The Champagne Tippler
We are living at a time, at least in my lifetime, when we most need to engage with those whose views differ from ours, even — perhaps especially — when those views seem drastically and fundamentally opposed. This creates a rather unnerving paradox if you also accept a harsh but basic truth of life: some people are simply best avoided. Take, for example, the people who regularly choose champagne as their drink of choice. I’m sure that they’re not all superficial, crass and tacky, but there’s a very good chance they will be. It may sound unduly judgmental, but it’s generally better to avoid them — life is exhausting enough as it is.
Perhaps I am being brutally unfair, but I see little point in engaging with people who describe champagne as their usual tipple. Champagne tipplers might seem glamorous and successful on the surface — they may even seem beautiful. But the harsh reality is that those people are far more likely to be vacuous, arrogant, self-congratulatory and pretentious. To use one of the most common and translatable clichés: “life’s too short”. It’s easier to navigate it by actively avoiding some folk as best you can. (And, to be fair, at least in my case, save them the hassle of spending time with me.)
Like with most things in life, there are always exceptions. Occasionally in our attempts to take a shortcut, we might find it has taken us in the wrong direction, leaving us in a worse place than when we started. Perhaps, what was avoided was infinitely better than the bad shortcut taken. But, let’s be honest, those occasions are the rare exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking, decidedly avoiding fairly obvious short-cuts in the hope that we’ll actually reach our destination quicker or find a better destination by chance, is like searching for a tiny diamond in an enormous field of shit.
Christopher Hitchens is quoted in the New Yorker as to have said, “The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.” I can’t say I strictly agree with him. I’ve always been quite partial to anal sex and picnics — partly because, being British, they tend to be quite the seasonal rarity.
Lobster, on the other hand, well there’s something I’m in complete agreement over. It’s bland, it’s ridiculously overpriced, and it’s gone from a poor man’s meal to the symbolic food of the upper classes, for no good reason other than the fact it’s expensive and seen as the choice of the rich.
In terms of my own personal taste, I’m inclined to agree with Hitchens on champagne too. But I’m willing to bet my house (the one that I don’t own and can’t afford to own) that one of the key reasons why I’ve been put off champagne is because of the perverse way in which it is consumed by a certain section of society and the brash way it has been appropriated in modern culture.
I’m not arrogant enough to suggest, even for a second, that all those people that see great value in champagne are wrong and I’m right. To be honest, I’m not really against champagne at all. I have more of a problem with what it has come to represent in our culture, and the flashy fools who tarnish its value — the ones who drink it purely or mainly because of its perceived prestige, without any real appreciation for what it is as a wine.
The champagne tippler thinks they love champagne, but give that notion the tiniest bit of scrutiny and you’ll quickly find it’s pure bullshit. The champagne tippler doesn’t love champagne at all; they love the differential. The only value they place on prosecco or cava or any sparkling white wine for that matter, is solely in the sense of how they aren’t champagnes. For the champagne tippler, champagne is a purchase representing the reality of desiring class but not actually having any.
What disappoints me most about all this is how champagne is being ruined for the rest of us by its close-to-synonymous correlation with the loudest, crassest, and most boorish people on the planet. It’s becoming a shallow emblem of excess, so much so, that, at times, people don’t so much drink it anymore, but bathe themselves in it. It has become the tokenistic ritual of celebration. Winners spray it on themselves and anyone else who’s willing to idolise them in their victory.
Champagne is now so distorted in some folk’s appreciation that the point is no longer to drink it as a wine, it’s for a pointless form of ownership or consumption — either sprayed about in the sort of frivolous perversion I mentioned, or stored away (to go bad or taste flat) as some idiotic projection of wealth. For so many of us, we’ve forgotten whether we’re even supposed to enjoy it as a drink.
Few people seem to understand the profound insult this is to its production and craft. Rarely do we consider the unjust affront this is to the true artisans of the Champagne region — part of long standing family traditions, primarily motivated by producing fine quality wine. No one seems to have noticed how blind consumption treats artisans as nothing more than conduits to support a lavish and thoughtless experience.
Champagne is now, for so many people, a drink produced for shallow consumption and ownership, symptomatic of the rise of consumerism while culture coughs alone on its deathbed. It’s emblematic of our increasing failure to make even the slightest of efforts to comprehend true value.
Historically, champagne started in a region ill-suited for making wine based on the general methods available at the time. In fact, the now famous fizz and bubbles were not seen as its original virtue but the sorrowful outcomes of the secondary fermentation process on the acidic grapes of the region.
In the early days, bottles continually broke and corks would frequently fly out. It was not a particularly profitable venture until the Champagne wine makers made use of thicker glass bottles imported from Britain, along with a better process for keeping the corks in.
Shortly following these better handling processes, British (and later French) royalty and aristocracy developed quite the taste for it. This, as far as I can tell, is what has led the most to its continued and current success (if you can call it that). To put it simply, champagne became the drink of the ruling and upper classes. And their foot soldiers distortedly saw the drink as an opportunity to be like the ruling class — to push themselves up to the echelons of aristocracy, if only for a moment.
It’s only through this distorted view, and a lack of pertinent thought — as to why they should want to be anything like the people oppressing them and others around them, and why they should want to bask in the shallow pretentiousness and false honour of the classes above — that allowed champagne’s ludicrous transformation to take place.
It is only through this bizarre form of socialisation and tricking ourselves into pushing false value onto it, that champagne has now taken on a secondary value completely distorted to its real value as a wine.
The champagne makers of the region, in a strange sort of defiance, curtailed to the grape of the region, changing their processes but never the grape, in order to support wine production in a region where you would not expect it to flourish. And through their defiance, it flourished. Their efforts and persistence eventually paid off. I’m just not willing to make similar efforts with some of its now tokenistic supporters. For those folk, I’d rather just cut my losses.
I’m certain that there are magnificent champagnes out there. I’m confident that plenty of champagne drinkers are wonderful people. But, if you tell me that champagne is your tipple, I’m going to use that as a sign to shortcut away from you. There are always risks that come with taking shortcuts, but if it means that I will better avoid the rowdily superficial, then I’ll gladly take those risks.
