Fabricating Effervescence: Creating, Maintaining, and Defending Champagne’s Bubble(s)

This paper explores the fabrication, managing, and defending of the “champagne bubble” during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together heterogenous elements – material, cultural, economic, political, legal, mythical – champagne is a powerful symbol and extremely valuable brand. I show how the champagne bubble is both fragile and rigid, both needing to be actively defended, and capable of rising from the ashes of wars as well as economic crises. Just as the bubbles in a champagne glass are influenced by numerous forces, so the metaphorical champagne bubble is subject to complex influences. Some of these are explored in this paper.