THE KICK TO CHAMPAGNE

A Marketing History of the World’s Most Fabulous Wine

David James Rosenthal

A Senior Thesis submitted to the Department of French and Italian, Princeton University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts.

Princeton University

Princeton, New Jersey 08544

Copyright David Rosenthal, 2007

April 9, 2007

This thesis represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.

David J. Rosenthal
 This thesis is dedicated to my parents—
For their love and support in everything I do.

Cheers!
Love, T.G.O.

1
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...(3)

Précis (French)………….……………………………………………………………….(4)

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...(9)

Chapter One: Drinking the Stars……………………………………………………….(11)

Chapter Two: Bubbling to the Top…………………………………...………………..(26)

Chapter Three: Depression, War, and Wine……………………….…………………..(42)

Chapter Four: Tastemakers and Trendsetters…………………………………………..(52)

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….……..(71)

Figures…………………………………………………………...……………………..(73)

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...……..(78)

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 Acknowledgements
I would like to thank:

Professor Volker Schröder, for guiding not only this thesis but my entire Princeton
career, from start to finish;

The Department of French and Italian, especially RuthAnne Lavis and Florent Masse, for
the wonderful academic and extracurricular opportunities it has provided me during my
time at Princeton;

Dr. Kevin Ruth and Mme. Veronica Eid, for inspiring me to study French at the
University level;

Sophie Piquet of Moët et Chandon for her knowledge and time,

The Princeton University President’s Fund, for generously supporting my research;

Jennie Scholick for her help and support in undertaking this work, and for reading more
drafts of this thesis than anyone else, myself included;

BodyHype Dance Company for introducing me to so many friends and giving me the
opportunity to create such fun and happy spectacles;

Billy J. Liu for his friendship and inspiration to help me find liveliness after Princeton;
Rodney M. Deavault for keeping carrel B-1-M clean;
The residents of 021 Buyers Hall 2003-2004 for four years of friendship, laughter, and
happy memories;

And finally and above all my parents, without whom this thesis, in every sense, would
never have been written. I love you and thank you for everything.

3
 Précis
Le champagne est un produit qui inspire en nous beaucoup d’émotion. L’amour,

la réjouissance, l’exclusivité, ces sensations sont toutes intimement liées à notre

conception du champagne aujourd’hui. Ce vin mousseux qui vient du terroir autour des

villes de Reims et d’Épernay est la boisson préférée du monde des gens riches et célèbres,

où il est devenu synonyme de la sophistication et de la joie de vivre. C’est cette affiliation

entre le vin et les gens du premier rang de la société qui est devenue pour l’industrie

l’outil de marketing le plus avantageux au long des trois siècles de son existence. La

présente thèse essai d’examiner comment cette liaison est née, et comment les maisons de

champagne l’ont utilisée depuis. On constate que la réputation qu’a le champagne

aujourd’hui est due à son entretien soigneux par les maisons de champagne et leur

utilisation de tactiques habiles pour associer le vin à une image de luxe et de noblesse qui

attire des consommateurs de tous les rangs sociaux.

Dès les débuts du champagne au 17ème siècle, le produit a été présenté comme un

« vin noble », lié à l’aristocratie et à la royauté. À la fin du siècle, aux temps de Dom

Pérignon, moine célèbre de l’abbaye d’Hautvillers, les premiers vins de qualité de

Champagne (qui, néanmoins, n’étaient pas mousseux mais rouges et plats) ont été choisis

par le roi Louis XIV comme son vin exclusif. Le vin de champagne est devenu une

boisson vraiment « à la mode », et cette célébrité a contribué à établir la région comme

appellation vinicole de premier rang. Dans les décennies qui ont suivi la mort du roi, une

demande pareille pour ce vin s’st développée dans les cours étrangères. Les aristocraties

étrangères l’ont adopté aussi comme leur vin préféré, créant ainsi pour la région un grand

marché d’exportation. De la même façon, un siècle plus tard l’empereur Napoléon a fait

4
grand bien à son ami Jean-Rémy Moët en associant son nom à sa maison comme son

champagne préféré qu’il a apporté avec lui dans tous les pays qu’il a conquis.

Parallèlement à cet anoblissement du vin de Champagne, les forces économiques

du marché vinicole ont fait naître en Champagne l’industrie du vin blanc mousseux qui

deviendra le produit principal de la région et qu’on nommera le champagne en son

honneur. Pendant les décennies avant la Révolution française, le marché parisien du vin

rouge de Champagne a beaucoup baissé. Les vignerons ont dû concentrer leurs efforts sur

les marchés étrangers, où, vers la fin du siècle, le vin blanc et mousseux avait remplacé le

vin rouge comme boisson le plus à la mode. Pour continuer à survivre, l’industrie

vinicole de la région devait adapter sa production à cette demande. Mais, il y avait une

barrière significative à cette entreprise : le champagne exigeait beaucoup de capital pour

en produire, que les vignerons ne pouvaient pas fournir. Les bouteilles et les lièges

coûtaient cher, et pendant les années supplémentaires qu’il fallait vieillir le vin on ne

pouvait pas gagner de retour sur l’investissement.

Ce n’était pas les vignerons qui ont commencé à produire le champagne en masse

à la fin du 18ème siècle. C’était plutôt les marchands de vin de la région qui sont devenus

les fournisseurs du champagne pour les marchés d’élite des pays étrangers. A cette

époque les marchands avaient et le capital et le savoir faire pour produire le vin

mousseux. Ils ont commencé à acheter le vin des vignerons spéculativement, sans avoir

encore contracté un acheteur, pour le mettre en bouteille, et puis le vendre aux marchés

étrangers. Ils sont devenus, ce faisant, des négociants de champagne qui vont se

transformer à travers les années en grandes maisons de champagne, exemples des plus

grandes sociétés de France.

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 C’est en vendant leurs champagnes au monde que les négociants ont développé

beaucoup d’innovations de marketing qui ont rendu possibles leurs croissances

impressionnantes. Les jeunes sociétés ont utilisé le marketing pour créer une réputation

aristocratique du champagne qui reflétait ses origines dans la royauté européenne mais

restait en même temps accessible aux consommateurs non-aristocratiques. Pendant le

19eme siècle les négociants ont « vendu » cette image à une nouvelle classe de bourgeois

qui aspirait à atteindre un rang social pareil au niveau de richesse qu’ils possédaient. En

utilisant quelques moyens comme l’approbation par des « célébrités » du temps comme le

roi d’Espagne, les sociétés de champagne ont créé une image du champagne comme

produit de luxe qui donne aux consommateurs le sentiment qu’en le consommant, ils

appartiennent à une classe noble et exclusive.

Au 20eme siècle, cette diffusion de la noblesse du champagne aux roturiers est

élargie pour inclure toutes les classes sociales, et non seulement les bourgeois riches.

Avec l’adoption de la première « cuvée de prestige », la marque Dom Pérignon de Moët

et Chandon, par des célébrités populaires comme Marilyn Monroe et le personnage de

James Bond dans les années soixante, l’image de luxe du champagne a été disséminée à

un public plus grand qui a appris à identifier le champagne avec une vie élégante et

somptueuse. Ces nouveaux consommateurs aspiraient, comme les bourgeois avant eux, à

mener une vie pareille à celle des célébrités qu’ils idolâtraient, et ont acheté le

champagne comme moyen pour y arriver.

Récemment, dans des types nouveaux de culture populaire comme le « hip-hop »,

la marque Dom Pérignon a vu ce marché envahi par des rivaux comme la marque Cristal

de la maison Louis Roederer. Moët et Chandon a dû changer sa stratégie de marketing

6
pour regagner le patronage des célébrités clés qui anime le grand marché du luxe des

consommateurs qui les imitent. En le faisant, les techniques de Moët et Chandon restent,

au fond, les mêmes qui ont été utilisées par les maisons de champagne tout au long de

leur histoire : vendre une conception du champagne comme produit de luxe qui anoblit

les gens qui en consomment.

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I drink champagne when I'm happy and when I'm sad.
Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone.
When I have company I consider it obligatory.
I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am.
Otherwise I never touch it - unless I'm thirsty.

-Madame Lilly Bollinger

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 Introduction
Champagne: a “Fabulous” Tradition

Champagne. The word evokes many images: a sparkling beverage of the rich and

famous, a celebratory mainstay of revelers the world over, and a loosely defined

geographic region in the northeast of France. In French, the gender differentiation of

nouns makes usage of the word somewhat less ambiguous: le champagne (masculine,

lowercase) represents the sparkling beverage produced famously in the region of la

Champagne (feminine, uppercase). Yet, for the French, even this distinction has become

blurred. Le champagne is as much a part of the national heritage and property of France

as the very land of la Champagne. According to historian Kolleen Guy, “Within France,

champagne has been seen as an embodiment of the national spirit.”

Champagne the land and champagne the product have become inseparable in

conveying to consumers a sense of tradition and authenticity that gives the region’s wines

their unique appeal, at least in the eyes of the industry groups that lobby governments

both domestic and foreign to protect the name from improper attribution to competing

products. In the words of the promotional website for the Comité Interprofessionnel du

Vin de Champagne (CIVC), “The Champagne appellation has come to stand as a

benchmark for excellence among producers and consumers who look to it for authenticity

and an almost visionary quality.”1

But such was not always the case for the wines of this rural French province. In

fact, as late as the early 17th century, wines from Champagne were sold under the generic

titles of Ile de France or Vins Français, or even under the appellation of Burgundy, from

the neighboring wine region to the south. It would not be until the beginning of the 19th
1
Le Champagne: The Official Website for Champagne wines, “The Champagne Appellation.”

9
century, with the establishment of the first grandes maisons de champagne—the large

firms that dominate champagne production—that le champagne would come to take on

some of the specific characteristics we associate with it today.

And just what are these characteristics? Of course we know champagne is

sparkling and white, and comes in bottles whose corks make a loud “pop!” when

disgorged. But, subconsciously, there are other, more culturally significant meanings we

associate with the wine. Celebration, romance, special occasions, sophistication,

exclusivity: these are some of the terms that come to mind today when we think of

champagne. How these qualities came to be intertwined with champagne was not by

chance, but through a series of careful and targeted marketing campaigns on the part of

champagne firms over the course of several centuries. At their root, our perceptions of

champagne today have come from these efforts. The success of this marketing has been

due primarily to a brilliantly conceived tactic on the part of champagne firms to promote

their product as part of a mythical lifestyle representing an Ancien Regime inspired

conception of aristocratic exclusivity: a beverage endowing anyone who drinks it with a

special feeling of privilege. From its very beginning during the times of the Benedictine

monk Dom Pérignon, the champagne industry, as we shall see, has been acutely aware of

customers’ conceptions of its goods. The trade has invented elaborate myths and

signifiers to imbue its products with cultural significance beyond the simple wine

contained in the bottle. In short, to quote the tagline of the latest marketing campaign for

Moët et Chandon, champagne has exhorted generations of wine consumers around the

world to “Be Fabulous”.2

2
Moët & Chandon.

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 Chapter One
Drinking the Stars:
Dom Pérignon and the Origins of Champagne

The Champagne winemaking industry in the 17th century

In May of 1668, when Dom Pierre Pérignon became cellérier of the abbey of

Hautvillers, the production of wine in the Champagne region of France was a markedly

different industry from the one we know today. Quality winemaking in the province was

still in its very early stages of development, and indeed the appellation itself, vin de

Champagne, only just had come into common usage in France at the end of the previous

century. The first recorded reference to the area as a quality wine-producing region had

appeared only a half century earlier in 1601, when the royal doctor of King Henri IV

wrote that of the wines of Champagne, those from Aÿ seemed to be first in “character and

perfection.”3 Before that time the region’s wines simply had been lumped together with

the many common quality Parisian wines under the moniker Ile de France or vins

français.4 The notion that the region might one day be associated the world over with

luxurious consumption by privileged elites seemed barely conceivable for the monastic

and peasant laborers who tended the vines of the countryside’s small villages and towns.

In particular, there existed none of the grandes maisons de champagne that

dominate the industry today, such as Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin or Moët et Chandon. In

contrast to the region known, in modern times, almost exclusively for its excellent

sparkling white wine, Champagne in the 17th century produced wines that were mostly

still, red, and of mediocre quality intended for consumption in the many taverns and

3
Bonal, Pérignon, 45.
4
Bonal, Or, 18.

11
 5
restaurants of Paris. The methods and products of Champagne differed very little in

most respects at this time from other general wine producing regions of France. The wine

making process rested fully under the direction of individual vignerons (growers), and

indeed it was not until much later, long after Dom Pérignon’s death in 1715, that the first

forbearers of the grands maisons would begin to appear.6

A large proportion of the vignerons operating in Champagne in the 1600’s were,

like the Dom’s abbey, establishments of the church. Although they may have originally

started producing wine solely for use in religious ceremonies, abbeys and churches soon

discovered that selling their products was an effective means of generating income. By

the time of Pérignon the wine trade had become a primary economic activity for most of

Champagne’s religious establishments, and the increased religious viticultural activity

spurred the development of Champagne as a premier winemaking region. The motivation

to produce better wines, which could in turn be sold for higher prices, became thus a

primary concern of many religious establishments. However, even more important

perhaps to the monks of the region’s abbeys and churches than financial profit was the

desire for prestige, as serving an excellent and memorable wine became an influential

way to impress important visitors.7

In their efforts to produce wine that would bring fortune and notoriety to their

establishments, the monks of these abbeys and churches catered to popular tastes of the

time. And, as mentioned before, it was red wine destined for Paris that flowed

overwhelmingly from the presses of Champagne’s vineyards during the 17th century.8 In

5
Brennan, 53, 246.
6
Ibid, 49.
7
Bonal, Pérignon, 44.
8
Brennan, 53.

12
fact, there developed during this period a direct economic rivalry between the reds of

Champagne and those of Burgundy, a region already known as one of the top red wine

producing areas in Europe.9 Often, in an early attempt to use marketing associations to

encourage sales, wines from Champagne would be sold under the guise of the more

popular Burgundies. In the words of a later treatise on winemaking, “much red wine has

been made in the last years in Champagne; these wines are good for [sending to]

Flanders, where they can easily be sold as [wine] from Burgundy.”10 Soon, however,

producers would no longer need to resort to such deception in order to attract customers;

the appellation of Champagne would become sufficient in its own right to communicate

the quality of the wines they sold.

From its limited notoriety thus at the start of the 17th century, the reputation of

Champagne as a top winemaking region rose quickly, and by the middle of the century

the province’s wines had become, in the words of a social critic writing in 1674, “le vin si

fort à la mode que tous les autres ne passent presque, chès les curieux, que pour des

vinasses, et des rebuts, dont on ne veut même pas entendre parler.”11 The Sun King

himself, Louis XIV, was one of the region’s strongest supporters, refusing until late in his

reign to drink wine from any other region.12 It was because of this rise to popularity of

Champagne wines that Dom Pérignon in particular came to be known for his skill and

expertise by representing the new kind of fine winemaking in the region, and the quality

reds his abbey produced earned him a great reputation during his lifetime.13 When

Pérignon arrived at the abbey of Hautvillers as a young monk, he found himself involved

9
Lachiver, 273-275; Brennan, 45.
10
Quoted in Brennan, 45.
11
Bonal, Pérignon, 45-46.
12
Ibid, 46.
13
Ibid, 67-69.

13
in an industry poised at an exciting crossroads. Wine in Champagne was experiencing

surging popularity and growth but was still far from mature in its production and

practices. The opportunity existed for a winemaker like Pérignon of exceptional quality

and talent to provide a spearhead for the industry’s remarkable growth, taking the best

practices of the many successful growers from around the region and refining them into a

set of methods that defined a standard benchmark for quality and would characterize the

province’s “sparkling” reputation.

Dom Pérignon proved to be just this kind of producer. His contributions to

winemaking in Champagne have been celebrated in popular history and myth throughout

the nearly three hundred years following his death. Taking the words of the famous 18th

century botanist l’abbé Rozier, who wrote in 1772 that “c’est par les soins multiples que

les Champenois ont pris de leurs vignes, et la perfection qu’ils ont donnée à leur méthode

de faire le vin, qu’ils sont parvenus à fixer ce dégrée de délicatesse qu’on leur connaît,”

no one better exemplified these efforts than the Benedictine monk from Hautvillers.14 No

producer in Champagne took better care of his vines or perfected a better method for

making his wine than did Dom Pérignon. Given the revolution in winemaking technique

that swept through the industry in the generation following his death, the assumption that

many historians would make seems simple: this gifted religious winemaker from la

Champagne was the first to discover the secret of producing the magical bubbling vin

mousseux that would in turn become known as le champagne.

14
Quoted Ibid, 45.

14
The true origins of “le champagne”

Mais dix siècles plus tard, le moine Pérignon

Inventait le Champagne et lui donnait son nom.
Du couvent d’Hautvillers ce vin fut la richesse
C’est là que Pérignon a passé sa jeunesse.
Le voyez-vous pensif, haletant, l’oeil hagard,
Penché sur un tonneau qu’il couve du regard,
Etudiant du vin les lois et les caprices,
Sources de tant de biens, causes de tant de vices,
Et, fou comme Archimède, en joyeux indiscret,
S’écrier tout-à-coup: “J’ai trouvé le secret!”
“Le secret”? oui, bon Moine, et ce fruit de tes veilles
Est mis par nos gourmets au nombre des merveilles.
J.-L. Gonzalle, Poète Champenois
Le Vin de Champagne, 1860.15

So goes the legend of Dom Pérignon. A blind Benedictine monk at a tiny abbey

on a hill in the Champagne countryside solemnly devotes his life in service not to the

sober and self-denying God of his Order but rather to the revelrous and passionate

Dionysus, ancient god of wine. So talented is he as a winemaker that he is blessed one

day with the divine revelation of the secret to making his wine sparkle like the stars. With

the announcement of his new creation, an entire industry dedicated to facilitating the flow

of good times and good life is born, and the name of his province is forever intertwined

with the mirthful product that blossomed from the fruit of his labor. The world of elite

luxury consumption celebrates their savior, and his memory lives on through history as

an example of magnanimous devotion to quality and joie de vivre.

Unfortunately for fanciful romantics, however, hardly a word of the legend is

true. Champagne was not invented by Dom Pérignon, nor any other individual for that

matter. Although as we shall later see there is great appeal in the sentimentality of the

myth that a single man is responsible for the creation of what Moet et Chandon calls “the
15
Quoted Ibid, 82.

15
best wine in the world”16, the development of sparkling white wine was not a secret

revealed suddenly in a brilliant discovery. It was the result, rather, of an economic

process that evolved slowly over time with the development of new technology and the

reaction of many Champagne brokers and growers to the conditions of a changing

marketplace. Yet, ironically, in spite of the revolutionary effects it would soon have on

the Champagne industry, this change did not begin with Champagne’s winemakers, who

were happily set in their ways and means of production, but rather in the demanding

hands of the consumers who drank it.

The first champagnes which began to appear in Dom Pérignon’s time were not

products of innovative practices invented by any producer of Champagne wines. They

were, instead, accidental consequences of attempts at the preservation and storage of

these producers’ wine by wealthy and elite consumers.17 Wine production in the 17th

century was a decidedly unscientific practice, and the physical processes underlying

fermentation were not well understood. Wines from Champagne, at this time, were being

packaged and sold to customers before fermentation had fully completed.18 When

prosperous consumers of these wines decided to bottle some of their stock to lay down

for aging in the coming years, the fermentation process recommenced and carbon dioxide

offgasses were trapped with the wine in the bottles the customers had sealed.19 The result,

quite serendipitously, was a sparkling wine that consumers enjoyed immensely when they

opened their wines some years later to find them infused with thousands of tasty and tiny

carbon dioxide bubbles.

16
Moët et Chandon, Dom Pérignon.
17
Brennan, 248.
18
Bonal, Pérignon, 142.
19
Brennan, 248.

16
 The science of how this occurred was simple; an elementary description of the

fermentation process holds the secret. When wine is made the sugar content of the

pressed grape juice ferments to make the wine alcoholic. Fermentation is a general

process defined in its most simple form as the conversion of carbohydrates into alcohol in

the presence of yeast. It has been used in foodmaking for thousands of years for a variety

of purposes: to leaven bread, preserve vegetables (such as pickling cucumbers), and of

course to produce alcoholic drinks of all forms such as beer and wine. Grapes are

naturally an ideal fruit for producing wine because the sugar content is balanced perfectly

with naturally occurring yeast on the fruit’s skin to allow for complete fermentation

without the introduction of any foreign substances.20 When the sugar in grape juice

undergoes this fermentation, two products are formed: the alcohol ethanol and carbon

dioxide gas. Because of the relatively cold climate in Champagne, this fermentation

process often takes longer than it may in other major winemaking regions. With the quick

arrival of the cold winter after harvesting and pressing in the fall, the temperature of wine

sitting in subterranean vats can drop too low for all of the sugar to completely ferment, a

phenomenon known today as “stuck fermentation”.

The nature of this process was unknown in the days of Dom Pérignon, and as a

result much wine that was sold in the early spring often had not fully finished

fermenting.21 As the Champagne wines were usually barreled and sold in bulk to taverns

and wine merchants who consumed them quickly, this had little effect on the product:

either the wine was drunk not fully fermented, or the process continued in the non-air-

tight barrel where the untrapped carbon dioxide byproduct could escape rather than

20
Zraly, 10-11.
21
Bonal, Pérignon, 146.

17
bubble in the wine. As the Champagne wines grew in prestige and renown throughout the

18th century, however, individual elites increasingly demanded them for consumption in

relatively small quantities. Wine of course could not be preserved for long in barrels

outside of controlled conditions, and thus it was not uncommon for these wealthy

customers to buy a large barrel of wine from Champagne and quickly transfer its contents

into bottles for better storage and preservation.22 When they returned to their wine

months or years later they were often surprised to find it had become foamy, due of

course to trapped carbon dioxide produced by the resumption of fermentation.

In a fitting presage of the future popularity of champagne exports to many

English-speaking countries, it was likely the British who first noticed the foaming effect

of bottling their Champagne wines. Receiving their wine orders after longer and

potentially more degrading transportation delays than their French counterparts, English

elites were understandably more concerned with bottling and preserving their wine

investments than were domestic consumers. Effective air-tight bottles and corks made for

storing wine were first developed in England during the latter half of the 17th century, and

references to foamy wine from Champagne began appearing around that time in English

literature, predating by ten or twenty years any references found in French.23 In an

English play written by George Etherege in 1676, The Man of Mode, wine from

Champagne is referred to as “sparkling Champaign”.24 Of course this “champaign” would

have been made sparkling by the wealthy consumers who drank it, not by the producers

who supplied them. Champagne brokers from the region likely heard about this sparkling

22
Brennan, 248-249.
23
Ibid, 249.
24
Lachiver, 280.

18
phenomenon from their overseas clients and began to experiment with encouraging at it

at home, both among producers and consumers.25

However, despite the novelty of the new vin mousseux from Champagne, the

product did not immediately become an economic success for the industry. As late as

1845, good white still wines from Champagne commanded a price premium over their

bubbly siblings.26 The reason, simply, was that wines manufactured to sparkle before the

19th century paled in quality next to the equivalent still products. Their market appeal lay

solely in the fact that they were foamy, and any consumer at all discerning about the

quality of the underlying wine was quick to turn up his nose at the sparkling “vin de

dernière qualité”.27 As Emile Manceau writes about champagne in the 18th century, “Dire

que le vin mousseux eut beaucoup de succès à cette époque serait exagéré […]. De

précieux documents témoignent du dédain avec lequel les connaisseurs accueillaient cette

detestable piquette.”28 The process of creating champagne was at this time of course

centered on bottling wines before the fermentation process had completed; thus grapes

intended for sparkling wines were picked before they were ripe and the wine bottled very

early, hardly a recipe for world class vintages. Historian François Bonal writes that if the

great monk had seen the methods of production of most Champagne sparkling wines at

the end of the 18th century, “Dom Pérignon devait se retourner dans sa tombe!”29

This crude process used by the early champagne consumer-producers to produce

sparkling wine contrasts greatly with the tightly regulated and controlled procedure used

to make champagne today. The “méthode champenoise”, as it is called, is the product of

25
Bonal, Pérignon, 150-151.
26
Ibid, 146-147.
27
Ibid, 158, 161.
28
Quoted Ibid, 161.
29
Ibid, 158.

19
many years of scientific research and an evolution of winemaking practices that did not

begin to appear in Champagne until the 19th century and which were not fully

standardized until much later.30 This process is regulated not just by the maisons de

champagne themselves but by law of the French government under an Appellation

d’Origine Contrôlée. Today in Champagne, wine fermentation is first fully completed

(the primary fermentation) before the product is bottled and additional yeast and sugar

are introduced to create a smaller secondary fermentation that will produce the

characteristic bubbles.

In search of the “real” Dom Pérignon

Almost certainly, then, Dom Pérignon did not invent champagne. Although the

first sparkling wines from Champagne did begin to appear in his lifetime, there is no

existing record that indicates he had any involvement in their production. The first

written attributions of the discovery of champagne to the Dom did not occur until 1820,

more than a century after his death. It is impossible to think that a figure who was well

known and written about even in his own time would have received credit so late for such

an important invention.31 Even Raoul Chandon de Briailles, head of the firm of Moët et

Chandon at the turn of the 20th century, would admit in 1908 the unliklihood of

Pérignon’s invention when he wrote in the Bulletin du Laboratoire de la Maison Moët et

Chandon, “L’histoire du moine auquel le hasard a fait découvrir le vin mousseux, ainsi

30
Ibid, 154.
31
Ibid, 87-89.

20
que la prédilection de certains rois pour le vin d’Ay sont connues, mais à ces légendes se

bornent les renseignements fournis.”32

If Dom Pérignon did not, then, invent champagne, what did he do and why do we

remember him? When Pérignon came to Hautvillers in 1668 the abbey was already

known for producing good wines.33 However by the end of his lifetime, Pérignon’s expert

winemaking had transformed the reputation of the abbey’s wine to one of exceptional

quality that was renowned, in the words of his student and successor at the abbey, frère

Pierre, “from one pole to the other.”34 The famous monk’s wine fetched a considerable

premium on the market relative to other Champagne wines: mediocre wine from the

region generally sold at the time for 300 livres per queue (a queue equaled roughly 400

liters) and the best products garnered between 400 and 550 livres—Dom Pérignon’s

wines regularly sold for 800 to 1000 livres.35 Although he most assuredly worked only

with still wines, Dom Pérignon was an excellent winemaker who practiced his craft with

great talent and devotion, and relative to his peers, stood for most of his lifetime at the

very top of his field.

How Pérignon achieved this reputation is, like the legend of his discovery of

champagne, another subject of popular misconception. Stories exist espousing such

diverse claims as that he was the first to use cellars for aging wine (he was not), and that

he invented the “champagne flute” for wine consumption (he most certainly did not).36

Aside from these wilder conjectures, however, the development of a range of important

winemaking techniques has been linked to the Dom, but there is often little primary-

32
Quoted Ibid, 87.
33
Ibid, 44.
34
Ibid, 50.
35
Ibid, 69-70.
36
Ibid, 126-128.

21
source documentary evidence to prove his responsibility for these innovations. The firm

of Moët et Chandon in particular, though it has abandoned the pretense that Pérignon

discovered champagne, asserts today that he was responsible for three major

advancements in the development of oenology in Champagne: the technique of

assemblage, or mixing wines of different grape varietals and vineyard origins to make a

blended wine, the making of white wine from red grapes (a process called blanc de noir),

and the use of proper bottles and corks to store the finished product.37 Each of these

claims, as we shall see, lacks any real historical grounding and proves under careful

analysis to be likely untrue.

Most easily refutable is the claim that Dom Pérignon was the first to use effective

bottling techniques. As we have seen, the dominant practice of winemakers in Dom

Pérignon’s time was to store and sell wine in barrels, and the celebrated monk was no

exception. Surviving sales and inventory records from the abbey indicate that in most

years very little if any of Dom Pérignon’s wine was bottled, with only a small portion of

bottles (about 1% of his total wine production) being sold occasionally to local merchants

to be distributed “over the counter”.38 As he was not producing sparkling wines and

bottling only in small quantities, Pérignon would have had no motivation to try to

improve upon existing bottle technology, and accordingly nowhere is such an innovation

on his part mentioned in any writings from his time. It was not until well into the 1800’s

that this unsubstantiated claim began to appear in association with the assertion that

Pérignon was responsible for inventing le champagne.39

37
Piquet.
38
Brennan, 251.
39
Bonal, Pérignon, 132-133.

22
 The assertion that Pérignon was the originator of the method of making white

wine from red grapes, also known as blanc de noir or vin gris (“grey wine”), is less

clearly inaccurate. Champagne’s white wines (vins blancs) were not known to be very

good during the 17th and 18th centuries. They were widely considered weak and overly

yellow, and tended to go bad very quickly.40 Consequently, as we have seen, red wine

comprised the primary output of the region’s winemaking industries and was the

principle product of Dom Pérignon and the abbey of Hautvillers.41 In the 1660’s,

however, right around the time when Dom Pérignon took over duties as the abbey’s

cellérier, there was a small surge in production and popularity of vin gris from the region,

which seemed to conserve the excellent qualities of the grapes expressed in the

province’s reds without taking on their dark color. From all contemporary accounts this

practice was a recent development in Champagne, and there is primary evidence from

frère Pierre and others documenting Pérignon’s utilization of the blanc de noir techniques

in making a small amount of vin gris in addition to his primary production of red wine.42

Nowhere, however, is there any evidence that the blanc de noir process was invented by

the Dom; certainly he used it, but the likelihood that he would have invented such an

important process and not received written credit is small. As with the claim of his

invention of effective bottling techniques, the first instances of written attribution of this

process to Pérignon did not appear until the late 19th century, and again without primary

source citations to support them.43

40
Ibid, 55.
41
Ibid, 67-68.
42
Ibid, 55-59, 128.
43
Ibid, 127.

23
 Finally, the claim that Dom Pérignon invented the technique of assemblage,

mixing several different wines together to create a blended final product, comes closest to

touching on the truth of the famous monk’s real contributions to the winemaking industry

in Champagne. Dom Pérignon did, we know from primary documentation, taste and mix

grapes from different vines before pressing to ensure that only the highest quality fruit

available would go into his wines. He chose not only from the vines of the vineyards of

Hautvillers but also from among the many lots of grapes given to the abbey in tithes from

producers around the region.44 This practice required great skill and patience, and in

many ways prefigured the difficult job of oenologists at major champagne houses today

who must cull together grapes and wine from many different vineyards, vintages, and

varietals to produce year after year a house label that should always taste the same. While

there is no substantial evidence to support that he was actually the first to do so, his

incredible skill in this practice brought much renown both to the abbey and to the region.

A younger member of the Order, Dom François, would write in praise of Pérignon later

in the 18th century after his death, “Cet homme unique a conservé, jusque dans une

vieillesse décrépite, une délicatesse de goût si singulière, qu’il discernoit, sans s’y

méprendre, en goûtant un raisin, le canton qui l’avait produit.”45

Whether Pérignon practiced an assemblage of finished wines in addition to one of

grapes is debatable. We have no verifiable record to indicate that he did, but according to

François Bonal it is not a stretch to think he would have applied his excellent taste to

post-pressing production—an assemblage de vins is certainly within the realm of

44
Ibid, 59-60.
45
Quoted Ibid, 60.

24
possibility.46 In either case, his skills in discerning the quality of tastes and foreseeing

their impact on the final assembled product were exceptional and far above any rival

winemaker of his time. In the words of the Nouveau Dictionnaire Historique of 1779,

“Dom Pérignon rendit de grandes services à la Province de Champagne en lui apprenant

comment il falloit combiner les différentes espèces de raisins, pour donner à son vin cette

délicatesse & ce montant qui l’ont si fort accrédité.47

46
Ibid, 62.
47
Quoted Ibid, 64-65.

25
 Chapter Two
Bubbling to the Top:
The Economic History of Champagne in the 18th and 19th Centuries

The négociant revolution

In January of 1730, fifteen years after the death of the great Dom Pérignon, a

cloth merchant from Reims by the name of Nicolas Ruinart recorded in his account book

the sale of a single barrel of wine. Over the next few years, he would increase his trade in

this side-business to a few hundred barrels per year, and create for himself a tidy profit,

on the order of half as much as he was earning through his main activity in the cloth

trade. He acted both as a broker—arranging deals between buyers and winemakers—and

a merchant—buying wine directly and reselling it speculatively on his own account. Most

of his wine came from local producers near the city, and would be sold to clients in other

medium-sized cities, such as Tournay, Lille, and Mons in Belgium. His business in all

these respects was not out of the ordinary, and probably typical of most smaller

participants in the Champagne wine trade at the time.48 However, by the end of the

century, Ruinart’s humble side-business would grow into a new type of organization

entirely unlike any in the Champagne wine trade that came before it. It would become a

large-scale operation, serving customers a new type of wine in new markets around the

world. The fateful sale of 1730 would prove to be the beginning of a revolution that

would change the wine industry in Champagne: the establishment of the first grandes

maisons de champagne.

Since the widely acknowledged ascendance of its wines’ quality in the beginning

of the 17th century, demand for wine from Champagne had been divided into two distinct
48
Brennan, 49-50.

26
markets. A high-volume mass market of merchants and taverns centered in Paris, where

Champagne wines were in favor, consumed most of the region’s production and

represented a big business for any broker who could organize sales with moderate

success. The wine that the region sold to the Parisian market was red and barreled in

bulk; it would be consumed quickly and required little specialized attention on the part of

the winemakers. Specific quality or ability to keep beyond a year were not important

characteristics, and the trade was thus efficient and attractive. As long as demand

remained high, growers and brokers alike profited handsomely on their supply.49

The export market, on the other hand, presented an entirely different economic

situation. Wine sent abroad was mostly a low-volume and high-margin undertaking in

which elite consumers demanded quality wine that would keep, not only through the

extended transportation process, but for years afterward in their cellars. These customers

were much more discerning in their taste and preferred wines of many different types, not

just the ordinary reds consumed by the Paris masses.50 While the large profit margins of

this market held the allure of high revenue for wine producers, the capital investment

required both to produce the kinds of products that would sell, and to cover the increased

transportation costs, made participation in this trade a much less attractive venture for

many brokers and growers.51

Throughout the course of the 18th century, however, demand in the Parisian

market would undergo a gradual but steady decline that caused the balance of these

markets to shift. The Champagne wine industry evolved substantially as it adjusted to the

pressures of changing consumer demands and realigned its sales and production practices

49
Ibid, 177-188.
50
Ibid, 240-241.
51
Ibid, 255.

27
to cater to what was replacing the Paris trade as its new principal operation: the

exportation of luxury wines. And it happened that at the moment, the luxury wine most

popular among elite customers both at home and abroad was the new vin mousseux.52

These changes in consumer tastes would be met with a swift reaction in the

commercial distribution of the Champagne wine industry. When Ruinart began his

business as a wine trader in the 1730’s, the industry was just beginning to experience this

demand shift from quantity to quality, and the distribution business was still a diverse

marketplace inhabited by many different agents. The French government oversaw the

wine trade in the region and sold the rights to operate as a broker in different grades.

Licenses were granted to “famous brokers, to the inferiors of the first, and to those who

have little or no practice.”53 These gradations translated, roughly, into two major sectors.

At the top of the trade, most of the shipments to the Parisian market as well as exports of

the region’s finest wines were handled by a few large, “famous” brokers, independent

businesses who took orders for wine from vendors and matched them with local

producers. Beneath them stood a range of operations “inferior” and of “little or no

practice” who served the local population as well as shipping and exporting products of

more common quality. These firms operated under a variety of different business models

for achieving profit, from pure brokerage activities to entrepreneurial mixtures of

brokering and merchandising like the Ruinart operation.54

This balance was not to last long, however. By the end of the century, the diverse

distribution business would be consolidated into a single industry standard. The economic

effects of the market’s shifting demand reverberated through the industry, and matching

52
Ibid, 245-246.
53
Ibid, 48.
54
Ibid, 46-50.

28
up consumers and producers became increasingly difficult for brokers as production costs

increased while the quantity demanded per client declined. Producers who had been used

to selling large quantities of relatively cheap wine to a few clients were ill equipped to fill

small orders of expensive wine to many clients. Large brokers thus started to shift their

business model away from simply acting as agents for the region’s producers, and

followed the lead of smaller operations such as that of Ruinart in buying and selling

speculatively as négociants instead.55 The benefits were appreciated all around: producers

could maintain their large-scale operations with the continued security that their products

would be purchased in bulk, brokerage firms could enjoy greater freedom in leveraging

and increasing their wide network of selling contacts to distribute the luxury wines, and

consumers could order their products from a central source without the inconvenience of

researching and contacting a multitude of mysterious producers located far away and

unequipped to deal with their small requests. What had once been an industry dominated

by agent-based brokerage firms had transitioned, by the close of the 18th century, to a

speculative distribution network of négociants.

Through the combination of these factors, the economic climate at the dawn of the

19th century became ripe for the birth of the modern champagne industry. As tastes in the

luxury market shifted to prefer sparkling wine, growers and négociants moved to supply

it.56 The process, however, was not as easy or as straightforward as simply modifying

pre-existing production techniques. Creating champagne was a much more capital

intensive undertaking than producing the still wine that traditionally had been sold in

barrels: thousands of bottles were now needed to capture the wine’s effervescence along

55
Ibid, 240-241.
56
Ibid, 245.

29
with an equal number of corks to stop them, not to mention the increased labor costs of

bottling, handling, and shipping these many new vessels.57 Not only did bottling wine

augment costs significantly, it also entailed running the risk of losing significant portions

of the investment to bottle breakage during the continued fermentation. La casse, as it

was known, was a serious problem in the 18th century which often caused anywhere from

a quarter to half of the wine bottled to be lost.58

Many growers were thus unable or unwilling to take on the financial risk required

to create champagne. Distributors, however, were in a markedly different financial

position. They possessed the capital required to finance champagne production, and,

thanks to their transition to speculatively buying and selling as négociants, they now had

access not only to great numbers of potential consumers who wished to buy it, but also to

vast stores of still wine contracted from growers with which to produce it. By adding

themselves as an intermediary in the production process, négociants could continue to

buy still wine from growers and sell champagne to consumers. In the words of historian

Thomas Brennan, “It required the commercial skill and financial resources of large

brokers to turn bottled champagne into a profitable business.”59 It would be this new

breed of distributor, acting not just in the sale of wine but involving itself in the very

production process, which would become the precursor of the grandes maisons de

champagne we know today.

Ruinart provided a leading example of this transformation. By the middle of the

18th century, bottling wine to turn it into champagne was beginning to become a major

activity of the region’s négociants, and in 1748 bottled wine represented a full third of the

57
Ibid, 247-250.
58
Ibid, 252.
59
Ibid, 255.

30
value of all Champagne exports.60 Ruinart made a handsome profit at this time selling

roughly thirty thousand bottles of wine per year to cities in Germany, England, the

Netherlands, and Italy. More importantly, however, records show that the Ruinart firm

purchased the majority of the wine they sold as still wine, contained in barrels, from

growers in the region’s villages, then bottling it themselves for sale as sparkling

champagne. Other firms soon took notice and began to establish similar operations. In

1764 Ruinart wrote to his bottle supplier asking for an increase in his order for the

coming year, only to be rebuffed with a reply that other merchants were making demands

as well and that he should request “only what [he would] need.”61 By the end of the

century, the Ruinart business model had become a standard for firms to follow. As

Brennan writes,

[Brokers] now intervened decisively in the production of wine, at its most

expensive and risky stage, and went looking for customers, creating a market for
their expensive product. Like merchants in other fields, they were moving from
the sphere of circulation into the sphere of production and transforming it with
their capital and enterprise.62

The wine industry in Champagne had been transformed into something fundamentally

different from what had existed at the beginning of the previous century in the heyday of

Dom Pérignon, and at its heart was the product which would come to be known as a

synonymously around the world with the region itself, le champagne.

Selling the Stars: champagne marketing in the 19th century

In 1837, Champagne négociants were the beneficiaries of a great stroke of luck,

when the pharmicien François published his paper entitled Traité sur le travail des vins

60
Ibid, 257-258.
61
Ibid, 266-267.
62
Ibid, 271.

31
blancs mousseux, which described the role and proper use of sugar in alcoholic

fermentation. In the work, he outlined a method by which adding a prescribed amount of

sugar to bottled wine would prompt fermentation to recommence and create

effervescence. This method of using a true second fermentation, as opposed to a

continued first, was adopted quickly by the industry, and as a result losses experienced

due to la casse were greatly reduced.63 Champagne production became possible on a

larger and more standardized scale, and delighted négociants looked to expand their

operations accordingly.

In the wake of François’ discoveries, the establishment of the large and

prosperous champagne firms of the industry we know today became possible. Although,

as we have seen, a market for sparkling wine already existed prior to this time, with the

larger and better supply enabled by François’ enhanced production methods, the maisons

de champagne took a new, more proactive approach to selling their products, stimulating

demand through the use of innovative marketing tactics. The opportunity for such large-

scale growth was created by the region’s wine firms seizing upon their new capabilities

and exploiting them with the utmost vigor.

As the industrial revolution of the 19th century led to the development of a new

mass market for goods, the Champagne négociants were at the leading edge of product

marketing in the emergence of the modern consumer economy. These firms developed

and utilized a variety of marketing techniques to create demand for their products among

the rising population with disposable income, appealing to customers through advertising,

packaging, journalism, and public relations campaigns. Many marketing devices

originally employed by these firms have since become commonplace: négociants

63
Bonal, Or, 95-98.

32
competed, for example, to become the official suppliers to royal courts, an achievement

which they would then tout on their products’ labels in an early form of celebrity

endorsement. Labels appeared during this time announcing such various monarchical

seals of approval as the king of Spain and the Khedive of Egypt.64 Just like today, scoring

a big celebrity advertisement gave a firm’s product increased competitive advantage

through advertising appeal and development of a greater sense of product value in the

minds of consumers. The use of such tactics enabled négociants to transition their

businesses over the century from niche producers of a luxury product for small elite

markets to some of the most powerful producers of consumer goods the world over.

Product labels played a key role in the development of champagne marketing in

the 19th century. Négociants did not stop at including celebrity endorsements on their

labels to push their consumers to buy more of their product: champagne packaging in

these years became a hotbed of marketing invention. Over the course of the century, the

label evolved from little more than a simple identification of the firm’s family name to

elaborate and ornately decorated works of art designed to project to potential customers

an image of quality and social enjoyment.65 Words such as “pure”, “special”, and “love”

appeared frequently on champagne bottles as part of an effort to associate the sparkling

beverage with a sense of membership in a privileged class community in the minds of

consumers.66 Firms created special labels designed to mark important life events; “fiancé

champagne”, “wedding champagne”, and “baby champagne” products all encouraged

consumers to celebrate their most significant moments with a bottle of bubbly.67 The

64
Guy, 18-19.
65
Ibid, 16, 30.
66
Ibid, 30.
67
Ibid, 32.

33
appeal of the label, négociants hoped, would help customers identify the experience of

consuming champagne with the attractive images of social quality the bottle depicted.

In addition to label design, champagne producers also employed targeted

advertising through press coverage and public relations spectacles to market their wines

to the public at large. The Mercier firm, for example, in celebration of the Exposition

Universelle of 1889, announced its intention to build the largest barrel in the world to

transport its wine to the exhibition. The creation of this massive and ornately decorated

object, and its subsequent journey to Paris driven by twenty-four white oxen and eighteen

horses caused such a stir that it received daily coverage in the worldwide press for three

weeks straight.68 Participation in such spectacles afforded négociants an easy chance to

associate their products with a new conception that was becoming a crucial aspect of

social life in the second half of the 19th century: fascination with the modern idea of

progress.

Champagne firms during this time made a concentrated effort to link their wines

with the many achievements of man in the modern world. The use of champagne to

“christen” the great inventions of technology and transportation became commonplace;

oceanliners launched with the breaking of a bottle of champagne on their bow, and, as

firms were well aware, the use of a particular brand was sure to be reported in the press.

In 1902, for example, Moët et Chandon scored a significant victory for their firm when a

bottle of their wine was chosen to christen the German emperor’s new yacht in place of a

competing sparkling wine from Germany. The international papers followed the story for

68
Ibid, 37.

34
weeks, detailing the ritual and noting the symbolic importance of champagne’s role in

conducting it.69

Likewise, at the turn of the century, with man’s invention of the airplane and the

advent of flight, champagne firms rushed to push their product into the air alongside the

great celebrities of aviation. Houses sponsored aviation festivals and adapted the practice

of christening new oceanliners to aircraft as well.70 In 1905, less than two years after the

Wright brothers’ first flight, the cover of the magazine La Vie Parisienne showed a

couple toasting champagne on the wings of an airplane. The subscript read, “It is you

Clicquot, Mumm, Roederer, Moet, and Pommery who triumph in the air! All the French

coqs sing in the fields: the best motor is the wine of champagne.”71 Just as champagne

négociants encouraged their wine to become a symbol of celebration for special moments

in individuals’ lives, they hoped too that consumption of champagne would come to be

linked with a collective celebration of the triumph of progress and the ingenious

achievements of man in the modern era.

Champagne négociants used progressive marketing not only to emphasize the

technological associations of champagne, but the political as well. Firms emphasized

champagne as fitting into the latest political development of the time—the new concept

of nationalism. In 1876, on the heels of the declaration of the constitution of France’s

Third Republic, one company released a special “Champagne de la République

Francaise” in a bottle complete with Lady Liberty and the tricolor flag adorning the

label.72 Négociants were quick to attempt to capitalize on a growing sense of

69
Ibid, 32-33.
70
Ibid, 33.
71
Ibid, 33.
72
Ibid, fig. 9.

35
identification with “la patrie”, both at home in France and abroad in foreign markets.

Products destined for the United States bore tributes to Columbus’s discovery of

America, and firms like Bouché Fils et Co. created labels during the early days of the first

World War depicting a soldier marching to battle carrying the interchangeable flags of

the country in which the wine was sold. Other producers looked to exploit the imperial

expansions of 19th century Europe with labels touting “Champagne of India”, and “Grand
73
Vin Imperial”. Interestingly, such apparent conflicts of national loyalty were either

tolerated or ignored by consumers around the globe. The sparkling wine became such an

iconic symbol worldwide of spirit and quality that négociants had no trouble adapting its

image to whichever set of national propaganda and culture existed in the various

countries where their champagnes were sold.74

The growing sales of champagne to various countries had a great impact on the

négociants’ marketing strategies. The growth of champagne’s export market, as discussed

in the previous section, was one of the most important factors contributing to the

establishment of négociants as dominant players in the region’s wine industry. As these

firms furthered their success, courting foreign clients remained a critical aspect of their

marketing strategy. Starting in the early 19th century, négociants began to employ sales

agents in England, America, and eastern European countries such as Prussia, Austria, and

Russia.75 The Clicquot firm, for example, won a great victory in the latter by instituting

an aggressive marketing push to the victorious Russian army in the immediate aftermath

of France’s defeat in the Napoleonic wars. The firm sold so much wine to the country

that the brand name in Russia became a synonym for sparkling wine. In the words of

73
Ibid, 34, Bonal, Or,173.
74
Guy, 34.
75
Brennan, 269-270.

36
Kolleen Guy, “French champagne triumphed where Napoleon’s Grande Armée had

failed.”76 By the middle of the century, such efforts were translated into millions of

bottles of sale for the industry. In 1844 the export market for champagne accounted for

twice the volume of domestic sales; bottles sold topped 4.4 million in foreign countries

compared to 2.2 million at home.77

Another of the most significant factors that helped champagne négociants succeed

in marketing to such a wide and varied consumer base was several of the leading firms’

organization in 1882 of the Syndicat du commerce des vins de Champagne. This

collective became one of the most successful examples of the early formation of an

industry interest group, and provided a united front for the large houses to further their

shared goals of market expansion and product protection. The Syndicat proved to be an

effective lobbying body in protecting the value of the champagne appellation, which,

thanks to the efforts of the négociants, had become internationally synonymous with

sparkling wine. The organization pursued competitors from other regions who attempted

to use the region’s name to describe their wines, encouraging the French government to

register the term as property of the French nation and prosecute any misuse not only

domestically but abroad as well.78 In an effort to persuade consumers to avoid these

knockoff products, the Syndicat published pamphlets describing the importance of the

region’s “tradition” and the authenticity of true vin de Champagne.79 By serving as a

protective agency to safeguard the brand position champagne négociants had created for

their products in the international marketplace, the Syndicat ensured that barriers to

76
Guy, 14-15.
77
Ibid, 15.
78
Ibid, 25-27.
79
Ibid, 25.

37
outside competition remained high and that firms from the region could continue to profit

from the success of their marketing efforts.

The main goal of these various tactics on the part of the négociants was to create

in the minds of consumers a cohesive brand image for their products as luxury items of

the finest quality. Each tactic represented a small step in a carefully choreographed

campaign to influence consumer perceptions. As négociants grew in size and influence,

these newly-consolidated firms discovered that selling customers an image, not just a

beverage, could help them reach a much wider audience and sell more products for more

money.

Interestingly, what was perhaps one of the most important actions in creating this

image was the creation of mythic past histories of the négociant families. In an effort to

appeal to a new class of bourgeois consumers who aspired to achieve social prominence

on par with the nobility of the previous age, champagne firms attempted to associate

themselves by any means available to the established aristocratic tradition of France.

Many négociants prominently advertised whatever noble titles had been held in their

family before the Revolution or, barring such familial ties as was often the case, rushed to

marry their offspring to children of aristocratic heritage. The only daughter of the

purveyors of the Clicquot firm, for example, was married to the comte de Chevigné to

provide an infusion of nobility into the well known brand.80 Such aristocratic connections

added a sense of honor and legitimacy to the business’s products. As historian Kolleen

Guy explains, “the reputable ‘noble’ families whose names appeared as brands on the

bottle were linked to ‘honorable’ consumption and tradition, which could bridge the gap

80
Ibid, 17-18.

38
between the middle-class ethos of frugality, self-denial, and civic responsibility and the

new consumer culture of the late nineteenth century.”81

The self-promotion of champagne families did not stop at simply adapting noble

titles. Charles Tovey, a British writer of the 19th century, published a book on the

region’s wine trade in 1870 in which he observed that négociant families were regarded

by the public as “a superior race, heroes, or something more, celebrated in song and

immortalized in history.”82 Such high social regard provided a great boon to négociants

looking to further their business objectives. Irénée Ruinart, the third-generation head of

the original champagne firm, wrote to his sons in 1809 that:

Perhaps no other commerce demands so much activity as that of Champagne’s

wines, these great luxury wines suit the great, those who like and invest some
thought to their manner of living, and so are sought by […] those who procure
objects of fantasy to the rich and well off public…. The first thing to do when you
arrive in a commercial city is to find out who holds the finest table, sees the most
people, is obliged to keep a grand house, such as ministers, civil and military high
officials, and then use your industry to discover their relations with each other, in
order to make their acquaintances.83

As the century progressed and members of the négociant families no longer solicited

clients directly, the reputation of the name on the champagne bottle became even more

important as an indication of the quality of the product.84

What drove the success of champagne marketing during this time is that the firms

were able to capture in their campaigns both the noble, aristocratic appeal of an Ancien

Regime tradition, and the modern bourgeois excitement of the concept of progress. The

very same firms who were touting on their labels the latest model of aircraft were

integrating the coats of arms of aristocrats in their logos. The greatest achievement of

81
Ibid, 18.
82
Quoted Ibid, 17.
83
Quoted in Brennan, 268.
84
Guy, 16.

39
champagne as a product was that it was desired by members of all social classes. The

product served as a bridge between old world privilege and new world luxury; a flute of

champagne was just as appropriate in the hand of Louis XV’s mistress Madame de

Pompadour—who famously proclaimed it the only wine which left a woman more

beautiful after having consumed it—as in a celebration of the declaration of the Third

Republic.85

Over the course of the 19th century, the champagne market evolved to include

both of these classes: a “discrete group of privileged clients” and a “burgeoning mass of

middle-class customers”.86 Négociants were able to adapt exactly what had made their

product appealing to aristocrats during the Ancien Regime to a new generation of

nouveaux riches bourgeois who hoped to transcend “mundane, day-to-day social

realities” and become the new elite of the modern society. Drinking champagne provided

for the public a sense of exclusive luxury—that one was communing with the highest-

class gens de qualité.87 Writes Kolleen Guy, “Champagne was meant to project a class

image. This class image, however, did not necessarily reflect the consumer’s

socioeconomic status with any fidelity.”88 Champagne houses marketed their wine

carefully so as to be accessible to a broad spectrum of 19th century consumers, yet

projected at the same time an image of select social exclusivity.

By the end of the century, the négociants of Champagne had transformed their

businesses from relatively large-scale beverage production and exportation agencies to

something fundamentally different—the massive lifestyle and luxury goods producers

85
Ibid, 14.
86
Ibid, 12.
87
Ibid, 19.
88
Ibid, 31.

40
known as les grandes maisons de champagne. These houses strove to associate their

products with attractive symbols of progress and exclusivity that appealed to a broad

range of socioeconomic classes around the world. As the firms moved into the 20th

century, these marketing associations would evolve and become increasingly important

as champagne would face and overcome hard times to solidify its position as one of the

leading luxury industries of the world.

41
 Chapter Three
Depression, War, and Wine:
Dom Pérignon Takes the Spotlight

The Dom Pérignon renaissance: rebirth of a legend

As the 19th century drew to a close, one of the particularly successful marketing

tactics the champagne industry employed was the resurrection of the myth of Dom

Pérignon as the inventor of champagne. The first documented claim of the famous

monk’s responsibility for discovering the sparkling wine’s secrets is attributed to a Dom

Grossard, who as a young monk at Hautvillers had been forced out of the abbey along

with the rest of the Benedictine Order during the French Revolution. In an effort, perhaps

born out of spite, to glorify the former occupants of the monastery, Grossard wrote to the

deputy mayor of nearby Aÿ in 1821 that “c’est le fameux Dom Pérignon […] qui a trouvé

le secret de faire le vin blanc mousseux.”89 Grossard’s testimony seems to have been

written without merit or documentary evidence, and his assertion was not widely

recognized until the champagne industry decided in the late 1880’s that the story could be

re-appropriated to provide marketing value. As the négociants prepared for the grand

Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, they sought a captivating story of the

development of their product and its ties to the region to feed to visitors. Dom Grossard’s

angry letter of a half century earlier provided the perfect tale.

The dissemination of the Dom Pérignon myth served a dual purpose for

champagne. It presented a pastoral vision of history that meshed seamlessly with the

romantic image of the wine that négociants hoped to sell to the world, as well as inspired

a sense of the uniqueness and authenticity of champagne in contrast to the many

89
Quoted in Bonal, Pérignon, 80.

42
competing sparkling wines that had begun appearing from other regions. With these goals

in mind, the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne produced an illustrated

pamphlet for the Exposition depicting the myth and declaring Dom Pérignon to be the

“father” of sparkling wine.90 The story became a grand success, and, by the dawn of the

20th century, attribution of the invention of champagne to the Dom was universally

recognized as fact.91 In 1914, on the supposed bicentennial of Dom Pérignon’s

“discovery” the leading French newspaper Petit Journal ran a special color-illustrated

commemorative issue in which it declared: “It was exactly two hundred years ago that

Dom Pérignon, a Benedictine monk, discovered the art of making the wines of

Champagne sparkle.”92 The humble monk, from his modest roots as a talented winemaker

working in a tiny abbey in the French countryside, had been resurrected as the pioneering

champion of a multi-million dollar international luxury industry.

No kick for champagne: war and hard times in the champagne industry

“Remember gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne!”
-Sir Winston Churchill, 1918

It was only a matter of months after the joyous fanfare of the Petit Journal publication,

however, that the négociants of Champagne would fall on hard times. The inauguration

of World War I would bring destruction to countless vineyards as the trenches of the

Western Front were dug through the region and aerial bombardments destroyed the

operations of many maisons. Forty percent of the region’s vineyards were destroyed, and

the cellars of many houses emptied to serve as de facto bomb shelters for Champagne’s

90
Guy, 28.
91
Ibid, 29.
92
Quoted Ibid, 29.

43
citizens.93 For the residents of Reims, all of city life moved underground as schools and

hospitals opened alongside the millions of aging bottles of champagne.94 Even after the

war, sales lagged far behind their pre-1914 levels as European economies focused on

rebuilding and, with the advent of Prohibition in the United States and the Communist

Revolution in Russia, some of the largest foreign export markets dried up completely.95

Following a brief recovery during the flapper era of the 1920’s, driven mostly by

strong sales in the domestic market, champagne’s fortunes tumbled again in 1929 with

the onset of the Great Depression. In France and around the world, people could no

longer afford or justify paying expensive prices for luxury goods. Négociants, forced to

liquidate their growing stocks, dumped wines on the French market for bargain prices,

hoping to realize any possible return on their significant inventory investments.96 From

1926 to 1932 worldwide consumption of champagne dropped from thirty-six million

bottles to less than twenty-three million—a decline in volume of 36%—with substantially

lower prices further cannibalizing the industry’s profit margins.97 In an effort to revive

the industry’s struggling economy, the négociants of Champagne looked once again to

resurrect the blessings of their humble monk from Hautvillers—they turned to the legend

of Dom Pérignon.

In June of 1932, the newly created Commission de Propagande et de Défense des

Vins de Champagne announced the celebration in Champagne of the “Fêtes du 250e

anniversaire de la découverte du champagne par Dom Pérignon.” Of course it was just

eighteen years earlier that the Petit Journal had, under the auspices of the Syndicat du

93
Bonal, Or, 171-178.
94
Kladstrup, 177-182.
95
Bonal, Or, 175.
96
Ibid, 187.
97
Bonal, Pérignon, 176.

44
Commerce, declared the bi-centennial of the Dom’s discovery. Time moved quickly

when there was champagne to sell. Chronological issues notwithstanding, the event

proved a grand success, attracting two bishops, the prefect of the Marne, several under-

secretaries of the State, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, and various associated

senators and politicians.98 The international press was quick to report on the festivities,

scoring a victory for desperate négociants who burned for their products to reappear in

the public eye. In the U.S. the New York Times reported that “The memory of Dom

Pérignon, Benedictine, the monk who put the sparkle into champagne wines just 250

years ago, was honored this week with the dedication of his statue and appropriate fêtes

at Epernay, Rheims, and Hautvillers.”99 Despite the Prohibition laws still in effect at the

time which made his “invention” illegal in the United States, the newspaper continued

with its warm description of Pérignon as “credited with founding one of France’s greatest

industries by the careful scientific discharge of his duties as the abbey’s cellarer and

winetender.”100 With the repeal of Prohibition the next year after the fête, sales of

champagne to foreign countries nearly doubled, jumping by over four million bottles—

undoubtedly largely consumed by enthusiastic Americans who, like the article’s author,

still retained a taste for the products of “one of France’s greatest industries”.101

Dom Pérignon had once again blessed the négociants of Champagne with a

marketing coup. The Commission de Propagande’s grande fête of 1932 proved such a

success that in each year following a spring festival was organized in Hautvillers to honor

98
Ibid ,176.
99
“Honor Monk Who Put Fizz in Champagne.”
100
Ibid.
101
Bonal, Or, 185.

45
the Dom, a practice that continued until 1953.102 Everywhere Dom Pérignon became

known as the name behind the luxurious bubbles of champagne. Another article in the

New York Times the October following the fête wrote of Pérignon’s relation to

champagne, “it has been said that no other wine owes so much to one man.”103 Writes

Kolleen Guy:

Despite the almost industrial techniques used in sparkling wine production, the
Dom Pérignon myth distanced champagne from any association with assembly
lines, technology, and backbreaking labor. The monk’s “simple” invention was
cultivated in public relations campaigns to create an image of champagne as being
as effortless to create as it was to drink, a symbol of balance between old-world
traditions and the “good life” of the modern period.104

It would not be long before this image of the “good life” that the champagne-drinking

public associated with the Dom Pérignon myth would itself be bottled and sold right

along with the bubbles; with the introduction in 1936 of the cuvée Dom Pérignon by the

firm of Moët et Chandon, consumers could drink the very stars the famous monk was

said to have discovered.

Grand vin impérial: the history of the maison of Moët et Chandon

No firm was more successful in promoting the old-world luxury image of its

wines to a large audience than the Epernay-based négociant Moët et Chandon. Started by

Claude Moët in the 1710’s (although no account records exist before 1743, the date cited

today as the official founding of the firm), the firm initially focused on traditional

brokerage activities, operating as much as a rural banking outfit as a wine trader.105

Through the late 18th century Moët’s primary revenues came from activity in the Parisian

102
Bonal, Pérignon, 178-179.
103
“The Origin of Champagne.”
104
Guy, 29.
105
Brennan, 69-72.

46
barreled wine market, which he continued to exploit profitably as it began to decline and

other firms moved toward the new export-driven bottle market. By mid-century, Moët’s

operation had become the leader in the Paris market share, serving those taverns and

restaurants who still demanded vin de Champagne.106

By the 1780’s however, the total size of the Parisian market had shrunk to the

point where the Moët firm, now operated by Claude’s son Claude-Louis-Nicolas, was

forced to expand its business and try its hand in the exportation trade. The younger Moët

launched into this new business model with gusto, and “took to the roads of the Holy

Roman Empire in the 1780’s to find customers.”107 Moët soon learned he could not cover

the whole of Europe alone, and began the practice of hiring sales representatives to

represent the firm in far-away locations, starting in England, as we know from his

records, with an agent named Jeanson.108 Fortunately for the firm, Claude-Louis-

Nicolas’s efforts would be rewarded handsomely with skyrocketing sales— over 74,000

bottles per year by the late 1790’s—and other négociants quickly followed suit in hiring

representatives abroad to champion the virtues of their own wines. Although a relative

latecomer to the developing marketplace of champagne négociants compared to rival

firms such as Ruinart, Moët’s large operation and innovative marketing techniques would

help the firm become a leading force in the industry among the ranks of the increasingly

more powerful grandes maisons de champagne.

As Moët entered the 19th century under the direction of the founder’s grandson,

Jean-Rémy Moët, the maison’s success began truly to take off. The third-generation head

would build upon the work of his father and grandfather, and prove even more adept at

106
Ibid, 261-262.
107
Ibid, 264.
108
Ibid, 264.

47
promoting the family’s wines among a wide and influential customer base. Keenly aware

of the beneficial relationship that could be achieved by cultivating a luxurious,

aristocratic image for his products and using such associative prestige to target sales to a

larger middle class, as discussed in the previous chapter, Jean-Rémy expanded the firm’s

trade and grew the Moët business into the foremost giant of the industry recognizable

today.

Jean-Rémy’s success in this regard would not come without, to quote the famous

Lennon and McCartney tune, ‘a little help from his friends’. In 1782, Jean-Rémy made

the acquaintance of a young student at the nearby Royal Military Academy of Brienne.

The youth, a young artillery officer by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, future Emperor

of France, would become a lifelong friend of the Moët firm’s head, and would reportedly

induct Jean-Rémy into the Légion d’Honneur by pinning on him his own personal

cross.109 The relationship between the two would prove to be mutually beneficial: Jean-

Rémy used his association with the Emperor to further the business aims of the maison,

and Napoleon enjoyed a never-ending supply of grand vin de champagne for his armies

and the courts of his conquered countries.110 In a shrewd marketing move, the Moët firm

capitalized on the Emperor’s endorsement by introducing the designation “Impérial” to

their wines, a tradition that is still carried on by the firm today.111

Jean-Rémy, ever the consummate businessman, knew, however, that such a

prestigious association would prove of little value if he could not leverage his wine’s

reputation to gain sales among large numbers of customers around the world. When, in

1814, Napoleon faced defeat at the hands of invading coalition armies, Jean-Rémy seized

109
Kladstrup, 61-67.
110
Ibid, 65.
111
Piquet.

48
the opportunity to gain exposure for his firm. As enemy soldiers pillaged the Moët

cellars, consuming over six hundred thousand bottles of champagne, the firm’s head

stood idly and let them drink. “All of these soldiers who are ruining me today will make

my fortune tomorrow,” he reportedly said. “They will be hooked for life and become my

best salesmen when they go back to their own country.”112 Indeed, Jean-Rémy’s

premonition proved correct. According to historian Don Kladstrup, “he found that he had

become ‘the most famous winemaker in the world,’ supplying champagne to every

European court.”113

Perhaps Jean-Rémy’s most important contribution to the success of the firm,

however, was his arrangement in 1816 for the marriage of his daughter Adélaïde to

Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles, a member of the French nobility. Upon his

retirement in 1833, Jean-Rémy would leave the firm jointly to his own son Victor and his

son-in-law Chandon, forming the partnership of Moët et Chandon that would carry the

company through its continued ascendancy over the next century toward becoming the

leading house of the modern champagne industry. Unbeknownst to the family at the time,

Pierre-Gabriel would perform for the firm undoubtedly his greatest service in 1823, a

decade before he even became a director, when he purchased from the French state the

ruins of the nearby abbey of Hautvillers and restored it to become the family’s summer

estate.114 The spirit of Dom Pérignon would prove a valuable asset to the fortunes of the

maison ever since.

112
Kladstrup, 67-68.
113
Ibid, 68.
114
Roubinet, 15.

49
Transubstantiation of a legend: birth of the cuvée Dom Pérignon

In 1932, the same year as the 250th-anniversary fête of Dom Pérignon’s

“discovery”, a consultant to the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne for the

British market, Lawrence Venn, reported to the organization that he believed he had

identified a lucrative market opportunity. He recommended to the grandes maisons that

they create a new vintage wine of exceptional quality, place it in a distinctive bottle, and

sell it to the British aristocracy at a premium price. The Syndicat rejected his suggestion,

but Venn’s idea caught the attention of the young Robert-Jean de Vogüé, cousin to the

Chandon’s, member of one of the most prominent families of the French aristocracy, and

newly appointed president of the firm of Moët et Chandon.115

De Vogüé decided to pursue the plan outlined by Venn, and in 1935 sent to the

families of 150 of the firm’s oldest clients in England a wicker basket containing two

bottles shaped just like those that had been sold to their ancestors 150 years ago by the

salesman Jeanson at the beginning of Moët’s export business. The bottles were shorter

and wider than modern champagne bottles, and featured a distinctive label in the form of

a shield and decorated with vine branches that had been used on the firm’s bottles at the

time of the Revolution and the First Empire.116 Inside was a special wine, made of the

millésime 1926, that was of a tier above the ordinary vintage blends the company offered.

The 300 bottles became an immediate success, and at the behest of several American

elites who had enjoyed the privilege of tasting their British friends’ supply, a larger

115
Bonal, Pérignon, 180.
116
See figures 7 and 8.

50
production was prepared for commercialization in England and the U.S. the following

year. 117

With commercial success virtually assured, only one challenge remained for the

new wine: finding a name. The recent rise to popularity of the “patron monk” of the

champagne industry, and the firm’s ownership and historic ties to the abbey of

Hautvillers made the title Dom Pérignon seem destined to grace the bottle of Moët et

Chandon’s newest product. Unfortunately however, the name had already been

trademarked by the Mercier firm, who had yet to put it to use. The spirit of Pérignon once

again however would smile on the fortunes of the industry he had been credited with

creating. As a symbol of good faith in the 1927 marriage of the families’ two heirs

Francine Durand-Mercier and the Comte Paul Chandon Moët, the Mercier firm ceded the

rights of the name to Moët et Chandon, and in 1936, with the shipment of an inaugural

vintage of wine from 1921, the cuvée Dom Pérignon was born.118

117
Bonal, Pérignon, 180.
118
Schalkens.

51
 Chapter Four
Tastemakers and Trendsetters:
Dom Pérignon and the Marketing of Champagne to a Modern Aristocracy

Champagne in the 20th century: a new age for luxury

The cuvée Dom Pérignon would became an unqualified success for the house of

Moët et Chandon. Perhaps no other wine has become as loved and as identified

worldwide with luxury consumption. Particularly in the U.S., the wine seems to have

achieved a legendary status even surpassing that of its celebrated namesake. In 2004, on

the occasion of Christie’s New York auction of the estate of American heiress Doris

Duke, a bidding war for a lot of three bottles from the initial shipment of the cuvée to

American shores, the millésime 1921, escalated the selling price to an astronomical

$21,000, ten times the pre-auction estimate of $1500-$2200.119 Rival champagne houses

across the industry have attempted to recreate the success of Moët et Chandon’s “prestige

cuvée”, leading to the introduction of a bevy of competing luxury wines such as Louis

Roederer’s Cristal and Pol Roger’s cuvée Sir Winston Churchill.

The introduction of the cuvée Dom Pérignon signaled a new age for the

champagne industry. What had always, as we have seen, been considered a luxury good

had now crossed into a new territory of elite status. The cuvée represented a pinnacle of

opulent consumption, a “luxury of luxuries”, and has been sought after by social

paragons and people looking for the “best” champagne the world over. Moët et

Chandon’s flagship brand embodied the ultimate expression of an image of aristocratic

lifestyle, and, like other champagnes before it, appealed to a mass market of all non-

aristocratic classes. Just as his predecessors such as Jean-Rémy Moët did a century

119
Goldberg.

52
before, Robert-Jean de Vogüé created for his product a mythic association with the

leading social classes of the past and present that drove demand among a broad base of

consumers who aspired to such a lifestyle. A bottle of Dom Pérignon represents more

than the finest or best tasting sparkling wine on the market; it is an assertion of social

status. Drinking Dom Pérignon proclaims to the world (and perhaps more importantly to

one’s self): I am sophisticated, I am cultivated, I am part of the club. The same kind of

associative prestige that Napoleon I brought Jean-Rémy’s champagne in the early days of

the 19th century is at work today when audiences watch secret agent and bon vivant

James Bond sips a bottle of his favorite 1953 vintage with his latest on-screen paramour

or when fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld photographs model Eva Herzigova downing glasses

in an expensive hotel suite. These figures represent the aristocracy of the modern world,

and the product is a proclaimed part of their elegant and luxurious lifestyle. For a price,

anyone who consumes Moët et Chandon’s prestige cuvée can experience the same feeling

of exclusivity associated with the privileged status of the champagne’s elite

representatives.

The use of marketing to depict luxury consumption as conferring social status, as

we have seen, has long been characterized by the encouragement of such class-inspired

aspirations. James Twitchell argues in his Living it Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury that

this relationship has its roots in the religious movements of the Catholic Church during

the Italian Renaissance. The societal elite of the day, such as wealthy princes and clerics,

amassed huge and ostentatious collections of art, artifacts, and palaces that inspired

wonder and admiration in people of lesser means. The Church strove to recreate the

opulent luxuries of these classes and incorporate them into religious ceremonies to appeal

53
to the masses’ aspirations that they too might possess such marvelous things. Says

Twitchell, “Nothing so spread the lure of materialism as the Vatican, which knew one

thing above all: Things that shine gather a crowd.”120 Huge and glorious churches were

filled with all manner of luxurious objects resembling the possessions of the privileged

nobles: colorful murals and stained glass, gilded altars, golden relics, and most

importantly, lavishly decorated chalices in which to display the miracle of

transubstantiation (coincidentally, a concept not dissimilar from the Baccarat Crystal

“Dom Pérignon” set of champagne flutes and decanters marketed today as “the ultimate

way to enjoy the bubbly”121). Twitchell continues,

those churches that prospered had one thing in common: intense luxurious
decoration. […] The internal spaces of the Renaissance church had the look of the
glossy pages of modern magazines. While it may be heresy to compare flipping
through the pages of the four pounds of Vogue with a trip through the Cornaro
Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, the journeys are not
dissimilar.122

This tradition of luxury marketing did not disappear with the coming of the

Protestant Reformation and the movement of many churches towards a more austere

religious environment, but rather moved over the two centuries preceding the times of

Dom Pérignon and the founding of the champagne industry from the sacred sector of the

Church to the secular world of commerce.123 By the time champagne had established

itself as the premier luxury product in the 19th century, this kind of associative social

marketing had become a preferred tactic of many consumer goods firms. As Jean

Castarède in Histoire du Luxe en France asserts: “Jamais siècle n’aura été plus charnière

120
Twitchell, 201.
121
“Baccarat Dom Perignon flutes, Set of 2.”
122
Twitchell, 203.
123
Ibid, 203.

54
en matière du luxe que ce XIXe siècle.”124 The négociants of Champagne, as we have

seen, were an integral part of this new luxury marketplace. Kolleen Guy writes,

“Champagne was linked to an “upscale”—to use modern advertising jargon—clientele,

playing on the desire of bourgeois consumers to distance themselves from the conditions

and values of the popular classes.”125 Négociants looked to target their wines to capitalize

on what was becoming a large market for position-enhancing goods. Castarède confirms:

“[le luxe du XIXe siècle] élargit en même temps sa clientèle à la bourgeoisie qui pour la

première fois s’y intéresse.”126 It would be this appeal to the new bourgeois consumers of

the aristocratic lifestyle imbued in luxury goods like champagne that drove the sales

volumes of the industry in the 19th century.

If the 19th century represented this kind of ‘trickling down’ of the luxury market

to the bourgeois middle class, the 20th century would see its democratization across all

ranks of society. Writes Castarède, “Le XXe siècle va faire franchir au luxe une nouvelle

étape. Il va se démocratiser et ne pas résister aux excès du clinquant.”127 Thanks to new

forms of mass-media such as newspaper, radio, television, and cinema, luxuries whose

experience had previously been reserved for those rich enough to afford them could now

be consumed—at least vicariously—by anyone rich or poor. For example, newspaper

readers of all classes could salivate at the description of champagne in the New York

Times, on the eve of the repeal of Prohibition in 1933:

Champagne suppers lasting into the early perfumed dawn of a St. Petersburg
spring; Viennese waltzes with a glass in hand; the grace and gayety of the
Edwardians; the pomp and power of the Waldorf; Delmonico’s and the Café
Martin; champagne drunk from a lady’s slipper; […]—all that is most dashing

124
Castarède, 255.
125
Guy, 19.
126
Castarède, 255.
127
Ibid, 259-260.

55
 and colorful in a world gone by swirls in our memories on the foam of
champagne.128

As common people became increasingly inundated with luxurious images of

consumption in the world around them, they began to believe that they too could be

capable of living this kind of ‘good life’, and aspired to attain it. Writes Twitchell, “the

aspiration of the poor to get at these unnecessary goods has done more than any social

program to motivate some of the disenchanted to become enfranchised. […] The

democratization of luxury has been the single most important marketing phenomenon of

modern times.”129 Luxury, a concept which started as a means of class distinction, had

been transformed into a means of social and cultural unification.

Nonetheless, despite the egalitarian opportunity for (occasional) consumption of

luxury by the masses, its relation to a subtext of aristocratic existence still continued.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the wine trade. Describing the legal conception

today of vin de qualité, Antoine Vialard, director of the Université Montesquieu’s Centre

Montesquieu de la Vigne et du Vin, writes,

la qualité d’un vin est d’être un vin de qualité, c’est à dire un vin dont les qualités
organoleptiques sont bonnes, voire excellentes. À l’image de l’homme de qualité,
formule qui s’appliquait aux nobles pendant l’Ancien Régime et même encore
après, le vin de qualité est un vin noble. Aujourd’hui encore, cette notion de
qualité-excellence, en terme de goût, est à la mode.130

Masses in the 20th century may have enjoyed greater exposure to the products of the

négociants’ industry, but champagne’s worth was still derived from its association with

the rich and famous—the New York Times in 1961 called it “the aristocrat of wines”.131

The upper echelons of society imbued champagne with its aura of quality. Luxury

128
Johnson.
129
Twitchell, 29.
130
Vialard, 120.
131
Alden.

56
consumption by lower classes in the modern market remained much like the soldiers who

drank from Moët’s cellars in the aftermath of Napoleon’s fall in 1814: it was the emperor

who established the champagne’s desirability, the soldiers who brought it profitability.

In describing the nature of the luxury-aristocracy relationship in the 20th century,

Twitchell invokes a famous scene from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece The

Great Gatsby. In the scene, the eminent title character, born an ordinary farmboy from

North Dakota, attempts to impress the lovely socialite Daisy Buchanan by parading

before her a series of luxury goods, hoping to convince her of his new aristocratic

worthiness. The ploy works; material goods confer upon the common James Gatz the

noble status of the Great Jay Gatsby, and Daisy bursts into tears as she is overcome by

the beauty of his possessions.132

Gatsby represents a foremost example of the affiliation between aristocracy and

luxury consumption in the 20th century: he exploits the social value of his goods with

such skill that he is, by association, able to transcend his class and ennoble himself—not

through any sort of productive or tangible contribution to society, but through

consumption alone. A more appropriate literary reference for our purposes, however,

could be the contemporary novel of Fitzgerald’s rival author Ernest Hemingway, The Sun

Also Rises. In a relationship reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s doomed cross-class love affair

between Daisy and Gatsby, Jake Barnes, an American journalist living in Paris, falls in

love with Lady Brett Ashley, a British aristocrat. He woos her but is never able to win her

hand, as a war wound has left him impotent and she refuses to give up sex to commit to

his love.

132
Twitchell, 175-177.

57
 In an early scene in the novel, the two share a bottle of champagne with the Greek

aristocrat Count Mippipopolous. He introduces the bottle as provided to him by a friend

“in the business”. “What’s his name,” Brett asks, “Veuve Clicquot?” “No,” the count

replies, “Mumms. He’s a baron.” The conversation continues:

“Isn’t it wonderful,” said Brett. “We all have titles. Why haven’t you a title,
Jake?”
“I assure you, sir,” the count put his hand on my arm. “It never does a man any
good. Most of the time it costs you money.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s damned useful sometimes,” Brett said.
“I’ve never known it to do me any good.”
“You haven’t used it properly. I’ve had hell’s own amount of credit on mine.”
[…]
“I say that is wine,” Brett held up her glass. “We ought to toast something.
‘Here’s to royalty.’”133

Noble titles, as Brett points out, still prove incredibly useful even in the democratic, post-

World War I modern world. Just as Jake is at a disadvantage in pursuing Brett’s love

from a lower social standing (a point Brett condescendingly implies in this exchange), the

Baron Mumm is well served by his noble title in creating an attractive and enjoyable

experience for customers who drink his wine. Clearly, as evidenced by Brett’s toast,

people of the 20th century still aspire to Ancien Regime aristocratic achievement, and the

luxurious consumption of champagne helps inspire their dreams.

Twitchell in fact describes this aspiration-enabling phenomenon of modern luxury

marketing as “dream marketing”. He writes, “Now we have a new class of aspirational

lifestyle, the pure confection of dream value—the consumer of opuluxe, the consumer of

dreams. That’s Gatsby—the new man of consumerist dreams.”134 This new class of

consumer is in essence no different from those individuals to whom, since its very

inception, the champagne industry has marketed its goods, as noted in Chapter Two by

133
Hemingway, 57-59.
134
Twitchell, 189.

58
the advice Irénée Ruinart left to his sons. The 20th century’s new consumers of dreams

represented simply an expansion of the market that has always been targeted by

producers in the champagne industry. The way to reach these customers, Twitchell

argues, is through a process champagne firms have been employing in earnest since the

Exposition Universelle of 1889: the creation and dissemination of product myth.

[I]t is exactly the same kind of aura that surrounds all luxe, whether it be a
cigarette, a watch, or a bonbon. It’s not enough to use the best design or the best
distribution system. You must be able to modify the customer’s sense of
perceived value. You do that, essentially, by telling a story, often something that
resembles a fairy tale.135

And the fairy tale of the champagne industry, as we have seen, is the story of the same

happy monk whose name graced the bottle of Robert-Jean de Vogüé’s prestige cuvée:

Dom Pierre Pérignon.

“I prefer the ’53 myself”: the celebrity status of Dom Pérignon

And what a story the house of Moët et Chandon has told. According to a 2006

survey of high net-worth consumers by the Luxury Institute, a marketing research firm,

the cuvée Dom Pérignon ranks today as the most prestigious brand of champagne and

sparkling wine on the market, topping consumers’ choices for its “uniqueness and

exclusivity, [use] by people who are admired and respected, and making those who

consume it feel special across the entire experience.”136 With the cuvée Dom Pérignon,

the house of Moët et Chandon (now incorporated into the international luxury goods

conglomerate LVMH—Louis-Vuitton-Moët-Hennessy) has been able to influence

135
Ibid, 187.
136
“Luxury Institute Survey: High Net Worth Consumers Rank the Top Champagnes, Dom Perignon,
Cristal (Louis Roederer) and La Grande Dame by Veuve Clicquot”.

59
consumers’ sense of value by developing a kind of romantic myth around the brand that

appeals to the emotions of the market audience. From the report: “The emotional

attachment wealthy consumers have with Dom Pérignon makes it clear that they think

they actually own this iconic LVMH brand. Of the hundreds of brands that we ask

wealthy consumers to rate every year across scores of luxury categories, Dom Pérignon is

one of the world's most prestigious, and therefore, most valuable, luxury brands.”137

Taking from the effectiveness of the Pérignon legend that was first popularized at the

Exposition Universelle by the Syndicat du Commerce des Vins de Champagne, the fairy

tale Moët et Chandon has created for Dom Pérignon surpasses the success even of the

cuvée’s namesake.

The means through which the maison has achieved this success are based on the

same marketing principle which the champagne industry has always used to sell its

products: associate the wine with an image of aristocracy and sell it to all social classes.

As the aristocracy of modern times has shifted from dukes and counts to movie stars and

fashion divas, the cultural associations of the cuvée Dom Pérignon have evolved in the

same manner. Although it was originally aimed at British nobles, Dom Pérignon today

can be found in the glasses of business men, politicians, and entertainers. François Bonal

illustrates this transition: “La maison Moët et Chandon, avec un art consommé de la

communication, a su donner au Dom Pérignon l’image d’un produit d’exception, faisant

figure de symbole. Il est devenu le champagne des milliardaires, des diplomates, mais

aussi des artistes de cinéma qui en font indirectement la promotion. Qui ne serait tenté de

137
“Luxury Institute Survey: High Net Worth Consumers Rank the Top Champagnes, Dom Perignon,
Cristal (Louis Roederer) and La Grande Dame by Veuve Clicquot”.

60
suivre, ne serait-ce qu’une fois, l’exemple de Marilyn Monroe?”138 Just as Jean-Rémy

Moët in the 19th century bolstered the maison’s sales through his relationship with

Napoleon, so too did the cuvée Dom Pérignon flourish through endorsements by iconic

public figures of the 20th century.

In his book Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand

Management, cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken describes the theory of celebrity

product endorsements according to a “meaning transfer” model. The celebrity develops

through his or her role in society a particular cultural “meaning” that is transferred

through association to products they endorse. This meaning is in turn then transferred to

users of the product through the act of consumption.139 The celebrity is able to provide

meaning to the product in a particularly powerful way that cannot be achieved through

traditional advertising or the use of models, who are, as McCracken explains, “merely

‘borrowing’ the meanings they bring to [an] ad.” He continues: “Celebrities ‘own’ their

meanings because they have created them on the public stage by dint of intense and

repeated performance. […] Or, to put this another way, the meaning that the celebrity

endorsement gives to the product was generated in distant movie performances, political

campaigns, or athletic achievements.”140

Dom Pérignon has been the beneficiary of many such important meaning

transfers, enjoying public association with presidents—Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac

were seen drinking Dom Pérignon together during a G7 summit in France in 1996141,

entertainers—it is purportedly perennial Las Vegas showman Tom Jones’ favorite drink,

138
Bonal, Pérignon, 182.
139
McCracken, 97-115.
140
Ibid, 107.
141
Matthews.

61
and athletes—baseball’s New York Yankees celebrate their many championship victories

with cases of the cuvée.142 Two celebrities in particular, however, have imbued Dom

Pérignon with a cultural meaning unique among prestige champagnes as representing the

pinnacle of modern elegance and sophistication: the actress Marilyn Monroe and the

fictional British secret agent James Bond.

Marilyn Monroe, America’s original “blonde bombshell”, was known as one of

history’s great lovers of champagne. Throughout the life of this silver screen icon, a glass

of bubbly was never known to be far from her reach. In many episodes throughout her

career Marilyn was photographed or reported to be seen with a champagne flute in

hand.143 The drink even gave her the courage to perform in perhaps her most famous

moment, singing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in Madison Square

Garden in 1962.144 And Marilyn’s favorite champagne, the public knew, was Dom

Pérignon vintage 1953.145

Like her own public persona, the beauty of Marilyn’s value for Moët et Chandon

was that she provided a perfect conduit for marketing the champagne’s connection

between an aristocratic lifestyle and a kind of accessible, “every person” affiliation.

Herself a humble foster child from Los Angeles who had lived out the modern fantasy of

“making it big”, her image resonated with ordinary Americans who dreamed of one day

transcending their everyday lives and living in a world of opulence and stardom where

they too could be in the centerfold of Playboy or marry Joe DiMaggio. McCracken writes

about the allure of Monroe, “‘Marilyn’ was charming because there was nothing

142
Olney.
143
Guiles, 155, 191, 256, 305.
144
Ibid, 306.
145
Zeidner; “Favorites.”

62
measured about her, nothing calculated, nothing manipulated. […] ‘Marilyn’ was about

access of every kind: sexual, emotional, intellectual. And the nation was smitten. People

were drawn to this selfless creature like moths to the flame.”146

If Marilyn Monroe brought accessibility to Dom Pérignon in the 1960’s, it was

James Bond who would give the champagne its inimitable sense of class. The cuvée,

featured as the favorite drink of Sean Connery’s suave and debonair agent in the

blockbuster movies Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965), would

become the ultimate aspiration of millions of theatergoers who idolized Bond’s cool

sophistication. As noted in an article on Pérignon in the 2003 Medical Post, a “canny

product placement in the first generation James Bond movies made Dom a synonym for

exclusive glamour.”147 The scene in which Bond raises a bottle of Pérignon to defend

himself from the villain Dr. No in the 1962 film of the same name has become one of the

iconic moments of 60’s cinema and a defining image of Pérignon’s glamorous depiction

in the series: “That’s a Dom Pérignon ’55. It would be a pity to break it,” deadpans Dr.

No. Bond calmly places the bottle back on the table, looks at it, and retorts: “I prefer the

’53 myself.” One can imagine throngs of testosterone-charged young men spilling out of

the theaters hoping to imitate their new hero’s sophisticated and discriminating taste in

beverage consumption.

Like Monroe, Bond also served as a bridge between the upper and lower classes

of society. Although he personified elegant sensibilities, he was a character designed very

much for mass-market consumption, and, as such, exposed luxury products like Dom

Pérignon to the public in a way that more exclusively aristocratic figures like Louis XIV

146
McCracken, 96.
147
Wolkoff.

63
or the Khedive of Egypt never could. Writes Michael Denning in an essay entitled

“Licensed to Look: James Bond and the Heroism of Consumption”, “[The choice of the

actor Sean] Connery was meant to give more of a ‘man of the people’ image to Bond, and

Christopher Booker argues that Connery’s Bond was part of a ‘new class’ of image

producers that dominated the culture of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, mixing lower-

class origins with media affluence and consumerism.”148 Denning continues to argue that

this “new class” of image producers to which Bond belonged served as the first example

of a new social aristocracy, one led not by prominent members of noble families, but by

“pop singers (The Beatles, Mick Jagger), photographers (David Bailey), interior

decorators, spy novelists (Deighton), actors (Michael Caine, Connery), and fashion

designers. Though they may have come from working-class, lower middle-class, and

northern [Scottish] backgrounds, the effect of the aristocracy of images was to efface

their origins.”149 The aristocracy of James Bond was not a renunciation of the nobility

associated with 19th century elitism, but rather an evolution of such a class conception to

adapt to the democratization of society that was happening alongside the media

revolution of the day. And it was likewise this democratization of the old-world

aristocracy that embodied the new kind of social luxury that was epitomized by Dom

Pérignon.

99 problems for Moët et Chandon: marketing champagne to today’s hip-hop culture

Since the Monroe and Bond-sponsored heyday of the cuvée’s popular celebrity in

the 1960’s, however, the balance Dom Pérignon struck between remaining an elite

148
Denning, 58.
149
Ibid, 59-60.

64
symbol of an aristocratic lifestyle and at the same time marketing a conception of luxury

that was accessible, or at least appealing, to all classes, has shifted. Faced with increased

competition and aggressive marketing from rival prestige cuvées such as Krug and Louis

Roederer’s Cristal, other brands have edged Dom Pérignon out of the mass-market

spotlight and placed it more squarely back in the realm of traditional upper-crust

exclusivity. Its image has changed from a luxury desired by all people—young and old,

rich and poor—to “a slightly old-fashioned gentlemen’s champagne,” in the words of

Neville Brody, a graphic design and marketing consultant brought in by Moët et Chandon

in 2004 to reinvigorate the brand’s image.150 In its place, champagnes such as Cristal

have become the go-to drinks in today’s popular culture for celebrities and ordinary

people alike looking to advertise their affiliation with a modern luxurious lifestyle.

The rapid rise of Cristal has been due particularly to its association with a new

type of mainstream luxury culture reminiscent of the Bond and Monroe icons of the

previous generation in its combination of lower-class origins with aristocratic

consumption: the hip-hop movement of the 1990’s and 2000’s. Rapper Notorious B.I.G.,

who was killed in 1997, is credited with first mentioning Cristal in his performances.

B.I.G. originally supported Dom Pérignon, releasing a single in 1995 with fellow rapper

Little Shawn featuring Moët et Chandon’s prestige cuvée as the song’s title and

repeatedly mentioning the drink in the main rhyme of the chorus. However, rapping in

the song “Brooklyn’s Finest” from Jay-Z’s 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt, B.I.G.

would reject “Chandon sippers” in favor of “Cristal forever.”

In the song’s wake, hip-hop references to Louis Roederer’s champagne began

appearing in lyrics from artists including Lil’ Kim, Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy, 50-Cent, and
150
“Brody team set to uncork results of Dom Perignon brand repositioning.”

65
Jay-Z.151 The latter would become one of the champagne’s biggest supporters, until his

high-profile falling out with the brand in the summer of 2006 after new managing

director of Roederer, Frédéric Rouzaud, made public comments expressing his

disapproval of the brand’s connection with hip-hop culture. Asked by the Economist if

association with the hip-hop lifestyle could hurt his company’s brand, Rouzaud

responded, “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from

buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”152

Jay-Z responded to Rouzaud’s remarks by calling them “racist” and announced a boycott

of the house’s champagne in his songs and popular New York City-based chain of 40/40

nightclubs.153

In spite of Rouzaud’s ill-advised disparagement of his brand’s hip-hop association

(for which he issued a hasty and obsequious apology), for Dom Pérignon, ceding the

crown of popular culture champagne of choice to Cristal in the hip-hop market presents a

significant worry for the champagne’s continued success. Although, as the recent Luxury

Institute report shows, the cuvée remains the top choice among wealthy consumers for

“most prestigious brand”, losing the champagne’s status as a desired product among

everyday individuals could jeopardize its future reputation. Just as popular exposure in

earlier generations among groups such as Napoleon’s enemy soldiers and 1960’s movie

fans helped drive the brand’s sales and prestige, so too can a strong affiliation with hip-

hop popular culture today.

Unlike other luxury products touted by rap stars, such as expensive automobiles

and flashy jewelry, prestige champagnes are priced so that people of lower and middle

151
MacLean.
152
Rachman, Felten.
153
Century.

66
income levels can afford occasionally to buy the champagne houses’ premium products.

At retail prices of $100 to $300 per bottle, investment in Cristal or Dom Pérignon is a

significant splurge for individuals living at or below the U.S. median yearly household

income of just under $46,000.154 Compared to the $86,525 price tag of Mercedes Benz’s

latest S-Class sedan, however, the champagnes represent an affordable means of access to

the lavish lifestyle hip-hop fans observe their favorite stars living—an indulgence that

makes them feel special without completely breaking the bank.

And indulge in champagne hip-hop fans do: according to a 2004 San Francisco

Chronicle article detailing the relationship between hip-hop culture and luxury

consumption, marketing consulting firm Scarborough Research has found that “people

who have attended a hip-hop concert are 77 percent more likely than the general public to

buy champagne.”155 And as members of lower income groups—like Marilyn Monroe or

Jay-Z—“make it big”, or transition to higher socioeconomic classes, they carry along

with them their pop culture-bred preferences when exercising their newfound market

influence. The Chronicle article continues: “hip-hop culture is all about disenfranchised

people, such as young blacks and Latinos from the inner cities, who like to celebrate in

very visible ways when they succeed, to show others how well they have done.”156 The

champagne choices of these groups of people become important market signifiers to the

many followers who aspire to emulate their success: if Jay-Z drinks Cristal, then the

millions of fans who buy his albums and attend his shows know that when it is time for

them to celebrate, they should drink Cristal, too. If Jay-Z stops drinking Cristal and starts

drinking Dom Pérignon, then Dom Pérignon becomes their drink of choice.

154
United States.
155
MacLean.
156
Ibid.

67
 Such shifts of fortune are already starting to happen in hip-hop culture. Since Jay-

Z’s boycott of Cristal, the Louis Roederer champagne has all but disappeared from the

hip-hop events at which its presence was once ubiquitous. At the Summer 2006 BET

(Black Entertainment Television) Awards show in Los Angeles, bottles of the champagne

were nowhere to be found, replaced instead by Dom Pérignon and brands from (fellow

LVMH-owned house) Veuve Clicquot.157 According to Marvet Britto, head of a public

relations and brand strategy consulting firm, “That’s Jay-Z’s influence as a tastemaker.

He’s the E. F. Hutton of hip-hop.”158 For Moët et Chandon, the hope is that his tastes will

continue to lead customers towards Dom Pérignon.

The reemergence of Dom Pérignon as a preeminent brand in hip-hop culture

represents a significant victory for Moët et Chandon. Such upstaging of rival Cristal at

the BET Awards is exactly the type of marketing coup for which the firm has been

hoping since its 2004 decision to overhaul the image of their top marque. Looking to

recapture the pervasive success the cuvée enjoyed among trendsetters and tastemakers of

the 1960’s, the house has launched into the rebranding initiative with vigor. Top

marketing talent with a track record of reviving aging brands has been brought in to fight

the inroads rivals have made into Dom Pérignon’s market share. Neville Brody, the high-

profile consultant hired to direct the project, came to Moët et Chandon on the heels of

remaking the visual image of The Times newspaper, designing a new font, Times

Modern, to replace the paper’s iconic Times Classic and Times New Roman. Although

with Dom Pérignon Brody stopped short of tampering with the cuvée’s storied bottle and

157
Century.
158
Ibid.

68
logo, he redesigned the product packaging to give the brand more “elegance, glamour and

appeal whilst retaining the luxury cues for which it is well known.”159

More significantly, in 2005 the firm commissioned fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld to

produce an advertising campaign featuring supermodels Helena Christensen and Eva

Herzigova for the release of the cuvée’s vintage 1998—Moët et Chandon’s first such

promotion dedicated solely to Dom Pérignon. Lagerfeld, in an interview conducted for

the Dom Pérignon website, says of the campaign, entitled “7 Fantasmes of a Woman”,

that “the mood is what I think champagne could evoke. It is at the same time like the

etchings of Moreau from the 18th century, like painting from the 19th century, like very

modern things.”160 Though the brand may be pursuing such new directions with the

repositioning initiative, clearly, from Lagerfeld’s comments, the underlying technique of

marketing a glamorous, aristocratic image to a broad public has survived unchanged from

centuries past. The audience has simply become wider and the firm has become more

proactive in attempting to reach it.

The effort seems to be paying off. According to “American Brandstand”, an

annual report published by brand strategy firm Agenda Inc. detailing the mention of

luxury brands in the lyrics of singles appearing in the top twenty songs on the Billboard

Music Chart, Dom Pérignon is gaining popularity in the hip-hop and pop culture

universe. In 2004, the first year of the brand’s new initiative, Dom Pérignon was

mentioned in twenty-one songs that made the Billboard Top Twenty, up from zero the

year before. This ranked the cuvée as the seventeenth most mentioned brand of the year,

ahead of products such as BMW, Cartier, and Grey Goose vodka but trailing by ten spots

159
“R.S. Dom Perignon.”
160
Dom Pérignon.

69
number seven Cristal. By the 2005 report, Dom Pérignon had jumped to twelfth place,

narrowing the gap to four behind the now eighth ranked Cristal.161

161
“American Brandstand 2004.”; “American Brandstand 2005.”

70
 Conclusion
Dom Pérignon: the tradition continues

There is, however, a danger that comes with Dom Pérignon’s new, more hip

advertising brand image: too much emphasis on marketing to new sectors such as the hip-

hop industry could compromise the tradition associated with the cuvée and alienate those

customers who liked the champagne’s image as it was. For consumers bred on the

conception of Dom Pérignon as a cultivated celebration of the centuries-long tradition of

champagne’s heroes and legends, appropriation by the edgier hip-hop culture could move

the brand’s equilibrium too far in a direction away from its aristocratic roots. However

ill-worded his comments, this theory seems to reflect Frédéric Rouzaud’s concern in

responding to The Economist’s question about his wine’s image. In an article on

CNBC.com, Richard Woodward of the beverage marketing firm Just-Drinks.com

comments: “Cristal has almost got [sic.] to the point where it has a downmarket image. It

gets looked down upon because of all that gangsta rap stuff. Frankly, a lot of wealthy

people don’t want to identify themselves with that culture.”162 Equally, for all of his

renown as a graphic designer, Neville Brody’s comment on the Moët et Chandon project

that “Dom Pérignon is such a pared-down brand, with very little story or myth,”163 hardly

inspires confidence that he understands the history of the brand he is manipulating and

can successfully leverage both sides of the tradition and modernity balance of champagne

marketing.

Moët et Chandon, however, seems to be aware of these risks, and so far has

skillfully walked the fine line between regaining cultural market share and cheapening

162
Armitage.
163
“Brody team set to uncork results of Dom Perignon brand repositioning.”

71
the perception of their storied brand. Their decision to commission Lagerfeld, a figure

who understands the balance necessary for such an undertaking and who appeals to

aristocratic and mainstream sensibilities alike (he has worked with such varying types as

Coco Chanel and Paris Hilton), for the brand’s first advertising campaign is a deft move

that promises to bolster the wine’s reputation across all consumer groups. Likewise,

invitations to the (Lagerfeld-sponsored) Dom Pérignon vintage 1998 release party in

New York City were presented in a similarly adroit manner. The guest list did not include

former Cristal-swigging rappers, whose negative media association with gangs and

misogyny Rouzaud worried could damage the industry’s reputation. Rather, Moët et

Chandon invited businessman and entrepreneur Russell Simmons, who as founder of hip-

hop music and clothing labels Def Jam Records and Phat Farm Fashions enjoys great

popular respect among all members of the hip-hop community, yet poses none of the

threats to the brand’s image that would, for instance, Cristal-devotee 50 Cent, an avowed

former drug-dealer and convicted felon.

Such thoughtfulness from the house of Moët should not be too surprising. After

all, walking the line between aristocratic appeal and mass-market accessibility is their

specialty: it is what they have been doing for the past two hundred years. From Napoleon

to James Bond, and Dom Pérignon to hip-hop, Moët et Chandon has demonstrated more

marketing success than any other maison in the champagne industry. They have proved

that in the world’s marketplace, it is not the product, but rather the image associated with

it, that makes Dom Pérignon and all other champagnes “fabulous”.

72
 Figures

Figure 1. “Be Fabulous” Display in Moët et Chandon Headquarters Store: Epernay,

France. (author’s photograph)

Figure 2. The church at the abbey of Hautvillers. (author’s photograph)

73
Figure 3. Dom Pérignon’s tomb in the Figure 4. Giant bottle of Taittinger
church at the abbey of Hautvillers. champagne produced to
(author’s photograph) christen oceanliners.
(author’s photograph)

74
Figure 5. Photo of Robert-Jean de Vogüé in Figure 6. Statue of Dom Pérignon at the
the Moët et Chandon headquarters. Moët et Chandon headquarters.
The caption reads: “Robert-Jean de (author’s photograph)
Vogüé donnera à la Maison Moët &
Chandon son moderne élan, ainsi que
le 1er rang mondial.”
(author’s photograph)

75
Figure 7. Moët champagne from 1791: Figure 8. Dom Pérignon vintage 1998:
Moët et Chandon headquarters. Moët et Chandon headquarters.
(author’s photograph) (author’s photograph)

76
 Figure 9. Image from Karl Lagerfeld campaign for Dom Pérignon.
(Lagerfeld, Karl. 7 Fantasmes of a Woman. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl
Publishing, 2006.)

Figure 10. Image from Karl Lagerfeld campaign for Dom Pérignon.
(Lagerfeld, Karl. 7 Fantasmes of a Woman. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl
Publishing, 2006.)

77
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This thesis represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.

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