ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century champagne both transformed its consumers and was itself transformed: the production of the wine and the way it tasted changed but so did the taste for champagne and the way it was marketed. This chapter explores those transformations and their impact on consumers. The wine was made new in nineteenth-century Britain. Champagne became the fashionable wine of the second half of the nineteenth century, and the chapter shows how London-based agents and merchants encouraged, underwrote and exploited this status. The habitual consumption of champagne was restricted to a wealthy few but the idea of champagne was very widely spread through print media both popular and elite. Typically, champagne was presented as a feminine wine. Drinking dry champagne became a mark of modernity and youth and like the taste for drier champagne became more generally accepted, so elite consumers favoured ever drier wines, leading to the success of the brut vintage of 1874.
