Why is cristal racist

Champagne executive Frederick Heidsieck has a message for rapper Jay-Z: Cristal is alive and well, thank you very much.

More to the point, he claims they never suffered because of the African-American musician's boycott of the purportedly "racist" brand in Heidsieck, dressed in a neatly tailored blue suit and shimmering pink tie, on a promotional swing through Toronto last week.

In fact, in the wake of the much-publicized denunciation, in which Jay-Z announced he was pulling the brand from his U. Heidsieck's office with e-mails and phone calls requesting any excess inventory not taken up by the U. Asked whether Cristal's association with the "bling lifestyle" might sully the brand, Mr. Rouzaud said: "That's a good question. But what can we do? We can't forbid people from buying it.

Heidsieck says the racism charge "was obviously not true," and, for the record, he seemed gleeful in our conversation about the wine's cachet among wealthy young rap artists. But that market is a drop in the bucket for Cristal with the entire United States accounting for just 15 per cent of sales. More tangibly painful for the brand - dubbed "Cris" by its rap-star devotees - was the recent recession, which took a swig out of Champagne sales generally after more than a decade of heady expansion.

Cristal sales plunged 20 per cent in late and the first half of , and Champagne over all was down 15 per cent in over the previous year, Mr. Heidsieck said, as wealthy consumers tightened their Gucci belts and formerly free-spending scenesters stayed home in droves.

So he buys the company," proclaimed CNN. Problem is, this piece of 'news' isn't actually new. The story really begins way back in , when Frederic Rouzaud, the manager of the company that makes Cristal champagne, put a grape-stomping foot in his mouth when a reporter from the Economist asked his thoughts about the popularity of Cristal among rappers. Many in the hip-hop world took the comments as a major sleight; some sensed racism, including Jay Z.

So he called for a boycott of Cristal and stopped rapping about it. Or at least, it was billed as new--sort of. Representatives from Cattier, the French company that makes the champagne, described it as a wine that was "making its North American debut this year, after enjoying success as a premium, high-end brand in France.

New York wine buyer Lyle Fass was less kind, dubbing Armand de Brignac "the biggest rip-off in the history of wine. While reporting Empire State of Mind , I decided to travel to France to get to the bottom of the story. I arranged a meeting with the head of Cattier at the company's beautiful headquarters in the tiny village of Chigny-Les-Roses and headed across the pond. Upon my arrival, a guide took me on a tour of Cattier's year-old cellars, which served as part of a network of underground shelters during the second World War.

There, I saw thousands of gold bottles glowing faintly in the damp dark--each waiting to be stamped with an Armand de Brignac spade logo that would differentiate it from Antique Gold. The company's commercial director told me about Cattier's history and explained that Jay Z had discovered Armand de Brignac in a New York wine shop.

He insisted that there was no "financial involvement," and that, more or less, Jay Z simply liked the champagne so much that he decided to feature it in one of his videos. What happened? In , The Economist interviewed Frederic Rouzaud, the managing director of the company that makes Cristal, on how its owners felt about seeing rappers drink the champagne in their videos.

Jay Z recounted how he felt to hear that. I used to drink Cristal, them motherfuckers racist So I switched gold bottles on to that Spade shit. Jay Z has been promoting this brand of champagne ever since. It has never been purely about the taste. The maximum output is 60, bottles per year. For much of the past few years, Jay Z has been associated with partial ownership of the Brookyln Nets basketball team and its home arena, the Barclays Center, where he performed eight sold-out shows to open the venue.

As he said at the time:. Which is true, but not the whole story.