This wine is a symbol of freethinking, decadence and the perfect drink for summer.

At some point, I don’t even know exactly when, champagne ceased to be wine and became an image. At the next wedding? At the Royal Ascot Hippodrome, among the top hats and hats with ribbons? At the celebration of the launch of the ship? Or in the hands of Schumacher in a red overall after another victory in the Grand Prix race? It’s impossible to count how many priceless bottles frothed in the hands of this champion nicknamed Noise. There is also a stage image: the playful King Champagne I in the song from the operetta “Die Fledermaus.” There are also endless film images in Hollywood films with millionaire heroes easily and elegantly uncorking a bottle of Dom Perignon. Once I was looking for music about champagne for a program from the “Red Dry” series on Radio Liberty. I found several compositions and was surprised. They were not sparkling, foaming, sparkling. No, these were melancholic melodies, like bubbles in a glass: the sad dwarf jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani, the sensual decadent Marc Almond, singing about a winter morning in New York, a hotel cockroach and the dream of a sip of champagne. Then I found the folk music of the Champagne people: it didn’t sound any more cheerful.

There are truly dramatic pages in the history of champagne. In 1911, civil war nearly broke out in France over an attempt to determine exactly which areas had the right to call their sparkling wine champagne and which did not. Another civil war - which took place - deprived the Louis Roederer champagne house of a huge market in Russia.

Russians have long had their own idea of champagne and their own image of this wine. The poets of the Golden Age reveled in it, literally and figuratively. They didn't always get away with it figuratively. In the gloomy post-Decembrist year of 1826, the censor banned Baratynsky’s stanza, in which the poet compared champagne with an “ardent mind”:

...Into a simple glass God hangover

It's pouring over the edge, my friends,

Your favorite Ai.

Its starry moisture

No wonder the eyes are amused:

Courage hides in her,

She's bursting with freedom

Like an ardent mind, it does not tolerate captivity,

Breaks the cork with a frisky wave,

And joyful foam splashes,

The semblance of young life.

This is how champagne acquired a political meaning. Pushkin replied to the censor:

Like hissed Ai

Golden stream and splashes...

But, gentlemen, is it allowed

Do-re-mi-sol equal to wine?

This is not my observation. Literary historians often wrote about the wine preferences of the poets of Pushkin’s circle. They inevitably had to be wine critics, since wines were part of the poetry of the Golden Age. I can imagine how surprised the venerable scientists N.L. Stepanov, M.A. would be. Tsyavlovsky, Yu. M. Lotman, seeing themselves on the list of pioneers of Russian wine criticism! But here’s what caught my eye personally. In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin explains the move away from Veuve Clicquot or Moët to Bordeaux:

But changes with noisy foam

It (champagne. - I.P.) to my stomach,

And I'm Bordeaux prudent

Nowadays I prefer him.

Of course, here too you can find a drop of politics - in the word “prudent”. But more than a hundred years before Pushkin, the “Sun King” Louis XIV, who idolized the same ai (named after a town in Champagne), on the urgent advice of a doctor, changed the ai to Burgundy. Maybe Pushkin also had a French doctor? As for Pushkin’s comparison of ai with music, many years later it was picked up by one of the titans of the modern sparkling wine industry, Remy Krug: “Champagne is like music. He has a name. You don’t say, “I listened to music.” No. You say, "I listened

Beethoven." Or Mozart. Or Berlioz. You need to know what's behind the label." And one more Russian trace in the culture of sparkling wines. Russian nobility in the 19th century drank sweet champagne. French winemakers took this into account, but the Russians still added powdered sugar to the already sweet champagne. It turned out something like syrup. In Paris, the Romanoff cocktail was invented based on a Russian recipe.

The image of champagne has been so popularized that its taste fades into the background. In spring, the air smells of white wine. At the beginning of spring I usually drink chardonnay: a golden chardonnay to match the pale March. In April - Sauvignon Blanc with its titillating gooseberry flavor. But in May I open the champagne season and end it with feminine

in the summer. One can hardly seriously talk about the “best” brand of champagne. In June, I prefer the restrained, flexing muscles of Taittenger, in July - the fragrant Bollinger and Krug, in August - the rich undertones of Veuve Clicquot. Alas, I drink these respected brands not every day or even every week, but once a month. Perhaps I could call myself a Keynesian. At least, I could definitely subscribe to one phrase of this famous economist: “I regret one thing in life: how little champagne I drank!”

Rivers of champagne