U.S. bubbly about Champagne

The economy may be in a funk and consumer spending in a slump, but there's one glass that seems to be more than half full: flutes of Champagne to be precise.

After seeing sales tumble as the recession hit, Champagne shipments were up nearly 22 percent comparing the first six months of 2011 to the same period in 2010, with a total of 7.5 million bottles shipped to the U.S. as of June, according to the Washington-based Champagne Bureau.

From July 2010 to June 2011, 18.3 million bottles were shipped, about a 20 percent increase over the July 2009-June 2010 period.

The trend may be due to people spending more, between $30 and $50 on a bottle of wine, says Gwendolyn Osborn, wine expert for online retailer Wine.com. Since there are some good Champagnes to be found in that range, "people are buying them, since it is viewed as a luxury," she says.

Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label, which sells for about $45 on the site, was No. 6 on Wine.com's Top 10 sellers for 2011.

Bargain-priced bubbles were popular too, of course. The No. 2 wine on the list was a cava from Spain, Jaume Serra Cristalino Brut Cava, which goes for $7.99. Still, there was definite interest in Champagne. Dom Perignon 2002, which has a price tag of around $160, jumped from 67th place in 2010 to No. 27 on the list in 2011.

No need to sell author and wine expert Leslie Sbrocco on the joys of Champagne. She's such a fan she had a glass of pink bubbly tattooed on her calf.

Sbrocco, author of "Wine for Women" and founder of the website ThirstyGirl.com, likes all kinds of sparkling wine, including cava from Spain and prosecco from Italy. "But Champagne is the icon, it is the mother ship, if you will, of bubbles," she points out. "So when I think of bubbles, I immediately am drawn to Champagne."

To be called Champagne, the wines have to be made with grapes from the Champagne region of France. Sparkling wines are believed to have originated as a happy accident: Grapes were fermented and barreled during a cool harvest, which made the yeasts that turn sugar into alcohol go dormant. A warm spring then woke up the yeasts, restarted fermentation and, in the process, created bubbles.

Just where and when that happened is unclear, but records show that sparkling wines were produced in the Languedoc region of southern France decades before the Champagne region became renowned for its sparkling wine.

At first, winemakers saw bubbles as a flaw, and a dangerous one at that since the re-fermentation could cause the weak glass bottles of the era to explode. The advent of better corks and stronger bottles helped turn Champagne into a reliable product, one that was taken up by the French royal court.

These days, sparkling wines are available from all over the world, including many that are made the same way as Champagne.

Still, Champagne has maintained its cachet, not least because of a robust name protection campaign waged by French producers who have reached agreements with wine regions and governments around the world to stop referring to sparkling wines from elsewhere as Champagne.

U.S. officials signed an agreement in 2006 to stop new producers from using the name. However, existing brands were grandfathered in, though they are required to put the origin on the label, i.e., "California" or "American."