Champagne in popular culture

Champagne has featured prominently in popular culture for over a century, due in part to a long history of effective marketing and product placement by leading Champagne houses and their representatives, such as CIVC. In time this created an association of Champagne with luxury and exclusivity. The popularity and positive attributes associated with Champagne have caused many other sparkling wine producers not located in the French wine region of Champagne to incorrectly use the name "champagne" to describe their wines.

Although sparkling wine was invented in the Limoux area of Languedoc in 1535, the wine we know today as Champagne was first produced in the French region of 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.

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. As the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once commented, "Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right."

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