Why Champagne is Connected to Wealth?

No drink says money quite like champagne. The pop of the cork, the rising thread of bubbles, the tall flute raised at a wedding or a Grand Prix podium — all of it signals celebration, success and a certain kind of wealth. But that association was not an accident of taste. It was built, deliberately and brilliantly, over the better part of a thousand years, from the coronation of French kings to the marketing genius of a handful of champagne houses¹.

The wine of kings

Champagne’s royal reputation begins with geography. From the crowning of Louis I in 861, French kings were consecrated at the great cathedral of Reims, in the very heart of the Champagne region, for the better part of a thousand years⁶. The coronation banquets were lavish affairs attended by the most powerful people in the kingdom, and the local wine — at first still, later sparkling — flowed freely at every one.

Out of this royal ritual came a nickname that stuck: champagne, people said, was “the wine of kings and the king of wines”¹. Long before a single bubble was bottled on purpose, the region’s wine already carried the glow of the crown.

The court makes it fashionable

What coronations began, the royal court perfected. At Versailles under Louis XIV and Louis XV, the new sparkling wine became the height of aristocratic fashion — a novelty, a luxury, and a little bit of theatre in a glass². Its most influential champion was Madame de Pompadour, the cultured mistress of Louis XV, who is said to have delivered the perfect endorsement.

“Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it.”— attributed to Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV⁴

In the hands of the court, champagne became associated not just with wealth but with wit, seduction and sophistication — the drink of people who had everything and wanted to be seen enjoying it. That image would prove astonishingly durable.

The Dom Pérignon myth

And what of the monk whose name adorns the world’s most famous champagne? The popular story — that the blind Benedictine Dom Pérignon invented sparkling champagne and, on first tasting it, cried “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” — is very nearly the opposite of the truth³. Pérignon was a real and gifted cellarmaster at the Abbey of Hautvillers, and he genuinely improved the region’s winemaking. But in his day the bubbles were considered a fault, and much of his work aimed to prevent them, not create them.

The heroic legend was largely stitched together in the 19th century, when champagne houses realised that a photogenic monk and a poetic quote made irresistible marketing. The myth itself, in other words, was a luxury product³.

Marketing the bubbles

For the association with wealth was, above all, sold. Through the 18th and 19th centuries the great champagne houses courted the crowned heads of Europe with ruthless charm, turning royal warrants and imperial patronage into the world’s first great luxury brands².

The widowed Barbe-Nicole Clicquot smuggled her champagne to the Russian court as Napoleon fell, capturing a market that adored it for a century. And genuine expense underpinned the glamour: the painstaking méthode traditionnelle — the second fermentation in the bottle, the hand-turning, the years of ageing — really did make champagne costly to produce. By the 20th century the link was unbreakable, immortalised by figures like Winston Churchill, who quipped that in victory he deserved champagne and in defeat he needed it⁵.

Why the bubbles still mean money

Today champagne sprays from the podiums of Formula 1, christens ships and superyachts, and fills the glasses of every film celebration — and every pop of the cork still carries that thousand-year charge of royalty, luxury and success¹. The taste is real, but the meaning was made: a wine of kings, refined by a court, mythologised by a monk’s legend, and marketed into the single most powerful symbol of wealth in the entire world of drink.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine in royal courts and noble houses
• Roman bubbles: ancient sparkling wine?
• Wine and historical trade routes

References

1. Comité Champagne (champagne.fr) — Champagne and its history. www.champagne.fr ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Champagne (wine). www.britannica.com ↩
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pierre (Dom) Pérignon. www.britannica.com ↩
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Madame de Pompadour. www.britannica.com ↩
5. International Churchill Society — Churchill Quotes on Champagne. winstonchurchill.org ↩
6. The Good Life France — Champagne: The Story. thegoodlifefrance.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
A grand history of wine with a rich account of champagne’s rise from coronation cup to global luxury.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
Shows how wine — and champagne in particular — became bound up with status, power and celebration.

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