California wines are pretty much the best in the world, and the French export wines are their “pour down the toilet” grade. (They keep all the good ones for themselves: can you blame them?) But even so, it’s still not permissible to call any wine “Champagne” unless it’s from the Champagne region of France. Champagne-type wines from other places and countries are called “sparkling wine” instead. This doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Champagne”.
So I was thinking, since the FDA allows food companies to market fake chocolate under the term “chocolatey”, rather than forcing them to call it “sweet brown stuff”, why can’t we get the same type of name for California Champagne? In the spirit of the term “chocolatey”, we could call it “Champagney”. It still might sound cheap somehow, but it’s better than calling it “sparkling wine”, isn’t it? That just makes everyone think of that Boone’s Farm stuff everyone drank too much of and threw up in high school.
Or maybe we could call it “freedom wine”, like we called French fries “freedom fries” when France wouldn’t help us invade Iraq, and then they corrected our grammar and were all rude to us whenever we would try to ask anyone for directions in Paris.
Or they could just call it “Shampagne”.
Or they could just call it “Shampagne”.
Here’s a blog post about this California Champagne issue:
And here’s an article about “chocolatey”:
