More champagne!

My only regret in life,” John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, “is that I did not drink more champagne.” Surprising sentiments, perhaps, from a man whose theories saved capitalism from itself, but then champagne does tend to inspire uncommon loyalty. Winston Churchill conducted World War II staying up all night on a diet of Pol Roger and Atlantic oysters. A true champagne romantic, he loved Pol Roger as much for its style, as for the widow of one of its owners, an English blue-blood named Odette. She would send him a 1928 Pol Roger on his birthday until 1953.

He even named one of his race horses Pol Roger. There are countless such stories in champagne’s rich history—a history that includes Napoleon I declaring “Champagne! In victory one deserves it, in defeat one needs it,” and King Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, whose breasts inspired the shape of the old champagne glasses (before the tulips took over). And the tales continue to this day. Rappers can’t seem to get enough of the stuff, particularly Cristal. It’s the champagne brand that gets namechecked by Lil’ Kim, Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy and 50 Cent. In Rotten Apple, 50 Cents sounds like a marketing honcho when he talks about “teachin’ the hoodrats what Cristal taste like.” But then it all went sour when the managing director of Louis Roederer suggested that hip hop was giving Cristal unwelcome attention. “You can’t stop people from drinking it,” he said. And rap mogul Jay Z promptly switched to Krug.

Closer to home, before our seemingly deathless dalliance with socialist prudery, champagne was big among those who could afford to drink it like water. Walter Lawrence, one of the famous brothers who were inextricably associated with the fortunes of colonial India, was once urged by a Rajput chieftain to “drink until your head goes turning, or you will never appreciate the nautch we are going to have in the palace tonight.”Old-timers still remember the striking advert for Pommery at the first-class waiting room of the old Howrah station during the twilight of the Raj. Borrowing from the parable of the crow that filled up a pitcher of water with stones to be able to drink the contents, it replaced water with champagne. But Maharani Gayatri Devi has, to my mind, the best champagne story in her autobiography,

A Princess Remembers. Rajendra (‘Raji’), son and heir of Maharaja Nripendra Narayan of the Cooch Behar—the old princely state to which the maharani belonged before she married into the Jaipur family—was so heart-broken after his family did not allow him to marry a little-known English actress that he drank himself to death with champagne. Raji, an Etonian, was a bachelor and was maharaja for two years before his premature death in 1913. Those were heady days. India’s wine market is a drop in the ocean of other beverages— mainly whisky and beer—consumed all over the country. And of this business, champagne has a tiny share, although 2006 sales are reported to have grown by 129 per cent to 15,000 nine-litre cases (12 bottles of 750ml each).

Compared to the 148 million cases of IMFL, or the 220,000 cases of wine sold in the Indian market, and it’s clear how much catching up champagne has to do. But champagne hasn’t given up on the Indian market. Some time back, Patrick Le Brun, chief of Champagne’s union of vineyard owners, announced that as many as 40 villages had been identified to produce grapes to cater to the rising demand for bubbly in India. His statement came in the wake of reports that the Champagne region around Reims in the French countryside had reached its optimum yield. “If there isn’t enough to go around, the producers will prefer places where there is growth— developing markets (like India, Russia and China),” Le Brun said. Let’s raise a toast to that. There’s something about champagne that justifies the hype.