The Economy May Be Flat, But Champagne Sales Are Popping

People may be poorer than they were a year ago, but that is not stopping them from indulging their taste for an apparently affordable luxury.

Champagne could be the premier example of what good intellectual property protection can do for a brand. Produced only in those parts of the Champagne region of France so designated, the drink's scarcity has contributed to its worldwide appeal. And like so many other (relatively) raw materials, increased demand from China and other new markets has driven up prices. Sparkling wines, the champagne-lite imitation is benefitting from this upsurge as suppliers of the real thing are limited in how much inventory they have to sell.

The lesson is that people will find a way to lighten the burdens of life one way or another. Champagne's protectors have done a superb job of managing the value of their product through reputation and availability. As a result, they will have more than just the new year to celebrate tonight. JL

Michelle Locke reports in the Associated Press via the Columbus Dispatch:

With the economy in a funk and consumer spending in a slump, one glass seems more than half-full — flutes of Champagne, to be precise.

Sales tumbled as the Great Recession hit, but Champagne shipments rose almost 22 percent in the first six months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010 — with 7.5 million bottles shipped to the United States as of June, according to the Champagne Bureau, based in Washington
And, from July 2010 to June 2011, 18.3 million bottles were shipped — about a 20 percent increase from the same 2009-10 period.

The trend might be attributed to people spending more, from $30 to $50 on a bottle of wine, said Gwendolyn Osborn of the online retailer Wine.com.

Finding good Champagnes in such a range, “People are buying them, since it is viewed as a luxury,” she said.

Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label, which sells for about $45 on the site, ranked No. 6 on the Wine.com top sellers for 2011.

Bargain-priced bubbles were popular, too, of course. The No. 2 wine on the list was a cava from Spain: Jaume Serra Cristalino Brut Cava, which sells for $7.99. Still, there was definite interest in Champagne. Dom Perignon 2002, which costs about $160, jumped from 67th on the list last year to 27th this year.

No need to sell author and wine expert Leslie Sbrocco on the joys of Champagne. She’s such a fan that she had a glass of pink bubbly tattooed on her calf.

Sbrocco, author of Wine for Women and founder of the website ThirstyGirl.com, likes all types of sparkling wine, including cava from Spain and prosecco from Italy.

“But Champagne is the icon; it is the mother ship, if you will, of bubbles,” she said.

To be called Champagne, the wines have to be made with grapes from the Champagne region of France.

Sparkling wines are thought to have originated as a happy accident: Grapes were fermented and barreled during a cool harvest, which made the yeasts that turn sugar into alcohol go dormant. A warm spring woke up the yeasts, restarted fermentation and, in the process, created bubbles.

Just where and when that happened is unclear, but records show that sparkling wines were produced in the Languedoc region of southern France decades before the Champagne region became renowned for its sparkling wine.

At first, winemakers saw bubbles as a flaw — and a dangerous one at that — because the re-fermentation could cause the weak glass bottles of the era to explode. The advent of better corks and stronger bottles helped turn Champagne into a reliable product, one that was taken up by the French royal court.

These days, sparkling wines are available from all over the world — including many that are made the same way as Champagne.

Still, Champagne has maintained its cachet, thanks in part to a robust name-protection campaign waged by French producers who have reached agreements with wine regions and governments worldwide to stop referring to sparkling wines from elsewhere as Champagne. U.S. officials signed an agreement in 2006 to stop new producers from using the name. Existing brands, however, were grandfathered in, although they are required to put the origin — such as “California” or “American” — on the label.

French Champagne tends to be expensive, with some bottles commanding hundreds of dollars. But there are values to be found.

Sbrocco advises looking at non-vintage blends offered by some of the big houses — including the Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label and Louis Roederer Brut Premier.

Another emerging trend is “grower Champagnes,” made by smaller producers that mostly grow their own grapes, as opposed to the big Champagne houses that buy grapes from throughout the region. One way to identify a grower Champagne is if it has the initials RM on the label, which stand for Recoltant-Manipulant — literally, “harvester-handler.”

Sarah Elliott, certified sommelier and wine director at Commonwealth restaurant in San Francisco, sees grower Champagnes as producing more unusual styles tied to smaller parcels — which seems to be contributing to a trend of more people viewing Champagne as a good food wine, not just something popped in celebration.

Another change on the Champagne front is renewed interest in drier types of wines that have had very little or no sugar added after the in-bottle fermentation. Some examples are Laurent-Perrier Ultra Brut and Pol Roger Pure, which Sbrocco would pair with “oysters or goat cheese or anything salty.”

Like Sbrocco, Osborn — the Wine.com expert — likes to drink pink, citing a Canard-Duchene Brut Rose on the website that sells for about $45 and, she said, is “really fantastic.”

True Champagne “has a taste unlike any other,” Osborn said. “It brings all of these wonderful assets together — beautiful packaging, beautiful to look at. I would rather have one beautiful glass of Champagne than a few glasses of just about anything else.”