The establishment of champagne in Britain, 1860-1914

Short abstract
This thesis is the first to study the history of champagne in nineteenth-century Britain, a period in which the usage and style of champagne changed fundamentally. From a sweet, lightly effervescent wine drunk on its own or with desserts, it became a fully dry and fully sparkling wine drunk throughout the meal. The central questions I address are why these changes occurred and what role the marketing and branding of champagne played in these changes. This analysis integrates production studies (including marketing and branding) and consumption studies by drawing on the rich vein of contemporary consumption data and the evidence of the day-to-day practice of the London agents of the French champagne houses. The thesis demonstrates that champagne was able to develop uniquely powerful brands that were managed in ways that closely prefigure the marketing practice of modern luxury brand owners.
Historiography
Whilst there have been many books on the subject of consumption in the last three decades, very few of these have focused on drinkers and drinking. There have also been many different approaches to consumption studies from sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars and historians and this work draws on all those traditions. My own interest lies in the changing daily habits of consumption and I have therefore drawn extensively not just on the historical scholarship but also on the writings of modern experts on branding and marketing to understand how consumer choice is currently understood and managed. The commercial importance of food and drink means much work has been done in these areas – not excluding wine. The history of drink in the last three centuries, however, has had relatively little interest until recently. Recent works by John Burnett, Charles Ludington and James Simpson illuminate the general history of wine in Britain but, though there are many general books on champagne, there has only been one history, that published by André Simon in 1905. Simon, agent for a champagne producer, was well placed to understand the trade and his work remains an important source. I have endeavoured to review all these works through the lens of the nineteenth-century British press and the archives of selected champagne producers and their British distributors.
1. Framing the market: wine in Britain, 1800-1914
Chapter one surveys the British wine market between 1800 and 1914. It looks at the market performance of different wines over time in the context of the rapid rise in light (i.e. unfortified) wine sales after Gladstone’s liberalisation of both the duties on wine and the licensing system in 1860–62. Using market performance data derived from government statistics supplemented by analysis of newspaper advertisements for wine and archival data from the market-leading distribution firm of W. & A. Gilbey, it examines the importance and impact of a number of century-long drivers of change: notably the ‘temperate turn’ in British society, the continuing concerns over adulteration and sharp practice in the trade and the consequent persistent but patchy growth in attempts to brand wine. By the end of the 1860s, champagne was established as a wine not just of the elite but also of the new commercial middle class, and it continued to hold its share of the overall wine market until sales slipped in the five years immediately prior to World War One. After looking at the nineteenth-century history of other wines, the chapter closes with an introductory overview of the champagne market, focusing on the changes in its taste and style and its unique ability to sustain frequent price rises which the thesis will link to its role as an important marker of social status.
2. ‘A smart agent and lavish expenditure’: the distribution and marketing of champagne in England 1860–75
In the fifteen years after Gladstone’s liberalisation of the wine market, entrepreneurial London agents acting for French producers largely took control of the marketing of champagne. They exploited the fast-growing market, evolving new distribution strategies and dealing with the challenges posed by counterfeit wines and ‘namealike’ brands. In particular, Adolphe Hubinet, the agent for the French house of Pommery and Greno, started to develop highly effective branding and marketing strategies that would in the following decades build Pommery into the most expensive and well-known brand in the British market. Using the archives of the French champagne houses, the Gilbey’s archives and the coverage of wine in a range of contemporary British sources that includes the national and provincial press and the specialist wine trade press, the chapter outlines how champagne’s new marketing template was developed and exploited by Pommery and other brands. However, increasing popularity brought its own challenges and the chapter concludes by looking at the pressures on champagne that might have caused price-led deterioration of quality of the type that resulted in both claret and sherry losing their reputation in the British market.
3. ‘Taste changes very fast’: consumers and consumption, 1860–75
In the first of two chapters on the consumers and their perspective on the market, I examine how the consumption of champagne changed between 1860 and 1875 and how these changes affected the taste and image of champagne. The chapter first analyses why it became so popular and socially powerful amongst men and women across a broad range of society. Specifically, it points to the importance of the dinner party and how it contributed to changing champagne from slightly less sweet than the European standard to very dry. Producer archives and sales records are used to confirm this shift to dry wines but the main sources for this chapter are the press, novels and songs of the period, as well as the flood of new wine books aimed at introducing a new public to the ever-increasing range of wine that was becoming available on the British market. Despite the range of information about wine that such books and articles in the general press communicated, most informed contemporaries agreed that the great majority of consumers were incapable of judging the quality of different champagnes. The market began to segment: lower-price wines for public dinners, race meetings and public or semi-public events; higher-priced and heavily branded wines for dinner parties where social capital was on display.
4. ‘Votaries of fashion?’: changing consumer tastes, 1876–1914
The second of the two chapters on consumption shows how champagne became steadily more embedded in the habits of late Victorian society. It focuses on illustrating and understanding the social and marketing dynamics that cemented champagne’s role as a powerful marker of status and a symbol of personal hedonism. Using similar sources to Chapter Three but also drawing on the rich data contained in Punch cartoons, this chapter examines the role of women in champagne choice and consumption, the power of the label and the importance of fashion as a driver of choice. It also considers the role of premium pricing. Despite the concern expressed by the general and trade press at the steadily rising price (at a point when prices of other wines were stable or falling), consumers continued to respond to the ‘illusion of scarcity’ that the champagne houses fostered, notably through the introduction in the mid-1870s of vintage-dated wines which took the market by storm in the 1880s and 1890s. Though such expensive wines were beyond the pocket of many in the middling classes of society, they too adopted the champagne habit, which became part not just of the celebrations of the wealthy but also of the day-to-day rituals of men in the commercial and professional classes. Though champagne’s appropriation of personal ‘celebration’ was certainly not complete before World War One, the foundations for this shift from the public to the private were laid in the period 1876–1914. The chapter concludes by examining consumer signalling in the light of modern thinking about identity and status.
5. ‘The magic of brand’: the marketing and branding of champagne, 1876–1914
The final chapter of the thesis returns to the perspective of the champagne industry to analyse firstly how and why its branding and marketing changed after the mid-1870s and what effect these tactics had on consumers, and secondly, how their approach compares to that advocated by modern luxury marketers. The first intensification of the branding and marketing came with the introduction of vintage-dated wines (of which Pommery 1874 was the first and most important). These created what modern marketers have called the all-important ‘illusion of scarcity’ in products that are, in fact, readily available and enabled the producers to push up prices considerably. Secondly, the period saw successful development and increasing differentiation of the house brands which effectively side-lined the merchant’s own brands regardless of any cost advantage to consumers. I look at two different attempts to create new ‘challenger brands’ and analyse the reasons for their failure. Increasingly, new and secondary brands entering the market attempted to appropriate the ‘cachet’ of the Champagne region, and the final sections of the chapter look at the French-led initiatives centred on the Paris Expositions of 1889 and 1900 that laid the foundations for the successful creation of ‘Champagne’ as an exclusive territorial brand. ‘If it’s not from Champagne, it’s not champagne’ is still central to all the modern champagne trade’s marketing. The chapter closes with a case study of Moët & Chandon, who were the first to integrate the themes of the territorial brand into a marketing approach specific to the United Kingdom and, in doing so, set the tone for the marketing of the immediate post-war era. The thesis as a whole demonstrates firstly the importance of champagne’s in the development of product branding, a process in which its role as a social marker in Victorian society was central. Secondly, it reaffirms the importance of intermediaries in the history of consumption. It is not enough to focus solely on producers and consumers. Lastly it shows the crucial role that the champagne industry played in the development of territorial branding, which has become central to food and drink marketing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Advisor: Whyte, W
de Bellaigue, C