Let’s start the new era with a glass of champagne

‘I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad,’ Madame Lily Bollinger (1899-1977) remarked. ‘Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory.’ As the last constituency results trickle in, we’ll all inevitably find ourselves in some combination of those four states.

If you’re sad, I hope at least you have good company – and that you’re as well supplied with the great French spirit-lifter as I have been this week, with a busload of Spectator readers on a tour to Reims, Epernay and Aÿ. But I suspect you’ve also consumed more than enough media comment on the spectacle of second-rate politicians slime-wrestling, dog-whistling and lying about tax plans. And given that the elections at home and in France have temporarily knocked business out of the news, I hope you’ll forgive me if I slip my harness for once and offer a column that’s about (almost) nothing but champagne.

Seduction technique

I mean, of course, champagne as a case-study of resilient entrepreneurship and brand projection, whatever the changes of political and physical climate: I’m not just going to boast about how much I’ve been drinking. But I’ll start by admitting that after tasting 40 wines in four days, I cannot claim an expert’s palate. I preferred, for example, the slightly nutty Henri Chauvet Brut Blanc de Noirs (£29.95 in the UK) over Bollinger’s supposedly fabulous La Côte aux Enfants 2012 (£1,060 – yes, that’s per bottle). Does that make me a rosbif vulgarian, or is it a perfect illustration of the myth-making that gives champagne its commercial power?

La Côte aux Enfants is ‘the realisation of the visionary spirit of Jacques Bollinger’, who was Lily’s husband. The Blanc de Noirs is the unspun product of the fourth–generation Damien Chauvet and his wife Mathilde, from a tiny cellar under their home in the village of Rilly la Montagne.