A man in a tuxedo to make Sean Connery envious studies his chess board. A woman in full fox-hunting gear holds her Dalmatian in one hand, an elaborate cigarette holder cradled in the other. An elegantly dressed bride and groom stand on a balcony, their family raising a toast to their health and happiness. A woman draped in a fur shawl is escorted down velvet blue stairs, a chandelier twinkling above her. A man in pristine black tie leans against his prized sports car.
What do all these luxurious people have in common? Their escapades are all accompanied by Miller High Life.
High Life was first unveiled on December 30, 1903 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to company history. Ernest Miller, the eldest son of founder Frederick J. Miller, was head brewer of Miller Brewing Company at the time—his father had started the company in 1855 and Ernest and his brothers had taken the reins after his passing in 1888. In the sweltering heat of July 1902, a trademark had been assigned to Miller High Life; with the New Year fast approaching, its debut had finally arrived.
Even from a distance, the beer looked special. It came packaged in a clear, glass bottle at a time when much beer was still kept in barrels. The team at Miller had astutely opted for a more elegant, sloping neck, as opposed to the long neck more commonly associated with bottled beer at the time. Silver foil adorned the crown cap all the way down the full length of that neck, glinting and glistening as it caught the light.
It would be another two years before the tagline The Champagne of Bottled Beers would be used, but even at this point of introduction, Miller High Life was already reaching for the stars.
“From the outset, advertising portrayed High Life as on par with Champagne, even before the idea was explicitly articulated in ad copy,” Daniel Scholzen, the corporate archivist for Molson Coors Beverage Company, tells me. “Even prior to the introduction of High Life, Miller emphasized the superior quality and taste of its beer, so comparing the new brand to Champagne was merely an elaboration of an existing marketing theme.”
Distinctive in Taste… accepted and appreciated by those who demand and expect the very best.
The images made it clear that Miller High Life went hand-in-hand with sophistication, class, and taste. The suggestion was that drinking Miller High Life might grant you entry into this rarefied Champagne lifestyle, that on drinking High Life you, too could be elevated to the lofty heights of first class, waited on hand and foot by staff in starched crimson jackets carrying polished silver trays.
Why is Miller High Life the Champagne of bottled beer? Because High Life satisfies the universal demand for a perfect beer. The world asks for it. That’s why we were compelled to increase our capacity to one million barrels.
“The ‘Champagne of Bottle Beer’ slogan was intended to communicate to consumers that a piece of the high life was within reach for any beer drinker discerning enough to recognize the quality of Miller beer,” Scholzen says. “Living the high life meant indulging in the best of all things, including beer. High Life was intentionally designed … to be appropriate for the finest homes and restaurants, spaces associated in the early 20th century more closely with wine and Champagne than beer.”
Champagne was then—and remains now—a fiercely protected luxury item. It is tricky to access and therefore innately covetable. By exploiting that status, not only was Miller linking High Life to the extravagant lifestyle associated with Champagne, but doing something that Champagne itself has been largely incapable of—marketing a tongue-in-cheek version of that lifestyle to the masses. Even 100 years later, the messaging has stuck.
“Molson Coors recently had some fun with the concept of the Champagne region,” Scholzen says. “In 2021 the Milwaukee County Council officially recognized the area surrounding the Miller brewery as ‘The Champagne of Beers Region.’ This was done mostly in jest and featured in High Life commercials and advertising. Hopefully no one from the Champagne region was offended by this campaign. If so, I have yet to learn of it.”
Champagne, then. The notorious sparkling wine takes its name from the northerly Champagne region of France; as the much-replicated meme format has reminded us, any wine made outside those carefully guarded parameters cannot carry its name. But that perceived exclusivity is only one of the reasons that Champagne is Champagne—and only one of the reasons that Champagne has long spoken to and inspired brewers and beer marketers.
One part of the mystique is the distinct way that Champagne is made. Seven grapes are permitted to be used in Champagne—Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier, as well as the lesser-known Arbane, Petit Meslier, Pinot Blanc, and Pinot Gris—and once picked and pressed they are fermented into a somewhat unremarkable base wine. It’s the traditional method—or the sexier méthode Champenoise—that transforms that base into something better.
The magic happens with the addition of liqueur de tirage—a liquid solution of yeast, wine, and sugar. This elixir is added to the aforementioned base wine and the two are bottled, where a secondary fermentation takes place. The base wine increases in alcohol; the carbon dioxide produced becomes trapped in the wine, causing that incandescent sparkle; and the dead yeast cells remain, imparting their complex wisdom over time as the bottles are left to age. After the appropriate amount of aging has occurred, the bottles are then riddled, disgorged, and topped up with a liqueur d’expedition—a post-fermentation dose of sugar dissolved in wine to see the bottle on its way. Et voilà, we have Champagne!
Champagne has been made this way for hundreds of years, the frivolity of its fizz now so ingrained that it’s hard to imagine the wine being anything but sophisticated, sparkling silliness. But for a long time, Champagne wasn’t actually bubbly.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that before Champagne started making sparkling wines, it was only making still wines,” says Sandia Chang. Chang is the owner and founder of Bubbleshop, home to the U.K.’s largest range of grower Champagnes, or Champagnes made by the grape growers themselves rather than the large Champagne houses. “And because of its proximity to Burgundy, they weren’t making anything with a distinct grape variety, they were using the same Pinot Noir and Chardonnay,” she says. “So as an effort to increase their sales, Champagne [producers] found a way to differentiate themselves, which was to make it sparkling and still keep the same grapes, because that’s what sold.”
The person often credited with putting the sparkling into sparkling wine is Dom Pérignon, a French Benedictine monk who pioneered various wine production methods. (“Come quickly! I am tasting the stars!” he supposedly quipped of his carbonated creation.) Alas, those famous words can only be traced back to a print campaign in the 19th century—and much to France’s chagrin, it is England that can take credit for first making Champagne sparkle. Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier and diplomat who also owned a glassworks, was the first to create glass strong enough to cope with the pressure produced during secondary fermentation. His verre Anglais was used to contain sparkling ciders—and later wines like Champagne.
The beginning of Champagne’s bubbles was the beginning of its notoriety—the start of its association with sex, money, and power. “It’s for occasions,” says Chang. “It’s for the rich and famous, people with money that can afford to drink Champagne, and if you don’t it is only on special occasions where you’ve saved the money to drink Champagne, and so on and so forth to where we are now, when people only open Champagne on New Year’s Eve or birthdays. It’s all marketing for commercial reasons.”
“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,” writes British author Henry Vizetelly in his 1882 “A History of Champagne, with Notes on Other Sparkling Wines of France.” “Its success in oiling the wheels of social life is so great and so universally acknowledged that its eclipse would almost threaten a collapse of our social system.”
Champagne’s journey to becoming the kind of luxury good without which society would disintegrate was the result of both luck and cunning. The Champagne region had long been an economic hub, one that was accessible from Paris. Reims—the unofficial capital of Champagne—was the traditional home for the coronations of French kings, events at which the local wine was served. Following the French Revolution, Champagne became a national symbol—in the words of Voltaire, the “most glorious expression” of French civilization. Led by forward-thinking figures like Jean-Rémy Moët and Madame Clicquot Ponsardin, and later aided by expanded train lines and international trade routes, the industry continued to grow in prominence.
That expansion was fed by marketing campaigns that didn’t just advertise Champagne, but constructed for it an elaborate mythology. “From the early 1900s, champagne advertising took on modern symbolism,” writes Joonas Rokka, a professor of marketing at Emlyon Business School. “During the Belle Époque, ads for champagne often featured modern marvels that dazzled the growing middle class – steamships, hot-air balloons, automobiles, planes and more.”
One of the earliest examples of this approach dates to the 1889 Exposition Universelle de Paris. This World’s Fair is best remembered for the debut of the Eiffel Tower, but it was here that Eugène Mercier—founder of the Mercier Champagne brand—decided that in order to showcase his Champagne to the audience it deserved, he would build the world’s largest wine cask. Weighing over 20 tons—and able to hold up to 200,000 bottles’ worth of Champagne—the cask was so large that, as legend has it, Mercier had to purchase several tiny streets in Paris so he could tear down entire houses to ensure the cask made its way safely to the fair.
The feat may have been unnecessarily extravagant, but Champagne’s success lies in its dramatics. According to Mark Tungate’s “Luxury World: The Past Present and Future of Luxury Brands,” the 1950 Formula One Grand Prix was held in Reims—our city of Kings—and it was here that the owners of Moët & Chandon saw an opportunity, and offered the winner a bottle of their Champagne. During the ceremony, the cork flew straight out of the bottle by accident, spraying wine all over the crowd in the process. Seventeen years later, when Dan Gurney won the race in 1967, he decided to shake his prized bottle deliberately, in homage to the famous accident. This show of bubbles as a signifier of fast cars and celebration has since become tradition.
Moët & Chandon is a case study for how a Champagne house can prioritize decadence and profit—the house now owns nearly 3,000 acres of vines, making it the largest landowner in the wine region. In 1971, the company merged with cognac producers Hennessy & Co, forming the brand Moët Hennessy; in 1987, it merged with Louis Vuitton to become the world’s largest luxury goods company. In so doing, Moët cemented Champagne’s vaunted status, its place among the crème de la crème of society.
That perspective characterizes many modern-day Champagne campaigns. Creative freedom is power captions the advertisement for Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Dom Pérignon, which is adorned in crystals and crowned in gold. An earlier campaign for Dom Pérignon saw Karl Lagerfeld mold a decorative glass based on the breasts of supermodel Claudia Schiffer. Maison Ruinart collaborates with an artist each year, and 2020 saw celebrated British artist David Shrigley take the helm; you can judge the product by the label one of his pieces declares.
“Champagne’s negociants have long understood that once famous people start to buy a product, the marketing becomes very straightforward,” writes Robert Walters in his book, “Bursting Bubbles: A Secret History of Champagne and the Rise of the Great Growers.” All the hard work to cement Champagne’s status has already happened.
A man and a woman with stern faces and flushed cheeks sit waiting, hands clasped, noses pointing in the air. Their hair sits perfectly coiffed atop their heads, and their clothes look pristine and expensive under the soft warmth of candlelight. Another woman is approaching them, holding a tray of drinks high in the air, her appearance somewhat disheveled in comparison—she is ready to serve, and they were born to be served. But it is not Champagne, nor is it Miller High Life, that this woman is about to present to this esteemed couple. It is Gueuze, as depicted in an 1897 advertisement for the Exposition Bruxelles-Kermesse.
Gueuze was first introduced to me as, “Hey, you should like this, it’s the Champagne of Belgium.” I was presented with a slim bottle of Boon Brewery’s Marriage Parfait, the emerald green of the glass winking at me as I turned it in my hand. The bottle was crowned in cork, which in turn was encased in a wire frame, as I had seen countless times before with sparkling wine, but never with beer. The bottle felt weighty in my hand, special to open and a thrill to watch as I poured it into a glass, watching the bubbles shimmy and synchronize their way into a perfect foam. Even before tasting, I could see why the comparison had been made. And as I later learned, the comparison had centuries of precedent.
“After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the French disappeared from Belgium and the government mainly wanted to support local products, so it was not uncommon for the King to drink the local beer instead of Champagne at a New Year’s reception,” says Frank Boon, the founder of Boon Brewery. “Because Gueuze contains almost as much carbon dioxide as Champagne, the comparison was quickly made, and it was sometimes touted as the ‘Champagne of the people of Brussels.’”
It helps that both Gueuze and Champagne were often packaged in the same bottles, lending them a visual consistency. “Many Belgian glass factories supplied bottles to the French winemakers and the Belgian brewers also used such bottles, especially for the export of beer to the New World,” Boon continues. “Because the Wheat Beer of spontaneous fermentation—which would be given the name ‘Gueuze’ in the 19th century—was best preserved and even improved by a maturation in the bottle, this beer became the most exported Belgian beer in the early 19th century.”
This practice continued throughout the 19th century. In his book “Lambic Untamed,” historian and author Raf Meert notes that the price for discarded, second-hand Champagne bottles in Brussels rose from eight centimes a bottle in 1893 to fourteen centimes just five years later in 1898. Gueuze was a Brussels beer packaged in Champagne’s clothing, during the same decade that Frederick Miller’s sons were plotting a similarly packaged beer of their own. But it is in its method, rather than its marketing, that Gueuze can solidify its likeness with Champagne.
The making of Gueuze shares many similarities with Champagne production. Both involve the blending of differently aged base wines or Lambics. Both require aging in the bottle. Both are defined by a secondary fermentation that takes place inside said bottle. Both, as a result of these historical, complex methods, have names and locations that are protected by law. And both offer a sense of theatricality and occasion.
Recently, that overlap has even extended to the glassware in which Gueuze is served. “One innovative feature that has become increasingly popular in Belgian glassware is the nucleation point, an etched mark on the bottom of the inside of the glass which helps release the carbonation and create a steady stream of bubbles emanating from the nucleated pattern to the top of the beer,” writes Breandán Kearney, Editor-in-Chief of Belgian Smaak, in an article for Belgian Beer and Food magazine on Ritzenhoff (the German crystal glass company responsible for most of the glassware found in Belgium). Nucleation has become increasingly common in Champagne glasses too, ensuring that a very visible stream of fizz can be concentrated in specific areas of the glass. Duvel has taken this one step further, releasing glasses with a specific nucleation that causes bubbles to form in the shape of a D, as Kearney notes in his article.
But for all of the comparisons between the two, Gueuze has never had the same status as its viticultural sibling. The two drinks may be so similar in method that they can share everything from bottles to cages to the latest innovations in glassware, but unfortunately for Gueuze, Champagne became the early signifier of quality, luxury, and status. When other brewers wish to pitch their beers as celebratory, luxurious products, then, they commandeer terminology from wine, not from beer.
In recent decades, a number of brewers have striven to create hybrids of beer and Champagne—beers that pull from the wine’s methods (if not its optics). One notable example is the now-retired Infinium, brewed as a collaboration between Boston Beer Co. and Germany’s Weihenstephan. Infinium was supposedly a brand-new style of beer that also adhered to the strictures of the Reinheitsgebot; it came packaged in 750ml bottles and magnums, was bottle-conditioned, and even accompanied by custom flute-style glasses.
“I think Champagne is a very interesting beverage,” Jim Koch declared at its launch event in December 2010, “but in all due respect to 500 years of Champagne making, we can do better.”
Calling the beer’s release “a watershed moment,” Koch described Infinium as having “some of the dryness, the freshness, the crispness, the effervescence and acidity of Champagne, but the texture and mouthfeel and structure of a beer.” Unfortunately, the experiment fell flat. In an Atlantic article titled “When Bad Beers Happen to Good Breweries,” writer Clay Risen said: “It just doesn’t taste very good. It’s effervescent, like champagne, but not sweet; it tastes flinty and bitter. It opens with some apple and persimmon, but those drop off quickly, leaving behind yeast and malt as the dominant flavors. It may be a technical achievement, but so was Frankenstein’s monster—and he wasn’t winning any beauty pageants.”
Meeting baseline flavor expectations is one thing—but Boston Beer and Weihenstephan overlooked another vital component. You can build on Champagne’s reputation with the help of the greatest minds and technologies working in modern brewing, but it’ll be for nothing unless you remember that the key to Champagne isn’t just in its taste but in its image. Champagne isn’t about how it makes you feel—it’s about how it makes you look.
The challenge of making a beer that speaks to the experience of drinking Champagne hasn’t stopped innumerable other breweries from making their own fizz-inspired beers. Some have opted to brew their beers with Champagne yeast, others to brew wine-beer hybrids with grapes such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Others package their beers in Champagne-style bottles using cork-and-cage closures and foil tops. Some even advertise aging their beers in Champagne barrels—barrels that are used in the creation of flimsy, still, base wines not suitable for public consumption. While the methods vary, the message stays the same—these are celebration beers, not for routine drinking.
A recent example of Champagne-inspired brewing is the Brut IPA, first created by Kim Sturdavant in 2017, during his time at the now-shuttered Social Kitchen & Brewery in San Francisco. Brut IPA was characterized by the use of amyloglucosidase—AMG—an enzyme which breaks down complex sugars into an easily fermentable form, allowing for a bone-dry, or brut, finish. Add a highly pressurized pour, creating a more prominent fizz and a foam, and there you have it: an IPA with a dry effervescence to rival that of Champagne.
But where the making of Gueuze is genuinely comparable to Champagne, the Brut IPA operates more like a novelty replica. A Brut Champagne requires fewer than 12 grams of residual sugar per liter, a level which is controlled by how much sugar is added when a bottle is topped up with its liqueur d’expedition. Champagne owes its signature sparkle to its secondary bottle fermentation, whereas Brut IPA gestures at Champagne without matching its complexity, its specialness, its feeling of occasion—which is maybe why the style fizzled out so quickly after its initial boom. One could argue that the pressurized pour bears a closer resemblance to Prosecco production instead, but there’s little glamor to be found in that comparison.
The downside of being associated with sparkle, frivolity, and seduction is that it also becomes very tricky to be taken seriously. Despite Champagne’s luxurious reputation, it’s not always a wine given the time of day. Just look at when it tends to be consumed. It is the wine of toasts—always the aperitif, never the main—appearing only at the start of a menu, to be followed by the more serious red wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. It is served in glasses that prioritize the aesthetics of its fizz, not the complexity of its flavor.
But it’s not just the fizz that prevents it from being respected. In many cases, Champagne’s marketing has outstripped its quality, and its focus on the superficial trappings of wealth often comes at the detriment of what’s in the bottle. The steady rise of grower Champagnes (with their emphasis on small-scale production, on place, on the hand of the maker) over the last two decades has become a counterpoint movement with a message: all that glitters is not gold.
Even Miller started to sour on the Champagne lifestyle. At the start of the 1970s, after seven decades of branding itself as the beer equivalent to Champagne, Miller High Life began to look at repositioning its social status with the help of Philip Morris, which had recently purchased Miller Brewing Company. The Miller Time tagline was introduced in a new advertorial, replacing the slogan The Champagne of Beers.
“‘Miller Time’ attempted to capitalize on High Life’s reputation for luxury, though it was now a luxury attainable to the average beer drinker by virtue of their own efforts,” Scholzen says. “By the early 1970s, Miller realized that working-class consumers had long felt excluded by High Life advertising and its connection to a luxury item like Champagne. To win over those who drank the most beer, Miller emphasized everyday people in everyday situations choosing High Life as their daily reward. The president of Miller Brewing Company in the early 1970s, John Murphy, characterized the process as a shift away from the Champagne-bucket crowd to the lunch-bucket crowd.”
Champagne would have been smart to take note. Attainable luxury was what the people wanted, not archaic definitions of class determined by who can access Champagne. The boom in Prosecco production is testament to this shift, and can be directly linked to the aftermath of the Great Recession. In times of severe economic hardship, luxury is hard to justify. But if all the things associated with sparkling wine—security, abundance, that despite everything you are still a person deserving of something good—can be found in Italy for a fraction of the price tag, then no wonder sales of Prosecco have rocketed in the way that they have.
Just look at Majestic Wine, one of Great Britain’s largest wine retailers, as an example. According to market research firm Kantar World Panel, in 2009 the company sold five million liters of Champagne, with Prosecco coming in at a measly 1.7 million. Just four years later, in 2013, Majestic saw annual Prosecco sales of 8.5 million liters, with Champagne lagging behind at 6.2 million.
Sales of sparkling wine have long been used as a barometer for economic unrest, and those same dynamics were in place in the wake of COVID-19. The first year of the pandemic saw Champagne shipments fall by a staggering 70%—but Prosecco, being the affordable fizz of the people that it is, actually managed some sales growth in exports to its European neighbors in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, and Austria. Aided by the recent introduction of its pink sibling, Rosé Prosecco, the sparkling wine is on course for further growth. According to a press release from alcohol e-retailer Drizly, in 2022 Prosecco saw a 22% sales increase, while Champagne faced a 6% decrease, leading to speculation that Prosecco would outsell Champagne over the New Year’s period as people raised a more economical glass to the start of 2023.
After all—regardless of who we are, what we can afford, and what the universe throws our way—aren’t we all deserving of the frivolous fancy that can only be found in a flute of fizz? Perhaps that’s what the beer industry has been trying to tell us all along.
The thing about sparkling wine is that it is always excited to meet you. This Champagne, a coruscating rose gold with a vivacious fizz to match, is no exception. It smells like the street outside of a very busy bakery and feels like asking a man to slowly zip up the back of your dress. I taste the soft fur of a raspberry skin, the buttery flakes of pastry that collect on my fingers after a croissant, the golden hour when the sun’s light turns apricot and everything it touches becomes beautiful. I take another sip, letting the bubbles shimmer and crystallize across my tongue, and I smile.
What we choose to drink signals what kind of person we think we are. When I buy Champagne for my birthday I am telling myself, and those around me, that I am evolving into a woman of taste, that I am deserving of the finer things in life, that I am a person who has their shit together.
Through my choice of carbonation I can send messages out to the world that seek to inspire and influence, as I, too, have been inspired and influenced before. This habit will not die with me. There have been over five centuries of a collective fascination with fizz that will continue long after I am gone. And when beers choose to emulate Champagne, they are sending a similar message, one that says: We know luxury when we see it, and we can cater to a celebration just as well as they can.
The argument for buying these drinks is not that they’re delicious or well-crafted, but that they have an instantly recognizable societal value, because they’re exclusive and by association you can become exclusive, too. Our worth here is not dictated by the quiet, small parts of our everyday lives, but by the bold, brash occasions that define us. Is that something worth raising a toast to?
Words by Rachel HendryIllustrations by Colette Holston
