Kathleen Willcox

Compromises are odious. They reek of disappointments both large and small, when no one really gets his way — there’s never a loser per se, but also rarely a winner. But very occasionally, seemingly disparate concepts can come together and create a new thing that is technically a compromise but ends up feeling like more than the sum of its parts, thanks to felicitous, and often impossible to predict, synergies. See: the bánh mì sandwich, the Constitution of the United States, Disney and Pixar. And now: Prosecco. The world’s favorite cheap, cheerful, reliably tasty tipple is dipping its toes into profundity — and the results are surprisingly successful.

Are the rich different from you and me as F. Scott Fitzgerald posited in 1926? Or do they just have more money, as Ernest Hemingway allegedly retorted? Whatever the answer, they’ve certainly become wealthier. While many of us normies have been sweating fallout from inflation and skyrocketing interest rates — buying a dozen eggs, never mind a new home, requires major budget adjustments — we can take comfort that at least the 0.001 percent are doing fine. According to the latest Oxfam International Inequality Report, the five richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes since 2020 — from a measly $405 billion to $869 billion. What do they sip as they stroke their fat white purebred cats atop piles of gold? It’s wine you won’t find at a store.

Sometimes, I pretend that I worked the wine beat thirty or forty years ago. I picture myself in formal wear, kicking back in gilded settings, sipping perfectly aged first growth, trading bons mots with winemakers. We’d spend hours solemnly considering the slow, steady, seemingly eternal rise of wine culture, and how inevitably it would soften the cruder edges of society. It would be so merry, yet cerebral — but also something we could feel good, even morally superior, about participating in. Instead, I’m in 2024 wearing yoga pants and guzzling mineral water (must hydrate!) by myself holding Zooms with winemakers, sweating over the fact that scientists say climate change imperils up to 73 percent of the world’s current wine-growing regions.

If the dozens of cartoonish stereotypes that flood my mind when I think of France — grand Bordeaux estates, snails and frog legs dripping in garlic butter, elegant women striding down the Champs-Élysées, a glittering Eiffel Tower at night — a stein of hoppy beer is nowhere to be found. France is not known for its pints. And yet, much to the concern of its vineyards and winemakers, that could be changing. “There has been a real explosion of breweries all over France in the past few years,” says Alexandra Berry, a Paris-based beer and hops sales consultant and the author of From Earth to Beer: The Expression of Terroir in a Glass. “General sales in wine have started to decrease in France in part because the industry has started to seem a little dated and overrated.

In the old days (2019), mimosas and Bloody Marys were really the only the socially acceptable forms of alcohol that could cross your lips before 12 p.m. To drink earlier would be a worrying indicator that you’re an alcoholic, or worse, a professional writer.  That benighted era is safely in our rearview.  Of all of the widespread cultural habits that have emerged post-Covid — obsessive hand-washing, a prickling fear of close-talkers, a desire to squeeze every morsel of conviviality possible out of even the dullest social exchanges — by far the best is the wholesale rejection of A.M.-drinks policing. And the biggest winner is the breakfast wine.

From the beginning, Champagne has never been just a drink, or a region: it’s a celebration, an occasion, a trophy, a reward; a symbol of joyful decadence and glamorous debauchery; the overflowing drink of the American Dream. In short, it’s a boozy cheat sheet for the zeitgeist and the anxieties and dreams of the people who sip it. And, for the past seventy-five years or so, that zeitgeist has been driven by the United States. “American culture pervades everything,” says Christian Holthausen, a dual French-American citizen and founder of the Paris-based Champagne consulting firm Westbrook Marketing Partners. “Driving through Paris just now, I saw a Coca-Cola machine on one street, and a billboard for Apple on the next.