When champagne isn't from Champagne and is still champagne?
Climate change is Britainizing the quintessential French product
H/T Bruce McIndoe.
Champagne the sparkling wine is a triumph of both evolution and marketing, but it is quite challenged by the reality of climate change’s progressive unfolding.
Romans started planting vineyards in northeastern France in the 5th century, and, for centuries, the region yielded pale red wines from Pinot Noir grapes. By the 1200s, these wines were being drunk across Europe, becoming quite popular.
But here was the trick: the Champagne region’s cold winters would interrupt fermentation so that, when spring arrived, a secondary fermentation of the yeast would occur inside the sealed bottles, with carbon dioxide trapped inside the bottles creating bubbles — a huge problem that caused bottles to explode randomly.
But here’s where the French got clever and made the problem a market differentiator: our wine is more lively and thus unique! They learned how to control the bubbly problem through more careful production and packaging methods while marketing the product as this special, elite form of wine — a purposeful improvement versus a defect.
By the 1600s, champagnes had become the favorite of the French royal court, and the rest is marketing history: champagne is the premier celebration wine made special by all those bubbles.
Since then the French have sought to discredit any sparkling wine as somehow illegitimate because it doesn’t come from the Champagne region, and they’ve won a lot of regulatory fights over that over the decades, the ruleset being that only sparking wines from that region can claim to be true champagne. The rest are just sparkling wines even though the product is basically the same.
Enter climate change.
Now, with climate velocity unfolding (the shifting movement of a clime over areas, typically poleward and/or higher in elevation), southern Britain is basically the recipient of what used to be northeast France’s clime — like God somehow gifted it from France to Britain.
The solution?
French champagne houses, based in Champagne France, are now investing in vineyards and wineries in southern England, in some instances starting new vineyards for champagne production.
Mon Dieu!
As always, climate change gives us the choice: adapt, move, or die.
One assumes French Champagne houses are doing everything they can to adapt, but when it comes to climate velocity, the ultimate hedging answer is to move — and so they move.
Here’s the underlying market reality: Britain is Champagne’s best market, so, in the future, one can expect these Champagne houses to market these sparkling wines as locally grown and thus “customized” to British tastes, or some such.
And if that offends your sense of propriety, then I say, put a cork in it.
