Your great-grandparents sang about a dandy named “Champagne Charlie.” A popular tune said:
Champagne Charlie is my name
Champagne Charlie is my nameThere’s no drink as good as fizz, fizz, fizzI’ll drink every drop there is, is, is.All ’round town it is the sameBy pop! Pop! Pop! I rose to fameI’m the idol of the barmaidsChampagne Charlie is my name. Champagne Charlie actually existed. He brought champagne to America and his story is wilder than any tale Hollywood could concoct.
Charles Heidsieck was born into a French family with a long history of marketing champagne. Charlie founded his own company in 1851. Visiting the U.S. the next year, he discovered champagne was unknown to Americans. A major market was waiting to be tapped.
Charlie secured an agent in New York and began exporting bubbly. Just one sip and Americans were hooked on the new drink.
Returning the following year, Charlie was the toast of New York. He used his charismatic personality and celebrity status to promote champagne (the same way Colonel Sanders did with fried chicken a century later).
Newspapers dubbed him Champagne Charlie. They couldn’t get enough of the dashing young Frenchman and his intoxicating product. He was fun company and embraced his Champagne Charlie image by dressing in the latest Parisian fashions, wining and dining the rich and powerful, filling their glasses with more bubbly as his order books filled with requests for more bottles. Being Champagne Charlie was very lucrative.
Until America went to war with itself in 1861. Half of Charlie’s assets were unpaid bills in America. Rushing here as fast as he could, he was met by bad news. His agent used a curious bit of logic to claim a new law passed by Congress excusing Northerners from paying debts on cotton from the South meant that he, the agent, didn’t have to pay his debts to Charlie.
So Charlie hurried to New Orleans, now deep in the Confederacy, to collect a big debt there. Arriving in April 1862, he found the man was unable to pay. He gave Charlie a warehouse full of cotton instead. It was shipped to Mobile, Ala., and loaded onto two blockade runners. Both were caught and the cotton burned.
Charlie decided to return to New Orleans and charter a boat to Mexico or Cuba and go home from there. France’s consul in Mobile gave him a diplomatic pouch containing documents bound for Paris to aid his escape plans. But when he arrived in New Orleans, he discovered it was now in Union hands. Examining the diplomatic pouch’s contents, the Federals found letters about French companies supplying Confederate uniforms. Charlie was tossed in prison as a spy.
With his business nearing bankruptcy, his wife sold her personal belongings just to buy food. Influential relatives lobbied French Emperor Napoleon III, who personally appealed to President Lincoln for Charlie’s freedom. Released in November 1862, he went home broke and sick.
Then something curious happened the next year. An American missionary delivered a letter from the brother of the agent who had stiffed Charlie in 1861. The writer said he was humiliated by his brother’s bad behavior. To atone, he included the deed to land in the American West. That’s nice, Charlie, thought, but what good was property in the wilderness?
Charlie barely kept his champagne business afloat, his family teetering close to poverty.
A few years later, in a desperate final bid to avoid going under, Charlie decided to sell the American land. Only then did he bother to learn where his holdings were located.
The property was in Colorado, which was experiencing a bonanza thanks to the discovery of gold. Charlie, it turned out, owned one-third of the boomtown of Denver.
He was instantly rich again. The windfall allowed him to revitalize his business, which remains one of France’s leading champagne houses today.
Champagne Charlie was a very wealthy man when he died at age 71 in 1893.
I dare Hollywood to come up with a better twist ending than that!
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
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