Why Do We Celebrate With Champagne? The Real History

The crucial thing to understand is that Champagne was prestigious as a place before it was famous as a drink. Around the year 496, Clovis, king of the Franks, was baptised at Reims, and that single event turned the city into the spiritual home of the French monarchy. From roughly the end of the ninth century through to Charles X in 1825, some thirty kings were crowned inside Reims Cathedral, anointed with holy oil in the most sacred ceremony the kingdom possessed. Reims sits in Champagne, and the region’s wine was poured at the coronation banquets that followed.

Here is the part the marketing later blurred: that wine was still, not sparkling. Clovis never raised a flute of fizz, because fizz did not yet exist. What the region banked over those centuries was association. Champagne became the wine of kings by geography and ceremony, not by bubbles. When the sparkling version finally arrived, it inherited a thousand years of royal reputation it had done nothing to earn.

The fizz was originally a defect. In Champagne’s cold climate, fermentation would stall in winter and restart in spring, trapping carbon dioxide in the barrel and, later, the bottle. Winemakers hated it. Bottles exploded in cellars, sometimes in chain reactions, and the wine was written off as flawed. Contrary to the myth, Dom Pierre Pérignon, the monk who ran the cellars at the Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668, was not trying to create those bubbles. He was largely trying to get rid of them. His real genius was in blending and careful pressing, not in inventing sparkle.

The people who actually cracked deliberate sparkling wine were English. In 1662, the physician Christopher Merret presented a paper to the newly formed Royal Society describing how adding sugar made wine “brisk and sparkling”, six years before Pérignon even arrived at Hautvillers. England also had the other missing piece: strong coal-fired glass that could survive the pressure, and Portuguese cork to hold it in. Once the bottle stopped exploding, the fault became a feature, and the feature became theatre. The cork’s bang, the rising foam, the mist off the neck: this is a drink that performs before anyone tastes it, and that performance is a large part of why we reach for it when there is something to mark.

Through the eighteenth century, sparkling Champagne was an expensive novelty for people who could afford novelties: the court and the aristocracy. The great houses that still dominate today set up shop in exactly this window. Ruinart came first in 1729, Moët followed in 1743, and Veuve Clicquot arrived in 1772 before the widow Clicquot turned it into an empire and refined the riddling method that made the wine clear and commercial. It helped that the drink had powerful fans. Claude Moët is said to have persuaded Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s influential mistress, that Champagne suited any occasion, and there are few better endorsements in pre-Revolution France than that. At this stage the answer to “why celebrate with Champagne” was simple snobbery: it was costly, it was royal by association, and drinking it announced that you belonged. The interesting bit is what happened when the aristocracy that gave it meaning got violently abolished.

When the French Revolution swept away kings and much of the Church’s grip on public life, a lot of ceremony was left without a home. Christenings, coming-of-age, career milestones, national days: these still needed marking, but the old religious and royal frameworks were suddenly suspect. Champagne slid neatly into the gap. It already carried the aura of importance, minus any specific altar or throne you now had to disapprove of. It became a portable, secular way to say “this moment matters”, available to anyone with the money, which increasingly meant a growing, ambitious bourgeoisie rather than a shrinking nobility. The stage was set for the cleverest phase of the whole story.

This is where marketing takes over from tradition, and the historian Kolleen M. Guy documents it beautifully in her book When Champagne Became French. Between roughly 1820 and 1920, Champagne’s merchant-producers, the négociants, faced a booming market and a rising middle class hungry for ways to signal status in an uncertain modern world. So they sold Champagne as exactly that signal. As Guy’s research shows, they deliberately attached the wine to weddings, launches, holidays and achievements until buying a bottle became the accepted way to mark almost anything. Champagne became the thing that, in a much-repeated phrase, oiled the wheels of social life.

The campaign even had celebrity endorsement, of a rowdy Victorian sort. In 1866 the London music-hall star George Leybourne became “Champagne Charlie”, singing the praises of the high life while reportedly contracted to be seen drinking nothing but Champagne in public. His rival Alfred Vance fired back with a song plugging Clicquot. It was an endorsement war fought in a theatre, funded by the trade, and it worked. If you want to see the modern descendants of that strategy, our rundown of the most popular Champagne brands is essentially a list of houses still selling the same idea.

By the twentieth century the associations had hardened into reflex. Weddings and New Year’s Eve are the two big ones, and both make sense once you see the pattern: they are communal thresholds, moments a whole group crosses together, and a single shared bottle poured into many glasses is a near-perfect symbol of that. The cork marks the instant. Everyone drinks the same thing at the same time. It is ritual technology as much as it is a drink.

Ship christenings are the most literal version, and they come with a warning about lazy history. Launching a vessel with a libation is ancient, the Greeks poured water and wine, and earlier cultures did far grislier things, so Champagne did not start that tradition at all. It simply took it over late. Champagne became the christening drink of choice only at the very end of the nineteenth century, around the launch of the USS Maine in 1890 and, most famously, when Queen Victoria smashed a bottle against HMS Royal Arthur in 1891. Prestige plus a bottle that explodes photogenically against a hull: of course it stuck.

The most modern Champagne ritual has the best origin story, and it is properly documented rather than invented. At the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Swiss driver Jo Siffert was handed a magnum-sized bottle that had sat in the sun all day. When it was opened the built-up pressure sent it spraying over the podium by accident. Nobody planned it, and a PR team would ordinarily have prayed everyone forgot it.

One man did not forget. A year later, having won the 1967 race with A.J. Foyt in a Ford GT40, the American Dan Gurney was handed a jeroboam of Moët and, on the podium, shook it up and deliberately drenched everyone, drivers, photographers, Carroll Shelby, Henry Ford II and his wife included. By his own account he had no idea he was starting anything. He was just delighted. The gesture reached Formula 1 by 1969 and has soaked winners’ podiums ever since. It is the perfect modern parable for this whole article: an accident, seized on, repeated until it became a tradition nobody questions.

Strip away the history and Champagne is still almost perfectly engineered for celebration, which is why the marketing had such good raw material to work with. The pop of the cork is an audible starting gun that makes everyone look up at once. The bubbles and the rising foam signal that something is different from ordinary drinking. It is expensive enough to feel like a deliberate choice, so opening a bottle is itself a small act of commitment to the moment. And the format matters more than people realise: one bottle, shared out into raised glasses, physically enacts togetherness in a way a round of separate pints never could. The right glass even sharpens the effect. Tradition told us Champagne was special; our senses keep agreeing.