Liquid gold: The evolution of (and big money behind) sport's champagne shower victory celebrations
“That’s not how wine is meant to be enjoyed — we’d rather it was sipped than sprayed."
After Spain lifted the World Cup this summer, you can be sure that the team had a healthy glug of champagne. Indeed, the event’s official champagne, Taittinger, had even created a special limited edition Brut Reserve for the occasion. What a shame then, at least for wine lovers, that so much of it will be sprayed into the air.
“That’s not how wine is meant to be enjoyed — we’d rather it was sipped than sprayed,” laughs Matteo Lunelli, the CEO of sparkling wine brand Ferrari Trento. It's the sponsor of sports events as varied as the America’s Cup to the Italian Open tennis tournament, from the matches of Juventus FC and, up until last year, when it was succeeded by Moet & Chandon, of Formula 1 too.
“But the fact is that the drink has become associated with moments of joy, like victory in sports. I mean, we’ve partnered with art events too, and for official state events, and you certainly won’t see much spraying there”.
On paper, taking a bottle of expensive liquid and spritzing everyone around you with it is a strange idea. And, indeed, the first time it happened wasn’t planned. Sure a relationship between champagne and Formula 1 goes back to 1950, when Moet & Chandon gifted a bottle to the legendary Argentine racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio, winner of the French Grand Prix that year at the Les Amis De Gueux circuit in Champagne. But it was 60 years ago this year when the Swiss driver Jo Siffert, winner of the Le Mans 24 Hour race, first took a bottle and soaked his fellow podium people.
There’s more to that story though. Siffert always claimed he hadn’t meant to — the bottle had been sat in the sun and the cork popped unexpectedly, he reckoned. But not so the following year, when 1967’s Le Mans winner, American driver Dan Gurney, quite deliberately gave his bottle a good shake (this wouldn’t have worked with anything other than champagne or sparking wine, of course, and a can of Fanta just wouldn’t have cut it) and let rip. He was, as he would later explain himself, “beyond caring and just got caught up in the moment”.
'The ultimate celebratory moments'
Thus the tradition of the winner receiving a bottle of champagne became one of spraying it, a tradition deemed so iconic that in countries where alcohol isn’t permitted (across the Middle East mostly) a sparkling fruit juice is used, which introduces drivers to a different kind of sticky moment. Mercedes team head Toto Wolff even claimed that Sprite was used at the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix. There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a great moment to watch, too.
So when doesn’t it happen? On occasion there is politics. In 2005 a number of race teams pulled out of the United States Grand Prix after the assessment by Michelin that their tyres couldn’t safely navigate a banked final corner. Fans were somewhat pissed off with the greatly diminished race and booed the podium, leaving winner Michael Schumacher and runner-up Rubens Barrichello, who shared the fans’ disgruntlement, refusing to spray. Not so the third place finisher Tiago Monteiro. It was his first (and, it would turn out, only) time on the podium. He wasn’t going to miss the opportunity. But on other occasions there is sadness. It has also become tradition that the wine isn’t sprayed — isn’t even opened — if a driver has been killed or seriously injured during the race.
“Champagne is all about celebration and I think that podium moment in Formula 1 must be one of the ultimate celebratory moments. It’s a reflection of the feeling you get when drinking it,” says Rachel James, head of partnerships for Silverstone, the birthplace of the modern Formula 1 World Championship.
'The Elevated Option'
From a business standpoint of course, having your bottle on the podium is about as high profile a moment as any marketing team could wish for.
“There’s a huge visibility to the celebratory moment, especially given social media now. It’s more joyful to see an image of someone spraying wine than it is just holding a trophy,” explains Ferrari Trento’s Lunelli. An estimated three billion people — over a third of the global population — watched the World Cup final, while F1 reaches almost two billion over a season.
No wonder competition to win the various Formula 1 contracts, be that for track or team sponsorship deals, is intense. Big name G.H Mumm was a sponsor for a long 15 year run, but so too Chandon — a much less well-known Argentine sparkling wine maker — who soaked the podium for two years, followed by relative newcomer Champagne Carbon.
And the commitment for a smaller player can be daunting. The kicker to the high profile is that, while any champagne or sparking wine brand that signs a sponsorship deal will sell a lot of its tipple, it also has to be a big enough operation to guarantee the supply of vast quantities of it. And, since high rollers who have paid big bucks for hospitality are going to be drinking it, at a very high quality too.
But there’s another reason why we should get used to seeing more fizz at the football, or any other big sporting event: because, as Lunelli puts it, “they’re becoming more like curated entertainment events beyond whatever the athletes are doing”. The synergy, to use some PR-speak, between luxury, high-end hospitality and sports is intensifying, as the world of luxury is said to move from being about buying stuff to more about access to exclusive experiences. Not for nothing is Silverstone, for example, set to unveil a partnership with the Michelin-starred Park Lane restaurant Labombe by Trivet this summer for its ‘ultra-premium’ trackside hospitality lounge The Vale.
“There aren’t many moments that can be so emotional to so many people at once, and sport delivers on that. It’s something a lot people want to be involved in,” says James.
“And increasingly I think when they go to these really big sports events they associate it with the elevated option — champagne has to be there”.
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