Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury by Graham Harding (review)

Reviewed by: Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury by Graham Harding David Clemis Harding, Graham – Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 295 p. Graham Harding has taken the agreeable subject of champagne and provided us with a very rich and detailed study of branding and marketing in nineteenth-century Britain. Inevitably, this story is a complex weaving together of elements of the period's social and cultural history in an account of commercial practices, commodity production, and consumption. In doing so, it seeks to show how the English changed the substance and perception of champagne over the course of the nineteenth century. Along the way, Harding touches on a variety of other matters such as the construction of gender identities, British imperial identity and influence, and class relations. But this book is pre-eminently, and at its best, a study in the development of luxury product branding. Harding strives to show us how the collective branding of champagne as a product, and the branding strategies of particular producers, anticipated or even marked the path for luxury good branding and marketing across the nineteenth century to this day. Harding charts the changes to the product and the growth of its consumption over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1800, champagne was as often consumed still as sparkling; and as the century progressed, for British consumers at least, it was made increasingly dry. The growth of attitudes favouring more moderate drinking, "the temperate turn," and the decline of duties on lighter wines relative to those imposed on fortified wines and other alcoholic beverages, are seen as conducive to increased champagne consumption. Harding notes several factors that help account for champagne's growing sales and popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beyond the generally increasing affluence of a burgeoning bourgeois society with its growing demand for luxury goods, champagne gained a particular acceptance because it meshed so well with prevailing or emerging social mores. Champagne's relatively low alcohol by volume made it more attractive across a society in which "the temperate turn" prompted expectations of moderate alcohol consumption and more sober comportment. For this reason, and belief in the relatively mild, transience of its [End Page 193] intoxicating effects, champagne was thought to be "unique among wines" as a product "that women could legitimately enjoy." Changing patterns of sociability, especially the growing importance of the private dinner party, made the relative ease of serving champagne and the greater assurance of its quality and health-giving properties very attractive to the emerging middle classes. Demand for champagne is further thought to be stimulated, from 1860, when William Gladstone reduced taxes on lower alcohol content beverages in an effort to promote more healthy patterns of consumption. Important as such factors were in the growing demand for champagne, the key developments that would set the stage for a kind of branding revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century were centred on the production process. From the 1840s, it became possible for champagne producers to more readily control the colour, sweetness, and effervescence of their product. This, together with enhanced blending of base wines from various vineyards and vintage years, further allowed producers to better assure the consistency of the distinctive taste of their particular product. Finally, while most wines were imported to England in casks and bottled by a distributor there, problems of spoilage meant that champagne had to be bottled by the producer. Thus, the ability to better craft the product, and the close association of the bottle and label design to the product, would become important preconditions to the building modern brand identities. The London agents of the great French producers became critical, not only to the building of the various brands' identities but also the general, collective identity of champagne and the social and cultural meanings of its consumption. Through his prodigious research, Harding tells a complex story of the various strategies employed by these agents to stimulate champagne sales and promote demand for higher-margin products. From the 1860s, agents acting as representatives of the...