Wine 11 min

Champagne

On grower Champagne, one AOC for 34,000 hectares, and why the most interesting bottles have initials you've never heard of

More than any other wine in the world, Champagne is so imbued with our ideas about culture and lifestyle that we forget that it's actually wine. When my dad died, we drank Champagne. When P. Diddy wants to celebrate his wealth by raining benjamins and pouring wine on his shoes, he uses Champagne. Champagne is so semiotically rich that its importance as wine is almost irrelevant. Except that it's not.

Champagne is dominated by only a handful of brand names. These négociants and coopératives produce a staggering eighty percent of the total output in Champagne yet they own only twelve percent of the vineyards. Nearly all the Champagne in the world is made by giant companies that don't own the vineyards and didn't do the farming — a sparkling wine made in a highly interventionist and formulaic way. In a word: spoofulated.

Full Text

Full text available to friends and family — See the Family section