Champagne in popular culture

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Champagne cork

Champagne to incorrectly use the name "champagne" to describe their wines.[2]

Early history

Although sparkling wine was invented in the

same name around 1700. For centuries prior to this, still wine from the region had been served as part of coronation festivities throughout Europe
, and the French aristocracy had offered it in tribute to foreign kings, associations with celebration and occasion which survive to the present day.

When the

méthode champenoise was introduced into the region, its ready association with luxury and power brought the unique sparkling wine from Champagne to the fore. The leading practitioners devoted considerable energy to creating a history and identity for their wine, associating it and themselves with nobility and royalty. Careful advertising and marketing associated Champagne with prestige, luxury, festivities and rites of passage, coinciding with an emerging middle class looking for symbols of upward mobility.[3]

Popular demand

fluted Champagne glass, shaped to best display the wine's effervescence

Successful marketing during the Industrial Revolution helped to firmly establish Champagne's reputation among the middle class and affluent elite of the time. The wine came to symbolize the "good life" to which all people could aspire. It also brought charges of decadence and indulgence.[4] As the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once commented, "Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right."[5]

Towards the end of the 19th century, with a new cohesion in social groups based on economic choices, the beginnings of

bourgeois society".[6]
This came about in part by the usual, informal pursuit of traditional practices and social norms. However, there was a great deal of careful and deliberate generation of rituals and images surrounding Champagne, not by any one agency or department, but as a result of widespread commercial efforts to market and popularise its consumption.

The "story" of Champagne wine was gradually re-told, effectively suppressing outdated and unfashionable ideas and images and promoting more desirable ones. This served not only the interests of Champagne négociants but the French

World Wars
.

By this time, Champagne had come to be seen not only as a luxury but as a worldwide cultural treasure.[9]

Marketing and placement

The music cover to George Leybourne's Champagne Charlie

In 1866 the famous entertainer and star of his day,

Belle époque" in export markets was remarked upon in 1882 by the British author and oenophile Henry Vizetelly on how Champagne had become mandatory at all launchings, inaugurations and celebrations.[10]

In art

Un bar aux Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet
, completed in 1882, features several bottles of unopened champagne.

French producers commissioned a diverse range of artists to produce advertising material, most notably posters, which dramatically raised the profile of both producer and artist alike. The works are still recognised and highly prized for their artistic merit.[11] The list includes:

Champagne also makes a more informal appearance in paintings by masters such as:

Champagne has widely being portrayed as the drink of celebration for toasting returning heroes from war. The Best Years of Our Life's (1946), Coming Home (1976), The Deer Hunter (1977), and For Queen and Country (1988) are examples. It symbolically represents the joy of those who have their family members returning home whilst challenging the premise that war should be celebrated so highly through the use of champagne. More recently this is illustrated beautifully within the stage play 'Minefield' by Lola Arias (Argentina) by former Royal Marine Commando and performer Dr David Jackson through his deep psychological rejection of home coming whilst around him those that view the war from afar drink champagne.

In literature

Champagne has important symbolic status in renowned literary works, such as:

In more popular literature – including periodicals and magazines such as Punch, La Vie Parisienne and Le Rire, and with humourists such as Richard Voigts, Honoré Daumier and John Leech – the wine became a vehicle for scathing satires of the elite and middle-classes.[11]

In music

In music from the era, especially in music hall and beer hall venues, tunes such as "Champagne Charlie" and "Ruinart-Polka" were very popular. The "Charles Heidsieck Waltz", after the pioneering Champagne producer, was an orchestral piece composed by Paul Mestrozzi which debuted in 1895 in honour of the Austrian emperor, accompanied by the presence of the wine itself.[11]

The term "champagne music" was a term used by bandleader Lawrence Welk to describe a style of music akin to easy listening that Welk performed with his band. Trademarks of the "champagne music" style include a light and upbeat tempo, muted brass instruments, accordions, woodwinds (especially clarinets), pizzicato strings, and frequent use of staccato. "Champagne music" became widely recognized through Welk's national television show, which ran for 27 years.

Champagne has long been associated with stars of

rock and pop music. In the song "Killer Queen" by Queen, Freddie Mercury
is quoted as saying "She keeps Moet et Chandon in her pretty cabinet."

Since the late 1990s, high-end champagne brands have been featured in

Puff Daddy, and Jay-Z.[12][13] Since 2006, Cristal has seen a loss of popularity and some boycotts, notably by Jay-Z, due to statements perceived as racist,[14][15][16] with other champagnes such as Armand de Brignac (gold bottle) making inroads.[17]

In 2011, American duo LMFAO released a song entitled "Champagne Showers".

In movies

Poster promoting the 1928 Hitchcock silent comedy "Champagne"

One of the longest-lasting associations of Champagne and popular culture belongs with

Dom Pérignon.[18]

Champagne has provided inspiration and a touch of

Hollywood productions over the years. In 1928, Alfred Hitchcock's silent film Champagne famously begins and ends with a shot through the bottom of a Champagne glass. Billy Wilder's musical entitled The Champagne Waltz, a 1937 film with the tagline, "As gay and sparkling as a Champagne cocktail!", accentuates the perceived rivalry between traditional classical music and more popular, modern tunes: Champagne being the exciting, decadent newcomer, the waltz representing old-fashioned attitudes.[19]
Several other movies have given Champagne notable prominence.[
example needed], including the anthology comedy Four Rooms, where Quentin Tarantino's character has a whole monolog praising Cristal. [20][21]

As a colour reference

Although often bearing little actual resemblance to the colour of the wine itself, the superlative-sounding name "

gemstones, especially diamonds. In the case of diamonds, any colouration used to be considered a defect which lowered prices considerably, until the idea came up to associate certain hues with Champagne.[citation needed
]

Ritual and symbolic uses

The Champagne coupe is erroneously claimed to symbolise aristocratic femininity

The iconic nature of Champagne has long been used as a means of effusive ritual celebration, in which the wine is not consumed so much as "sacrificed". The Champagne bottle traditionally smashed off the

sinking") has arisen in Sweden due to a ban on spraying champagne in bars.[24]

In a similarly extravagant vein, Marilyn Monroe was reputed to have taken a bath in 350 bottles of Champagne.[25]

The "saucer" shaped glass is another Champagne icon associated with a celebrity sex symbol. The

Champagne coupe is often claimed to have been modeled on the shape of the breast of a French aristocrat, often cited as Marie Antoinette or Madame de Pompadour. This is almost certainly apocryphal, as the glass was designed especially for sparkling wine in England in 1663, preceding those aristocrats by almost a century, and sparkling Champagne itself by several decades.[26]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0-06-621282-0
  2. ISBN 0-7645-5354-2
  3. ISBN 0-19-860990-6
  4. ISBN 0-671-68702-6
  5. ^ Emily Temple, "'Too Much Champagne Is Just Right': Famous Writers on How to Drink", The Atlantic, Accessed 14 April 2013
  6. ^ Kolleen M Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity JHU Press, 2003, pg 4-6
  7. ^ Kolleen M Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity JHU Press, 2003, pg 6
  8. ISBN 978-0199681372
    , attributed
  9. ISBN 0-06-073792-1
  10. JSTOR 286747
  11. ^ a b c Kolleen M. Guy. (2003). "When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity". JHU Press. Page 234.
  12. ^ Ojumu, Akin (8 September 2002). "Hip pop". The Observer. London. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
  13. ^ L. Farmer "Grabbing le Bâton - A new generation of Champenois is ready to handle the good and the too good Archived November 24, 2007, at the Wayback Machine" The Wine News, Accessed 16 December 2007
  14. ^ Woodard, Richard (June 16, 2006). "Rapper Jay Z boycotts "racist" Cristal". Decanter.com. Archived from the original on March 24, 2010. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
  15. ^ Steinberger, Mike, Slate.com (June 22, 2006). "The Cristal Boycott". Slate.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  16. TheGuardian.com.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  17. ^ "Is the champagne in the Jay-z video for real? It's complicated.", Bloomberg Businessweek, Brand New Day, Burt Helm, October 25, 2006
  18. ^ Make mine a 007...: Film statistics Archived December 26, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, accessed 16 December 2007
  19. ^ IMDB: The Champagne Waltz (1937)
  20. ^ Wine Intro "Champagne and Movies" Accessed 16 December 2007
  21. ^ Into Wine "Champagne at the Movies"
  22. ^ Kolleen M Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity JHU Press, 2003, pp 37-40
  23. ^ Pimm Jal De La Parra, U2 Live: A Concert Documentary Omnibus Press 2003, p128
  24. ^ Johan Åkesson, "Vaskning är bratsens provokation" (Eng. ”Sinking is the brats’ provocation”), Dagens Nyheter, 2 August 2010
  25. ^ L. Cramer "Champagne is the life of the Party" San Jose Mercury News, 7 December 2007
  26. ^ "Champagne Glass Origin". Snopes. 3 March 2002.
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