charlotte Alexander-Marsh enters from Majestic, where the source identifies her as Area Sales Manager London. Chris Frayling-Cork comes from the sommelier's station as Head Sommelier at The Chancery Rosewood. Shehnaz Hansraj brings a different angle, Head of Research & Consumer Insights UK at Viking. Those three names alone map three ways wine knowledge moves through the trade: the retail floor and area team, the dining room, and the consumer research desk.

The remaining winners extend that spread.

The Gérard Basset Foundation announcement names Amelia Burgess, associated in the source with University of Edinburgh Business School, Santander Academy, and ELLE; Zaloren Gonzalez Fontes, Sommelier at Los Mochis and linked with a Masters in Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt; Daisy Henderson, Wine Sales Specialist at Laithwaites and Sommelier at Harper Weddings; Serhat Narsap, Founder and Managing Director of Sonvino; Joanna Nerantzi, Head Sommelier at Raffles London at The OWO; Anna Pavlovna Suzan, Senior Sommelier at Langan's Brasserie; Joseph Rosenfeld, Senior Sommelier at Dinings SW3; Kostas Vaitsidis, Sommelier at Brown's Hotel; and Lauren Wedge, Sommelier at The Wilderness.

Read as a list, it is a roll call. Read bench-side, it is a picture of where Champagne gets explained, poured, sold, translated, and defended. Nerantzi, Frayling-Cork, Suzan, Rosenfeld, Vaitsidis, and Wedge work tables where a head sommelier may need the confidence to place a grower or house cuvée against a guest's expectation.

Alexander-Marsh and Henderson work retail roles where they may need to train teams to explain dosage, ageing, and house style without leaning on ceremony. Narsap as a founder may need to build trust with customers who know the word Champagne but not the method. Hansraj's research may connect what drinkers say they want with what they actually buy.

The Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarship gives all twelve a shared technical reference point.

The scholarship is open to UK-based wine professionals only, according to the foundation's materials. That boundary gives Basset and her co-judges a clear trade audience. They are not selecting general consumer prize winners, and they are not awarding tourism grants. They are choosing people already working in wine, the ones who carry bottles to tables, buy for lists, manage teams, train colleagues, interpret labels, and answer questions after the cork comes out.

What Basset and the Foundation Are Offering: Study, Sales, and Tasting

The core of the award is the Wine Scholar Guild Champagne Masters course. The source describes the course as focused on the wines of Champagne and taught by industry-recognised experts. That matters because Champagne is not one subject. It is a region, a set of methods, a commercial system, a lexicon of crus and houses, and a tasting discipline where small differences in blend, ageing, dosage, and release strategy carry through the glass.

The Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarship does not stop at technical study. The winners also receive a one-day masterclass in negotiation and sales. That addition is easy to pass over, but practitioners will recognise the weight of it. Wine work often turns on language under pressure: a buyer's meeting, a table on a Saturday night, a staff training where the team has twenty minutes before briefing, a private client asking why one Champagne costs more than another. Product knowledge gives a professional the structure. Sales and negotiation decide whether that structure can be used without flattening the wine into a script.

Laurent-Perrier also hosts a tutored tasting session with the winners. The useful fact is the format. A tutored tasting with a Champagne house is not only about aromas and finish. It is about calibration.

The glass becomes a teaching tool: how the house frames its range, which cues it asks tasters to notice, how it connects craft to vocabulary, and where a professional learns to separate memory from method. For Nerantzi, Frayling-Cork, Suzan, Rosenfeld, Vaitsidis, or Wedge, that training returns to the pass.

For Alexander-Marsh or Henderson in retail, it returns to the shelf talker, the team huddle, and the customer who wants a bottle for a specific table rather than an abstract occasion.

Collectors should read the award in that practical register. This is not a market signal that tells you to buy or sell a bottle. It does not announce a score, a limited release, or an allocation. Its effect, if it carries, will show up more quietly: better trained sommeliers, clearer buying conversations, and wine lists where Champagne can be explained through production and style rather than price alone. The hands holding the list often decide how a region is understood.

How Basset and the Panel Made Their Choices

The 2026 field had 53 applications. The judging panel included Nina Basset FIH, co-founding trustee and team leader of the Gérard Basset Foundation; Romané Basset, co-founding trustee and head of operations; Christian Holthausen, head of communications for the foundation; and Preston Mohr, managing director of the Wine Scholar Guild. That panel joins family stewardship, foundation operations, communications, and course leadership in one selection process.

The foundation has not published, in the source provided, a points grid for how each application was scored. What the announcement does give is the size of the field and the trade frame. "We received 53 applications this year, and we had to narrow it down to 12 well-deserving members of the UK wine trade, individuals coming from all walks of life," said Romané Basset.¹ The phrase matters because it places the emphasis on working professionals, not polished biographies.

The source also states that one aim of the Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarships is to support inclusion and accessibility in the wine industry. Those words can become soft if left alone. Here they are tied to seats on a course, a day of sales training, and a tasting with the Champagne house. Access is not only entry through the front door. It is the chance to study with enough structure that the next exam, buyer meeting, list review, or staff training does not depend solely on who could afford private routes into the same knowledge.

In the June 30, 2026 announcement, Romané Basset said 53 applications were received this year and narrowed to 12 winners. That date gives future applicants a marker, but the more useful preparation begins before the form opens. A working wine professional who wants this kind of scholarship needs to know what they are already doing with Champagne, where their knowledge stops, how the course would alter their daily work, and who would benefit after they return to the floor, office, shop, or programme. The strongest application in any education award usually has evidence of practice. Not a claim of interest. Time on the tools.

Nina Basset, Romané Basset, and the Second-Year Partnership

The Gérard Basset Foundation describes its work as funding education, training, and mentorship programmes in wine, spirits, and hospitality. The 2026 Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarship sits inside that mission as a second-year partnership with Champagne Laurent-Perrier, following a launch in 2025. The repetition matters. A one-off scholarship can read like a gesture. A second cohort begins to create a line of alumni, a small but trackable group of people whose work can be watched across restaurants, retail, research, and independent businesses.

Gérard Basset's name carries a specific weight in this field. The source identifies him as OBE, MS, MW, MBA, OIV MSc, and ASI World's Best Sommelier 2010, and notes that he mentored and trained a generation of young sommeliers during his lifetime. Those letters can look like a wall of credentials, but their practical meaning is simpler: Basset's career moved between service, study, competition, and teaching. The foundation that bears his name, now led by Nina Basset and Romané Basset, has chosen education as its method, not memorial as its final form.

Nina Basset and Romané Basset are not distant names in this announcement. Nina Basset is listed as co-founding trustee and team leader of the foundation, and Romané Basset as co-founding trustee and head of operations. Christian Holthausen brings the foundation's communications role to the judging table. Preston Mohr, as managing director of the Wine Scholar Guild, connects selection to the study programme the winners will undertake. The layers are visible: foundation, Champagne house, course provider, and working trade.

For Laurent-Perrier, the partnership places its Champagne in an education setting rather than only a sales setting. The tutored tasting will still be a tasting of Champagne Laurent-Perrier, and it should be understood as such. But the scholarship's broader frame asks the winners to study Champagne as a region and category through the Wine Scholar Guild course, then sharpen the commercial language that follows. A house tasting after that kind of study can function as a test of attention. What does the scholar notice after formal work on the region that they would have missed before?

What Alexander-Marsh, Nerantzi, Hansraj, and the Others Will Carry Forward

Wine education spreads through service. A sommelier studies, then a commis hears the language at briefing. A retail specialist studies, then a team member learns how to explain a label without retreating to "dry" or "nice." A buyer studies, then a list changes by one placement, one glass pour, one staff note. The Laurent-Perrier Champagne Scholarship is small in number, twelve winners from 53 applications, but the recipients sit in roles where knowledge travels.

That is especially true for Champagne, a category often treated as shorthand for celebration. Practitioners know the shorthand is not enough. Guests and customers ask for Champagne because they recognise the name, but the professional has to work between desire and detail: house style, food pairing, price, occasion, serving temperature, and the difference between buying a bottle for theatre and buying one for the table. Training does not remove the pleasure. It gives the maker's work a clearer route to the drinker.

The inclusion of negotiation and sales also acknowledges a part of wine work that education sometimes leaves off the page. A scholar may learn the region, but the working day asks for more: how to present value without apology, how to speak to a buyer who has already fixed a budget, how to guide a guest who wants a brand name and no lecture, how to bring colleagues into the conversation. These are not softer skills. They are part of the discipline. If the Champagne Masters course is the cellar of knowledge, the sales masterclass is the pass, where timing and phrasing decide whether that knowledge serves anyone.

There is no need to overstate the award. Twelve scholarships will not redraw the UK wine trade by themselves. But they will give Charlotte Alexander-Marsh, Amelia Burgess, Chris Frayling-Cork, Zaloren Gonzalez Fontes, Shehnaz Hansraj, Daisy Henderson, Serhat Narsap, Joanna Nerantzi, Anna Pavlovna Suzan, Joseph Rosenfeld, Kostas Vaitsidis, and Lauren Wedge a shared period of study in a region that demands precision. Watch what they do with it: the lists they build, the teams they train, the tastings they lead, the way Champagne is explained the next time a guest asks for a bottle with purpose rather than ceremony.