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.