Champagne is the only wine people buy for a reason that has nothing to do with taste.
Everything else on my list gets ordered because somebody wants to drink it, or wants to be seen drinking it, or is eating something it goes with. Champagne gets ordered because something happened.
A deal closed. A baby arrived. Somebody got the job, or left the job, or made it to a birthday they were not sure about. The bottle is not the point. The bottle is a receipt for an event.
Which makes it the most sensitive instrument I have. Wine sales tell me about the menu. Champagne sales tell me how people feel about their lives.
And for a while now the needle has been sitting still while it should be moving.
The number that does not match the news
Money is being made right now. Not by everyone, and not evenly, but you can read the same stories I can, and there is a class of people in this city having a very good year.
Historically I would know that before the paper told me. It arrives as a table of six ordering something with a name on it at nine on a Thursday, loudly, badly, and I do not care that they are ordering it badly because that is not what it is for.
That is not happening at the rate it used to.
I want to be careful, because one room is not an economy and a sommelier with a hunch is not a data set. But this is the one signal I have watched most closely for the longest time, and it is quiet in a period when it has historically been loud.
So I have been asking the only useful question. Not why are people drinking less, which I have written about and which has a real answer.
Why has the ritual for *we won* gone quiet?
What a bottle was actually for
Opening champagne is a strange act if you look at it directly.
It is loud on purpose. The cork is engineered to announce itself. You cannot do it discreetly, and nobody has ever wanted to. The entire design of the gesture is public.
It is expensive relative to what it delivers as a drink, and everybody knows that too. You are not buying refreshment. You are buying a moment that the whole room can hear.
And it is communal. You do not open a bottle for one. The format assumes an audience, which means the purchase is a small piece of theatre with a cast.
So the ritual was doing three things at once. It marked a moment. It told other people that the moment happened. And it made the moment social, which means it made it real, because a thing nobody witnessed is a thing you have to keep insisting on.
That is the machinery. Now look at what has changed around it.
Nobody wants the room to hear
The first thing is that public celebration has become expensive in a way it was not.
Announcing that you have done well is now a risk. Somebody is having a worse year, and you know it, and they know you know. The cork is a loud noise in a quiet room. A generation that watched what happens to people who look pleased with themselves in public has learned to do well privately and mention it to four people.
I see the compressed version constantly. The table that has clearly closed something and is deliberately not making a thing of it. Good wine, ordered carefully, no announcement. The celebration happened. It just refused to be witnessed.
That is not thrift. Those tables spend. They spend on something that does not make a sound.
Nobody is sure the win will hold
The second thing is harder and I think it matters more.
You open a bottle when something is finished. The deal closed, the baby is here, the job is yours. Champagne is a full stop.
A lot of the money being made right now does not feel like a full stop to the people making it. It feels like a position. It can be worth less by Friday, and everyone holding it knows that at all times, and you do not toast something that might unwind before the glasses are washed.
Somebody who gets a promotion opens a bottle because the promotion is a fact. Somebody whose number went up has not finished anything. They have a screen that will tell them something different tomorrow.
You cannot celebrate a thing that has not stopped moving. So people wait for the moment that will justify it, and the moment keeps not arriving, because that is the nature of the asset.
The bottle does not get opened. Not out of modesty. Out of superstition, and the sense that celebrating early is how you lose it.
And the drinking part stopped being automatic
The third thing is mine, and I have to be careful with it, because I am not neutral.
I do not drink. I taste and I spit and I have not had a drink in over a year, and I am better at this job than I was when I drank.
Which means I have spent a long time now watching the celebration ritual from the outside, sober, at close range, and I can tell you something I did not expect.
Most of what looked like joy was momentum.
The bottle arrived because that is what you do, and the second one arrived because the first one had, and somewhere in there the evening became about the drinking rather than the thing being celebrated. I did that for years. I was not marking occasions. I was using them.
Take the momentum away, which is what has happened to a generation that drinks deliberately or not at all, and you are left with the actual question, which is much harder.
*What do we do to mark this?*
And it turns out most people have no answer, because the answer was always the bottle, and the bottle was doing the work that the ritual was supposed to do.
The thing I am actually worried about
Not champagne sales. I will be fine and so will the category.
I am worried that we are losing the practice of marking things, and that nothing has been built to replace it.
A win that nobody witnessed is oddly difficult to believe in. That is not sentiment, it is how people work. We are bad at feeling that something is finished until we have done something physical and public and slightly ridiculous about it. That is what the loud cork was for. It was not about the wine. It was a technology for making an event real to the people it happened to.
We have quietly retired that technology, for good reasons and bad ones, and put nothing in its place. So people accumulate unmarked wins. A run of achievements that never got a full stop, which means none of them ever quite landed, which is a specific modern way to be successful and feel nothing.
I watch this at close range. The table that has clearly done something remarkable, eating well, saying little, going home early, having marked nothing.
What I would tell you
Order the bottle.
Not the expensive one, and I mean that professionally. The grower stuff is better and cheaper and the people who farm it have been getting a fraction of what they are owed for a century.
But order it, and let it be loud, and say out loud what it is for, because the saying is the part that works.
You do not have to drink it. I do not. I will pour it, and I will make the moment happen, and I will be genuinely glad about your year while entirely sober.
The ritual was never about the alcohol. We just could not tell, because for a few hundred years the alcohol came bundled with it.
Now the bundle has come apart, and we get to find out what the ceremony was actually made of.