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Europe|French Winemaker Gets Prison for Scheme That Threatened the Champagne Bubble
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/world/europe/france-fake-champagne-sentence.html
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Didier Chopin, 56, was accused of passing off wine made with carbonated grapes from Spain and other regions in France as Champagne.
Sept. 5, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
It’s harvest season in the Champagne region of France, and local residents are celebrating. Not only do yields look good, but a scandal that had rocked the strict bubbly business was finally laid to rest this week.
In 2023, Didier Chopin, a 56-year-old French winemaker, was accused of passing off wine made with carbonated grapes from Spain and other regions in France as Champagne. On Tuesday, he was sentenced to prison.
His deception was the ultimate faux pas in an area where the Comité Champagne, a local trade association, dictates a litany of rules on things like the distance between vines to harvest times, and strictly polices business in France and abroad.
“It’s a betrayal; it’s like if you found out your husband was cheating on you,” Cynthia Coutu, a sommelier and Champagne expert in Paris, said by phone of Mr. Chopin’s actions.
The first rule of Champagne is that only producers using local grapes can claim that name. Since 1936, regional growers have received special protection, the “Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée” label, the French mark of a product with a unique identity stemming from its geographical origin. You can buy bubbly from other places, but producers cannot call it “Champagne.”
The label is intended to signal quality and to guarantee that buyers are getting the real thing. The industry shipped more than 270 million bottles of the bubbly last year, generating about 5.8 billion euros, or about $6.75 billion, according to the Comité Champagne.
