07 January 2016, The Tablet

Sparkling new year

by N. O’Phile

 
The title of David Lough’s riveting new account of Winston Churchill’s financial affairs, No More Champagne, relates how he lived his entire life on a fiscal knife-edge. Recurring, urgent economies rarely touched, however, his heroic consumption of champagne: he famously drank Pol Roger with every meal (and much else in between). The book’s title may be ominous. Only a year ago this column lyricised about champagne as the undisputed celebratory drink of choice: but as the new year begins, change is apparently afoot, in Britain at least. In 2014, we Brits for the first time spent more on Prosecco than champagne – £181.8 million as against £141.3 million. It’s highly probable that more glasses of Italian rather than French sparkling wine were raised
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