The 1911 Champagne Riots in France

In April 1911, the streets of Aube in northeastern France really did run with champagne. Furious small winegrowers poured out of their houses and into the roads, broke into cellars, smashed bottles, and rolled whole barrels into the river. One paper claimed that twenty million quarts of champagne ended up in the gutters.

Across the Atlantic, the New York Times summed it up with a blunt headline: “We Buy Fake Champagne and the Vineyards Revolt.”

Behind the drama and broken glass was a story about disease, fraud, geography—and the birth of the rules that still govern what we’re allowed to call “Champagne” today.

Champagne’s Rise

A few decades before the riots, the future of champagne looked dazzling.

In the early nineteenth century, making sparkling wine was a risky business. Bottles had an alarming habit of exploding in storage, turning cellars into minefields. Workers sometimes wore metal masks to avoid being blinded by flying glass. It wasn’t until the 1830s that better bottles, improved corks, and more controlled fermentation finally tamed this problem.

Once producers could reliably bottle bubbles, champagne took off. By the 1880s, it had become the official drink of “something worth celebrating.” One English observer noted that no serious event—opening a railway, launching a ship, dedicating a public building, hosting a famous politician, or throwing a big charity dinner—felt complete without champagne on the table. It was the liquid seal on public success.

This wasn’t just luck. Champagne houses waged some of the most aggressive and inventive marketing campaigns of their time. One famous story credits Madame Clicquot, the visionary force behind Veuve Clicquot, with turning defeat into an opportunity. After Napoleon’s troops retreated from Russia, she supposedly pushed her wines onto the victorious Russian officers trailing behind them. The idea was simple and brilliant: let the enemy fall in love with champagne, and they’ll carry the habit home.

By the late nineteenth century, it seemed like everyone in Champagne was poised to ride this sparkling wave to prosperity.

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A Tiny Insect that Almost Killed French Wine

Then came an enemy no one had invited: phylloxera.

This tiny insect, accidentally imported from the Americas, slipped quietly into European vineyards in the mid–nineteenth century. Its scientific name, Phylloxera vastatrix—“the devastator”—turned out to be painfully accurate.

The insect attacked the roots of grapevines, sucking their sap and leaving wounds that encouraged rot and disease. Entire vineyards withered and died. For growers, it was like watching the ground itself turn against them. Confused and desperate, they tried anything:

• Flooding the fields
• Replanting
• Even burying live toads under the vines as a kind of folk remedy

None of it worked.

The only real solution was radical: grafting European grape varieties onto American rootstock, which was naturally resistant to phylloxera. It did save French wine—but at a huge cost. Grafting was expensive. Newly grafted vines took years before they produced decent harvests.

Economically, everything flipped. France, long the world’s leading wine exporter, suddenly found itself importing wine and raw materials just to keep production going.

Fake Wine, Cheap Grapes, and Bitter Resentment

In this crisis, big champagne houses and small growers did not suffer equally.

Large firms, under pressure to meet demand and protect their profits, turned to whatever they could get their hands on. They imported grapes and wine from other countries. Some went further still—using dried grapes (raisins), and coloring cheap wine with everything from elderberries to synthetic dyes made from coal tar.

The label might say “champagne,” but what was inside could be a very different story.

Small growers in places like Aube couldn’t compete. They didn’t have the capital to import vast quantities of outside grapes or invest in elaborate blending operations. They were being squeezed from two directions:

• Their vineyards had been ravaged by phylloxera and slowly, painfully replanted
• The big houses were flooding the market with cheaper, often dubious wine

By the time their vines started producing again, small growers found themselves in a marketplace dominated by large firms selling “champagne” that was, in many cases, barely connected to the region at all. The sense of betrayal was intense—not just toward the powerful houses, but toward a system that allowed fraud to masquerade as tradition.

Drawing Borders Around Taste: Early Terroir Rules

To calm tensions and restore order to the market, the French government began to formalize what counted as authentic wine from particular regions. These early rules were the ancestors of the modern Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) system—the reason we still insist that if it doesn’t come from the Champagne region, it’s just “sparkling wine.”

On paper, that sounds like exactly what small growers wanted: strict rules tying the word “Champagne” to a specific place, justified by terroir—the unique combination of soil, climate, and tradition.

But the way the map was drawn set everything on fire.

When officials outlined the Champagne region, the department of Marne—home to big, famous houses in places like Reims and Épernay—was placed in the top, “first-tier” category. Aube, further south, was labeled a “second-tier” zone.

For growers in Aube, this was a brutal blow. Many had recently replanted their land with low-yielding grapes suitable for high-quality champagne. They had invested heavily, in good faith, in the idea that they were part of Champagne.

Now, with a few strokes of an official pen, the value of their produce was effectively chopped to a fraction. They were being told that their grapes, their soil, their labor—all of it—belonged to a lesser category.

This was the spark falling into an already very dry powder keg.

The 1911 Champagne Riots

In early 1911, anger in Aube boiled over.

Growers formed large crowds—tens of thousands of people in some places—and marched into towns, targeting symbols of the system they believed had betrayed them: cellars, warehouses, and stocks of wine. Bottles were smashed, barrels were destroyed, and champagne that had once signified luxury and celebration was poured out as an act of protest.

The government, shocked by the scale of the unrest, tried to retreat. Officials adjusted the geographical definitions, stepping back from the harsh second-tier designation for Aube.

But this triggered outrage in the other direction. Growers and merchants in Marne, who saw themselves as the heart of Champagne, exploded in protest at what they viewed as a dilution of their status. Soon both sides were marching, waving red flags, and singing the socialist anthem, the “Internationale,” for very different reasons.

A dispute over wine quality, geography, and economic survival had turned into a broader confrontation over fairness, identity, and state power.

Champagne, Cameras, and the Birth of Modern Surveillance

The aftermath of the riots holds a curious place in history for another reason: the use of motion pictures as police evidence.

Authorities had a problem. It was one thing to know that rioters had burned a warehouse or looted a store; it was another to prove who, exactly, had done what in a crowd of tens of thousands.

During and after the unrest, newsreel cameras had rolled, capturing scenes of chaos. At first, these films were simply shown in public as a novelty. Then, local police had an idea.

They began attending screenings, bringing along older residents who knew most of the people in the region by sight. As the images flickered across the screen, these locals started pointing out familiar faces:

“There’s Pierre D… setting fire to the warehouse.”
“That’s so-and-so throwing barrels into the river.”

What had been entertainment for audiences became a tool for law enforcement. The winemakers of Aube, already under pressure from new legal definitions of terroir and market control, now also found themselves caught up in one of the early examples of filmed evidence being used to identify and punish protesters.

The Champagne riots weren’t just about wine. They also marked a moment when cameras shifted from recording celebrations to documenting crimes—and when public spectacle began to merge with state surveillance.

What the Champagne Riots Left Behind

Today, Aube is officially part of the Champagne region. Bottles made from its grapes can proudly carry the name that growers fought so hard to protect in 1911.

When you pop a cork now, there’s a whole hidden history in that spray of bubbles:

• The technological leaps that made champagne safe to bottle
• The clever marketing that turned it into the drink of celebration
• The tiny insect that nearly wiped out French vines
• The small growers who refused to accept being written out of the story
• And the early police use of film, foreshadowing the kind of surveillance we now take for granted

The Champagne riots remind us that even something as glamorous as a glass of fizz is shaped by conflict, politics, and power. Behind every toast is a long struggle over who gets to define authenticity—and who pays the price when the rules change.