Terroir Terror: The 1911 Champagne Riots

The streets ran with champagne in Aube, France, in April 1911. Small-time wine growers went out en masse, raiding cellars, smashing bottles, and rolling barrels into the river. One newspaper reported that twenty million quarts of Champagne had been poured into the road. A headline blared in the New York Times: WE BUY FAKE CHAMPAGNE AND THE VINEYARDS REVOLT.

The Champagne Riots of 1911 arrived at a curious moment in wine history. Only a few decades earlier, the future of champagne had looked brighter than ever. In the 1830s, a series of technological advances had solved a long-standing problem: stored bottles tended to spontaneously explode (workers were obliged to wear iron masks to protect themselves from flying shards).

By the 1880s, champagne had secured its place as an indispensable adjunct to any celebration. As one English writer, cited by historian Kolleen M. Guy, put it,

We cannot open a railway, launch a vessel, inaugurate a public edifice, start a newspaper, entertain a distinguished foreigner, invite a leading politician to favour us with his views on things in general, celebrate an anniversary, or specially appeal on behalf of a benevolent institution without a banquet, and hence without the aid of Champagne, which, at the present day, is the obligatory adjunct of all such repasts.

This was thanks in part to extraordinarily savvy and creative marketing by the champagne houses. Reputedly, writes Harry G. West, after the French invasion of Russia, the canny Madame Clicquot (of Veuve Clicquot) pressed her champagne on the enemy soldiers who were pursuing the retreating French army—so that they’d bring a taste for it back to their home countries.

It seemed like everything was looking up for the champagne growers. So, what precipitated the 1911 revolt?

As champagne’s popularity had been growing, a minuscule menace was spreading through the vineyards of France. A tiny insect accidentally imported from the Americas, Phylloxera vastatrix went unnoticed for quite a while after its arrival—but its second binomial (“devastator”) gives a clue as to its impact. The pests set about sucking the sap from grape roots, slowly weakening them and opening wounds that invited disease. The mysterious devastation swept across France, leaving vine growers terrified.

Growers tried everything from flooding their vineyards to burying live toads under the vines. The only effective solution proved to be grafting their grapes onto American vinestock, which was resistant to the invader. But it was a costly solution that left small-time growers waiting for years for their vines to start bearing again. As economists Catherine Haeck, Giulia Meloni, and Johan Swinnen explain, the wine economy turned upside down: France, which had been the world’s largest exporter of wine, became the largest importer.

To make up for the loss of grapes, writes economic historian James Simpson, large wine houses simply began importing vines and grapes from other countries, making wine from raisins, and dying their product red with anything from elderberries to coal-tar anilines. Meanwhile, the small-scale wine growers didn’t have the resources to keep up. They were fighting a war on two fronts: their crops were devastated, and the big firms were undercutting their prices. By 1911, their vines may have recovered, but the gap between the big firms and the small-time producers seemed wider than ever—not to mention the roiling resentment felt over the fraudulent products flooding the market.

To make matters even worse, in an attempt to pacify the small-scale producers, the government began rolling out the forerunner of the Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) classification system—the reason why you may have heard that “if it’s not from the Champagne region of France, it’s just sparkling wine”—to formalize the division between wine terroirs. But when the boundaries were drawn around the Champagne region, Simpson writes, Aube was designated a “second-tier” zone, which incensed Aube wine growers who had just painstakingly replanted all their acres with low-yielding champagne-type grapes. It was a significant blow; not being designated as true Champagne quartered the value of what they grew.

This was the powder keg that ultimately sparked in the 1911 Champagne riots. The protests led the government to backtrack on the geographical designation, but this vacillation sparked counter-protests in Marne, the first-tier Champagne region. As a letter in The Nation dryly noted, “The two departments are in opposition to each other, but they agree in waving red flags and singing the Internationale.”

Today, Aube is considered part of the Champagne region. But while Aube may have protected its status, not everyone got off scot-free. It’s an interesting footnote in history that the 1911 riots became an early marker in the use of video evidence by police, explains historian Sara F. Hall. As the 1911 Pacific Wine and Spirit Review reported,

Evidence was hard to get together, that is, evidence that was indisputable, for in crowds of 20,000 or 30,000 people it was hard to say that this man or that man, did the dirty work. But…when the motion picture[s] began to unroll their films [of the events] to the public gaze, a brilliant idea struck the police. They visited several performances, taking with them a few old inhabitants who were personally acquainted with all the grape growers, winemakers, and workmen in the surrounding country. As the show proceeded, first one, then another of the men would exclaim: “Oh look! There’s Pierre Durand setting fire to the warehouse!”

In this way, Aube’s winemakers, already under pressure introduced by the freshly formalized terroir boundaries, unwittingly became victims of a burgeoning police surveillance system as well.

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