Moët Is Using Formula 1 to Find Champagne’s Next Drinkers

Moët Is Using Formula 1 to Find Champagne’s Next Drinkers

Moët & Chandon will be title sponsor of the 2027 Australian Grand Prix, putting its name on a race that drew 483,934 people this year. Champagne has a demographic problem it has been unable to solve with advertising. Formula 1 has the audience it needs. This is what that costs.

By Vim, Editor of 12×75

In brief

• Moët & Chandon will be title sponsor of the 2027 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park, taking naming rights from Qatar Airways. Announced September 18, 2026.
• The race runs April 2 to 4, 2027, as round three rather than the season opener, and will stage a sprint race at Albert Park for the first time. The 2026 event drew 483,934 attendees.
• It follows LVMH’s ten-year global luxury partnership with F1, signed in 2025, which made Moët the official Champagne of Formula 1 for the first time since 1997. It is also title partner of the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa.
• Moët chief executive Sibylle Scherer called Australia “one of the world’s great Champagne markets” with resonance across Asia-Pacific. The house first shipped to Melbourne in 1888.
• The context nobody in the announcement mentions: Champagne shipments have fallen three years running, and the average buyer is getting older.

What was announced

Sibylle Scherer, Moët’s president and chief executive, framed it around the market rather than the sport: “Melbourne holds a special place in Moët & Chandon’s story. Australia is one of the world’s great Champagne markets and Melbourne gives this title sponsorship a resonance that extends across the Asia-Pacific region.” The house first shipped to Melbourne in 1888, for the city’s Centennial Exhibition, which is the sort of detail a maison keeps in a drawer for exactly this purpose.

Why Formula 1, and why now

Because F1 has the audience Champagne has been unable to buy any other way.

The sport’s transformation over the last five years is well documented and genuinely unusual: a motorsport that was ageing and male has become younger, substantially more female and vastly more global, largely through streaming, social media and the Netflix effect. Nearly half a million people went to Albert Park this year. They skew affluent, they travel, and they are standing in a venue where the podium ritual is literally spraying Champagne.

Compare that with how Champagne normally reaches people. Through brand recognition built over a century, through weddings, through duty free, and through a retail shelf where the buying decision is made by someone who already knows what Champagne is for. None of those routes reach a 28-year-old in Melbourne who has never bought a bottle and has no particular reason to start.

The LVMH deal makes the scale clearer. This is not a one-off: LVMH signed a ten-year global luxury partnership with F1 in 2025, and Moët returned as official Champagne of the championship for the first time since 1997. It is already title partner at Spa. Belvedere and Chandon, both LVMH, activated at Albert Park this year. What is being built is not a sponsorship but a permanent presence, on a calendar that visits 24 countries a year.

The numbers behind the urgency

The announcement does not mention any of this, so here it is.

Read those together and the sponsorship looks less like a luxury indulgence and more like a response. A category shipping fewer bottles each year, coming off its smallest harvest in forty years, cannot fix a demographic problem with supply. It has to find new drinkers, and it has to find them in places where the product already makes sense.

There is a supply-side argument too, and it is slightly awkward. When production falls as sharply as it is forecast to this year, a house does not need more demand for the next twelve months. But brand-building operates on a longer clock than a harvest, and a ten-year F1 partnership is aimed at who is drinking in 2035, not who is drinking next spring.

Does sport actually sell Champagne?

Reasonable question, and the honest answer is that nobody outside LVMH’s marketing department knows the return on this.

What can be said is that the association is unusually natural. Most sponsorship requires a brand to explain why it belongs; Champagne on a Formula 1 podium requires no explanation at all, because it has been there since the 1960s and the image is lodged in the culture. Moët itself was on the Australian podium from 1985 to 1997. This is a return rather than an arrival, which is a much easier story to tell.

The riskier part is what sponsorship does to a luxury brand’s positioning. Moët is already the most widely distributed prestige Champagne in the world and its challenge has never been reach; it is the bottle people buy when they want Champagne without thinking about it. Putting the name on a stadium event reinforces ubiquity rather than desirability, and ubiquity is precisely what the genuinely luxury Champagnes trade above. Whether LVMH cares is another matter: Moët is the volume engine, and Dom Pérignon, also LVMH, is the halo.

There is also the Australian angle Scherer emphasised. Australia is a serious sparkling market, with a domestic industry and a strong Prosecco habit, and the Champagne-versus-Prosecco question is fought harder there than in most places. Owning the name of the country’s biggest sporting weekend is a direct answer to that, and it reaches Asia-Pacific at the same time, which is the region where the drinks trade has had its worst year.

The pattern this belongs to

Look across the last month in drinks and you see the same instinct everywhere: established categories buying their way into occasions they have lost.

Christina Aguilera has bought into a Champagne brand selling itself on low sugar to health-conscious drinkers. Gallo put an $11 red wine in a Halloween blood bag. Patrón is running an agave school for bartenders, Don Julio an immersive tasting. And Champagne’s biggest house has bought a Grand Prix.

These look unrelated and they are the same move. Every one of them is a mature brand accepting that the occasions it used to own are shrinking, and going to find the occasions that are growing. The can is winning the everyday, as the RTD data keeps showing. What is left for the traditional categories is the event, and events can be bought.

The verdict

It is a sensible deal and a slightly sad one. Sensible because the fit is genuine, the audience is exactly the one Champagne needs, the Melbourne history is real rather than manufactured, and a ten-year LVMH partnership gives it time to work. Slightly sad because a category that spent three hundred years as the default symbol of celebration now has to buy the naming rights to a celebration to stay in the conversation.

For anyone actually buying Champagne, none of this changes what is in the bottle. Moët Impérial is the same wine it was last week, and the bottles that give you most for your money are, as ever, the ones without a Formula 1 contract attached. But if the sponsorship brings a few hundred thousand people into the category who would otherwise have drunk something else, it will have done its job, and the rest of the category will quietly benefit too.

Sources

• WWD: Moët & Chandon becomes title sponsor of the 2027 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix
• Forbes Australia: deal detail, calendar changes and sponsor history
• Speedcafe: Australian Grand Prix Corporation and Moët statements
• B&T: LVMH brand activity at Albert Park

Attendance and calendar details are from the Australian Grand Prix Corporation and F1 reporting. Champagne shipment and harvest figures are from the region’s published data as covered previously on 12×75. Commercial terms of the sponsorship were not disclosed. Correct as of September 25, 2026. Please drink responsibly.