The Political Bubble

Champagne showed its far-right spots in last week's European elections. Are there actually any leftie wine regions, though?

I have always loved the term ‘champagne socialist’. It’s a peculiarly British saying, perhaps for a peculiarly British sense of liberal middle class-ness; author George Cary Eggleston, who coined the term in 1906, describes a person that “wants everybody to be equal on the higher plane that suits him, utterly ignoring the fact that there is not enough champagne, green turtle and truffles to go round.”

A sort of well-wisher, then, unable to reconcile the essential nice-ness of socialism - let’s share, let’s get along - with the suggestion that they might fall within the part of the graph that needs to be pulled down a few gridlines. As the wonderful Anne Krebiehl MW said in a recent podcast with Tim Atkin MW, wine is indeed elitist - we score it, we rate it, it attracts huge, market-driven prices and becomes a symbol of status just as much for the natty-unicorn instagrammers as the classed-growth Bordeaux completists. When I see the likes of Anselme Selosse plastered, perhaps unwillingly, on instagram posts by a lucky visitor, the pictures always end up having a whiff of trophy-hunting about them.

Yet, on the ground, Champagne’s stuffiness seems to be loosening faster than 2006 Blanc de Blancs (darling). I turned up to an appointment at a major Maison this year to find myself better-dressed than the Chef de Cave (and that’s saying something - I’m often having to find a mid-point between muddy-vineyard and Grande Marque tasting room which ends up poorly-suited to both). Twitter’s ‘menswear guy’ Derek Guy once published a brilliant missive against the ‘dress sneaker’ - he’d better stay clear of Reims, then. Champagne’s women are brilliantly-adept at inhabiting the sartorial nether-region between formality and joviality, but it’s an awkward place for the Champenois gentilhomme.

Anyway, the point is this - one could be forgiven, in Champagne as elsewhere, for thinking that the wines which are so often communicated about with faintly-liberal notions of environmentalism, naturalism and thoughtfulness, by people who appear to be (at least) faintly liberal themselves, would be grown and made in that very spirit, too. How could you possibly be growing grapes for Champagne, unifying people in celebration, in validation of human spirit and optimism, yet vote for the far-right?

Well, you can. And, wine-growing places do. The hammering that ‘Rassemblement National’, the former ‘Front National’ of Jean-Marie Le Pen (and, subsequently his daughter Marine) gave to Macron and France’s centre in last week’s European elections was pretty much universal in rural France. In fact, there isn’t a single Champagne-making town or village I could find - including the relative metropolis of Reims, above, where you can buy Thai food and artisan filter coffee, and (less surprisingly) the town of Épernay (where you can’t)- that didn’t vote for the resurgent far-right.

It is perhaps testimony to the idiocy of Brexit that even France’s far-right has abandoned its support for ‘Frexit’ in the light of the fallout on the other side of the channel. Elsewhere their policies are hardly much softer than they were a decade ago, though; this is a party that, according to its manifesto, believes that Islamists want “to erect in our country a counter-model of society based on a totalitarian ideology’, and whose environmental nonchalance stretches to actually planning to dismantle existing wind energy farms. Immigration, though, is the hot topic, with Le Pen promising to end the right to French citizenship for children born in France, prioritise French nationals for all state benefits and - contrary to the very fundaments of the EU - end all non-economic migration.

Despite the youthful energy that appears to be present in Champagne, this is a rural, conservative community. 6.7% of the population are immigrants, lower than the national average of 11.6%, and only 4.8% have Foreign citizenship according to the 2020 Census. There’s been a steady growth in people aged 60+, as there has in France in general. The people that actually make and market Champagne are, of course, a tiny minority of the population; many, many more are driving tractors, packing crates, driving forklifts et cetera, or indeed not directly connected to the Champagne industry. In 2020 just under 2% registered as farmers in the Marne department, wheres retirees were 26.5%.

Champagne is hardly alone, though. Wander the streets of Beune, the heart of Bugundy, and almost one third of the people you’ll meet have voted for a party led by a woman who faced trial for comparing Muslims praying in the streets to a Nazi occupation.

It’s all a reminder that winemaking places are, in the end, just places. It’s fun to mythologise them, to imagine that every soul we bump into on the street will have something to say about last year’s crop or their neighbour’s soil management practices, or will burst forth with the sort of reflections on life, love and beauty which the products of their landscape evoke. The truth, though, is that even the economic constituency of La Champagne Viticole is not actually populated largely by wealthy, suited (or dress-sneakered) oenologues, jet-setting super-growers and poets, but by often very conservative, long-established families who grow and sell fruit, either as a main business or on the side.

An awareness of the place - not just the winelands, but the actual place - helps put all the recent wranglings over working conditions and environmental concerns into perspective. If anyone wonders why the world of wine sometimes seems slow to change, then it’s worth remembering Champagne Conservatism, rather than Champagne Socialism, is the incumbent.

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