The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year.
In fact, champagne as a dry sparkling wine was created specifically for us. Until the mid-19th century, most production from the Champagne region was still red wine. French connoisseurs thought the fizzy stuff rather vulgar. Bertin du Rocheret, a wine merchant, compared it to ‘beer, chocolate and whipped cream’. It would have been a rich yellow wine fortified with brandy; a sort of sparkling sweet sherry, beloved by Russians in particular.
While Veuve Clicquot built her business on the Russian market, others such as Pol Roger saw that the future lay with the expanding British middle classes.
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