Empire State of Mind

Branson greets me with a handshake and a chest bump and opens the door. We enter a dim foyer stacked to the ceiling with case upon case of his personal label of Guy Charlemagne wine. He leads the way through another door into a room dominated by a full-sized bar. “I made it myself,” he says, pulling up a pair of stools. Then he disappears back into the foyer.

I feel like I’ve fallen through a rabbit hole into an oenophilic wonderland. Scattered before me are at least twenty bottles of wine and champagne in varying states of consumption; dozens more adorn the shelves behind the counter. Resting on a table next to the bar is a plasterboard sign with the words BRANSON B. CUVÉE emblazoned over the silhouette of a dreadlocked man. The walls are coated with cutouts from wine publications. A deflated purple birthday balloon hangs in the corner.

Branson bustles back into the room, the foil neck of a champagne bottle peeking out over the rim of the ice bucket in his arms. “One of Jay-Z’s favorite drinks is the Taittinger Rosé Comtes—we called that the ‘Food of the Gods,’ ” he says, recalling the rare $300 bottle made from France’s finest Chardonnay grapes. “One time I remember I came in, and Biggie and Jay were in the studio, and they had a bottle on the table, and Jay kind of looked at me and smiled because he knew it was something I introduced him to.”

“Last time I seen Jay, he said, ‘Damn, every time I see you, I think about Biggie,’ ” Branson continues. “I always used to come through and bring them different things, and we used to sit around and drink together and enjoy,” he says. “They’d be like, ‘Yo, this is good.’ And it seemed to be a thing of, ‘Damn, I’ve never seen this before, never tasted this before!’’Cause it’s new.”

Still glancing around the room, my eyes fall on an empty gold bottle of Armand de Brignac, another trendy $300 champagne. “Respectfully, I didn’t care for it,” Branson pipes in, as if reading my mind. “I didn’t think it was worth the money. When I initially tasted it, it was a little young, so I really didn’t like it.”

He gestures to a neighboring bottle whose ridged surface makes it look like the love child of an armadillo and a grenade. “This is a Nicolas Feuillatte Palmes d’Or Rosé, 1999,” he says. “I happened to go to a liquor store in New Jersey, and I was looking for something special for my birthday, and I ran into that. I really enjoyed it. It was nice, and it was different.”

What goes along with Armand de Brignac is Jay-Z. The rapper put the flashy gold bottle on the map when he featured it in his 2006 video for “Show Me What You Got,” a single from his comeback album Kingdom Come. The four-minute video begins with a shot of a car parked on a bluff overlooking Monaco. The camera pans in to reveal Jay-Z sitting in a Ferrari F430 Spyder convertible, his foot hanging nonchalantly over the side. An exotic Pagani Zonda roadster pulls up next to him, piloted by IndyCar driver Danica Patrick.

The music begins, Patrick shrugs, and the two cars zoom off in a mountainside race inspired by the opening sequence of the James Bond flick GoldenEye. Later in the video, Jay-Z arrives at a rollicking party on what appears to be a private island. As the third verse begins, he raps about the “gold bottles of the Ace of Spades.” He then becomes embroiled in a high-stakes game of blackjack with swimsuit model Jarah Mariano, who’s holding two queens. Jay-Z, naturally, has both the king and ace of spades. The video fades into an orgy of belly dancing, hand waving, and other forms of enjoyment presumably available only to those who attend parties at medium-size private islands off the coast of Monaco (though a quick search on Google Earth reveals that there are, in fact, no such islands off the coast of Monaco).

The video is typical of mainstream hip-hop, with one possible exception: toward the end of the video, a waiter presents Jay-Z with a bottle of Cristal champagne, and Jay-Z declines with a sweep of his hand. In its place, he accepts a gold bottle of then-unknown Armand de Brignac. This may not seem terribly meaningful in the abstract, but coming from someone who’d been rapping Cristal’s praises for years—and once bragged that he was “popping that Cristal when all y’all thought it was beer”²—it marked a major departure.

Jay-Z’s sudden change in attitude toward the pricey bubbly wasn’t without cause. In June 2006, months before the video’s release, a reporter from the Economist asked Frédéric Rouzaud, manager of the Louis Roederer house that produces Cristal, what he thought of rappers drinking his champagne. “That’s a good question,” Rouzaud replied. “But what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”³

As soon as Jay-Z caught wind of the comments, he publicly denounced Rouzaud. Cristal was one of the only brands Jay-Z had been willing to promote for free in his songs, but a slight of this nature was grounds for a boycott. “It has come to my attention that the managing director of Cristal, Frédéric Rouzaud, views the hip-hop culture as ‘unwelcome attention,’ ” he declared. “I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products through any of my various brands including the 40/40 Club nor in my personal life.”⁴

The mainstream media joined industry observers to weigh in on Jay-Z’s statement. “Don’t drop a bomb like ‘racist’ when what you’re dealing with is a skirmish over image,” the Washington Post admonished.⁵ “Hell hath no fury like a rap impresario dissed,” noted Slate.⁶ Roberto Rogness, an NPR commentator and general manager of Santa Monica’s Wine Expo, offered another suggestion: “If Jay-Z really wanted to show them what for, he should buy Roederer and give it to Beyoncé for a wedding present!”⁷

Meanwhile, Cristal’s golden image was starting to tarnish. Though demand continued to outpace supply worldwide, Jay-Z’s boycott had a noticeable effect on sales. “I’ve noticed a slight drop-off in Cristal in the club,” said Noel Ashman, owner of Manhattan’s Plumm, a favorite celebrity nightspot. “You have to recognize how deeply respected Jay-Z is, so his position definitely will have an effect.”⁸ Though Jay-Z initially replaced Cristal with Krug and Dom Pérignon in his clubs as Rouzaud had mockingly suggested, the release of the “Show Me What You Got” video on October 10 immediately established Armand de Brignac as his favorite. The use of the “Ace of Spades” moniker—a possible reclamation of the word spade, a slur used against African Americans—can also be seen as a clever swipe at Rouzaud’s perceived racism.

By simply associating himself with Armand de Brignac, Jay-Z was able to almost single-handedly lift the brand from obscurity to the heights of celebrity chic. Proprietors of many American liquor stores reported that sales of Armand de Brignac were quickly catching up to the older bubbly. “Our sales of Armand de Brignac are rivaling Cristal,” said Christian Navarro, a shop owner in Brentwood, California. “They’ve managed to shortcut one hundred and fifty years of traditional marketing.”⁹

Some observers pointed out that Armand de Brignac, which shared its first four letters with Jay-Z’s Armadale Vodka, could be Jay-Z’s latest business venture. He wasn’t shy about his connection to the spirit, but that product flopped; the last major news story about the vodka came in 2005, when a case disappeared en route to Mariah Carey’s birthday party.¹⁰ In the wake of Jay-Z’s split with Dash and Burke, there was no chance he’d enrich his former partners by rapping about Armadale (the spirit has since vanished from the public eye and store shelves altogether, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database has listed the brand as “DEAD” since May 2, 2009¹¹).

By 2006, Jay-Z was clearly on the lookout for a new beverage to hawk. Pundits theorized that he could have dreamed up Armand de Brignac to capitalize on his own Cristal boycott, and the stealth with which he promoted the champagne was simply a change in marketing strategy after overhyping Armadale. “Anytime you’re promoting a product, you’re trying to convince the public that it’s part of your lifestyle,” says Ryan Schinman, founder of Platinum Rye, the world’s largest buyer of media for corporations. “The minute that the public thinks that it’s part of your lifestyle because it’s a paid situation, it doesn’t help the cause.” Schinman points to McDonald’s ill-fated plan, launched in 2005, to pay rappers up to $5 for every radio spin of any song in which they mentioned the Big Mac. “The minute it came out,” he says, “it was inauthentic and the whole program was worthless.”¹²

Accordingly, two days after the gold bottle’s inclusion in Jay-Z’s “Show Me What You Got” video, Armand de Brignac attempted to dispel rumors of a financial connection to Jay-Z. Representatives issued a press release explaining that the champagne was simply an “ultra-luxury product in the high-end champagne category” that was “making its North American debut this year, after enjoying success as a premium, high-end brand in France.”¹³

Amid the aftermath of the divorce between Jay-Z and Cristal, Branson B.—the self-described street entrepreneur who’d introduced the star-crossed lovers nearly two decades earlier through the Notorious B.I.G.—found himself in France, hand-selecting grapes for his own Branson B. Cuvée champagne. During the three months he spent in the heart of wine country, he never heard a peep about Armand de Brignac or Ace of Spades. The notion that it had enjoyed “success as a premium, high-end brand in France” just wasn’t true.

“You look at these pretty bottles, you’re thinking when you pour something out, it’s going to take you somewhere really special,” he says. “Now if you’re used to drinking champagne, and you pour something out of that bottle, and you don’t go no place, you’re going to be disappointed. You got on a ride, and you didn’t enjoy it, and you want your money back. You know what I mean?”

“The ride didn’t flip the way it should have, it went around the curve too slow, didn’t turn upside down,” he says, again seeming to read my mind. “When you’re spending that kind of money, you want to be excited.”

Jay-Z may tout Armand de Brignac in his songs and videos, but to some champagne industry veterans, it’s at best a mediocre product masquerading as a high-end delicacy. “It’s the biggest rip-off in the history of wine,” says Lyle Fass, an independent wine buyer based in New York. “It tastes like shit. At least Cristal tastes good.”¹⁴

Fass explains that Armand de Brignac appeals to the masses because of its very sweet taste, something frowned upon by most connoisseurs. The champagne’s sweetness comes from having what’s known as a high dosage. Toward the end of the champagne-making process, a mixture of white wine, brandy, and sugar—the dosage—is added to fermented champagne. The exact amount added is up to the producer; low dosage yields the dry champagne favored by wine experts, while high dosage produces sweeter champagne. “That’s why [Armand de Brignac] is popular among the hip-hop community, because it has a high dosage,” says Fass. “Cristal is a wonderful wine. But wine people, if they say there’s one thing about it, it might be that it’s a little bit too sweet.”

Fass was working at a store in midtown Manhattan called Crush Wine & Spirits when Armand de Brignac came out in 2006. Though the large store frequently ordered cases of Krug, Moët & Chandon, and other fine champagnes, Armand de Brignac was never on their list. “We would not touch [Armand de Brignac] because we knew this was a scam,” says Fass. “It could have been easy money. We couldn’t do it. We couldn’t pull the trigger. It was just such a transparently obvious bullshit thing that was going on.”

In response to such criticism, employees of Cattier, the French house that produces Armand de Brignac, like to tout their champagne’s accolades.¹⁵ In December 2009, for example, it was named the world’s best-tasting champagne by Fine Champagne magazine. To win the Fine award, Armand de Brignac bested one thousand other champagnes. Fass wasn’t impressed. “I saw that online, and I think it’s pitooey, horseshit,” he says. “Anybody who sits down and tastes a thousand champagnes, that’s humanly impossible—your gums will be rotting and the enamel will be falling off your teeth. These wine tastings are garbage. But that’s how a lot of secondary and crappy wines [market themselves], they win bronze medals or gold medals. Everybody has a wine tasting . . . There’s a lot of stupid people in the world.”¹⁶

On the quantitative side of the champagne world, Armand de Brignac tends to score in the low nineties on the industry-standard scale that goes up to one hundred. Wine Spectator gave it an eighty-eight in 2008.¹⁷ That’s still respectable, but well short of other high-priced champagnes like Cristal, whose various vintages often flirt with one hundred. Dom Pérignon, which can be had for $150, usually scores in the mid-nineties. Armand de Brignac’s ratings place it on par with varieties of Veuve Clicquot and Taittinger that sell for $50 or less. Yet Armand de Brignac has sold 100 percent of every annual release of the $300 bottle; its highest annual unit volume thus far was forty-two thousand bottles. Representatives insist that demand for Armand de Brignac far outpaces the brand’s maximum output of sixty thousand bottles per year.¹⁸

“Everybody should take a lesson who wants to sell wine that sucks,” says Fass. “Because it is probably the most brilliant marketing in the history of wine . . . What an amazing job to take a piece of shit wine and turn it into a $300 bottle of wine overnight.”¹⁹

So why would Jay-Z get involved with a second-tier champagne? Because of the immense profit potential. Unlike vodka, which also has low production costs but produces a narrower spectrum of tastes, the ceiling on prices for champagne is nearly unlimited. Fass estimates that Cattier’s production cost for each $300 bottle of Armand de Brignac is a mere 10 euros (about $13). “The profit margin for that champagne is something I’ve never heard of before,” says Fass. “Why would a profit margin be that high? Because there are a lot of [investors] to pay out.”

Assuming Jay-Z is one of these people, the connection could be through any number of outlets: the house of Cattier itself, the brand Armand de Brignac, the importer, the exporter, or the distributor. All of these entities are registered with an array of state and national government agencies in the United States and France. Theoretically, the link could be established with a little bit of sleuth work.

My first call goes to the French offices of the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne, the trade association that includes all the grape growers and houses of Champagne, France. A woman named Brigitte informs me that Cattier is 100 percent family owned, but that the brand Armand de Brignac might have a different structure. She suggests trying the French department of agriculture. An e-mail to the agency yields a reply from one Isabelle Ruault, who explains that the brand Armand de Brignac is registered to AJC International, an export company owned by J. J. Cattier. Ruault supposes the brand belongs entirely to the family, but without knowing AJC’s precise capital structure, the exact details are impossible de savoir.²⁰

Turning my attention to stateside bureaucracies, I place a call to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington, D.C. A representative redirects me to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which in turn points me to the New York State Liquor Authority in Harlem. There, a man named Kashif Thompson informs me that Armand de Brignac is distributed by Sovereign Brands, LLC, and imported by Southern Wines & Spirits.²¹ Southern is one of the largest liquor distributors in the country, and it’s known for having personal relationships with some of the biggest names in hip-hop. Fass noted this firsthand while working at Crush: “50 Cent wanted magnums of Patrón tequila, which are incredibly rare, and the leader of Southern dropped them off to our store, and 50 Cent picked them up.”²² A call to the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation turns up a list of Southern’s owners; Shawn Carter is not listed among them.

The last link is Sovereign Brands, whose owner is listed as Brett Berish. Berish, I later learn, is an entrepreneur who distributes and owns a line of spirits called 3 Vodka. The brand was launched in 2004 as a partnership with Atlanta-based hip-hop mogul Jermaine Dupri,²³ who overlapped with Jay-Z as a member of Island Def Jam’s executive ranks. I also discover that shortly after Armand de Brignac’s 2006 launch, Berish issued a press release saying that “Armand de Brignac and Jay-Z have not entered into any agreement, sponsorship or otherwise.” However, he didn’t specify whether there was a financial agreement between Sovereign and Jay-Z. Besides Berish, the only other owner listed for Armand de Brignac is Shannon Bullinger, Sovereign’s operations manager. If Jay-Z has a Dupri-style partnership with Berish, it’s not on the books.²⁴

He points across the bar to a bottle of Antique Gold, strikingly similar to the empty Armand de Brignac sitting in front of us. “That bottle there, a friend of mine brought it back from Monaco,” he says. “It’s like sixty dollars, seventy dollars, eighty dollars in the store.”

I nod, realizing the magnitude of what Branson has just said. Antique Gold, the champagne Branson’s friend brought back from Monaco, has been around for decades. Armand de Brignac, the one that started appearing in Jay-Z’s videos circa 2006, looks nearly identical and costs five times as much. Both are made by Cattier—the only real difference seems to be the pewter Ace of Spades label slapped on the more expensive bottle.

“Jay and I have a relationship, we know one another,” says Branson, sitting down. “And here it is, I have this champagne, I’d like for my champagne to be in his environments [where] he sells products. If he can bring Veuve Clicquot [to the 40/40 Club], why can’t he bring Branson B. into his environment? That, I don’t understand. I have no idea.”

Branson shuffles through the stack and produces a coffee-stained sheet of paper. I crane my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of a contract, a document with percentages. But it’s something totally different. Addressed to Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter at the 40/40 Club, 6 West 25th Street, New York, New York, 10010, it’s a copy of the letter that accompanied bottles of Branson B. Cuvée to Jay-Z’s offices in 2006, shortly after Jay-Z announced his Cristal boycott.

I nod sympathetically, but I completely understand. When it comes to business, Jay-Z is a cold pragmatist. He ditched Jaz-O, the boyhood mentor who showed him how to rhyme; he split with Damon Dash, the man who taught him how to sell CDs. He even shot his own brother in the shoulder for stealing his jewelry. Jay-Z parted ways with many of his former colleagues because he realized he’d outgrown them, or simply didn’t need their help; there’s no reason to expect he’d approach a champagne venture differently.

That said, working with Branson B. would have made sense in other ways. Jay-Z’s champagne adventure started as a response to what he perceived as a racist statement by Roederer’s Rouzaud about rap culture. What better way to prove him wrong than starting a champagne brand with hip-hop’s own sommelier? Perhaps Branson’s entreaties never made it past Jay-Z’s gatekeepers. Certainly the duo could have come up with a more reasonably priced bubbly—Branson’s retails for $40 to $75 per bottle. But there are very few people in the world who can inspire others to pay $300 for a bottle of champagne, and Jay-Z is apparently one of them. Partnering on a cheaper champagne would have meant a smaller profit to split, and thus, it would have been bad business for Jay-Z. In Branson’s eyes, that’s why it’s so obvious that Jay-Z has a monetary stake in Armand de Brignac.

“I couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t benefit financially,” he says. “Why would he do that if he didn’t have a financial stake? Why would he associate Shawn Carter with champagne and not benefit from it?”

Though my visit didn’t yield a concrete paper trail between Jay-Z and Ace of Spades, and my calls to various government agencies in the United States and France had yielded only circumstantial evidence, there was one last chance: a transatlantic trip to the birthplace of Armand de Brignac.

The village of Chigny-Les-Roses, France, is so tiny that it seems nobody ever bothered to put street numbers on any of the buildings. Given the number of edifices in the town, it would be about as useful as numbering the pots and pans in one’s kitchen. Fortunately, I’m already with the Cattier-employed guide who will take me to the company’s champagne cellars.

We walk down Rue Dom Pérignon and stop in front of an unnumbered house with all its windows shuttered. The gate in front has a sign that says CHIEN MÉCHANT—“Mean Dog.” I throw a wary glance across the yard.

She leads me through the gate, past the house, and into a garage whose floor is littered with dusty champagne bottles and elaborate metal contraptions used to insert corks. Then she flips on an electric lantern, and we descend a narrow spiral staircase some ninety feet into the ground. The temperature quickly drops from a dry, sunny 80 degrees to a brisk 45 degrees moistened by 90 percent humidity.²⁵

The guide explains that the cellars are about one hundred and fifty years old; they served as part of a vast network of underground shelters during World War II. Patches of the brick walls still bear burns from candles used to light the corridors when electricity went out during air raids. I’m still mulling this fact when we arrive in a room glimmering with golden bottles of Armand de Brignac. They hang by the dozen in racks, slanted at a slight angle so that sediment collects in the necks and can be removed easily in the next step of the champagne-making process.

The spectacle of thousands of bottles sitting like gilded test tubes is quite impressive, but what really strikes me is that the bottles themselves are completely blank. There are no labels on the front or back, and nothing to distinguish a $300 bottle of Armand de Brignac from, say, a $60 bottle of Antique Gold, which Cattier stopped producing in 2006—the same year the house started producing Armand de Brignac. (“It’s the old cuvée that’s been sort of resurrected,” a New York liquor store manager named J. J. Battipaglia would tell me upon my return to the States.²⁶)

After the tour is complete, my guide takes me back into the daylight and over to Cattier’s headquarters for a meeting with the company’s brass. First to greet me is Philippe Bienvenu, Armand de Brignac’s commercial director.

He introduces me to a few more Cattier employees, including the family’s kindly patriarch Jean-Jacques Cattier and his son Alexandre (who enthusiastically informs me that his wife just gave birth to their first son, Armand). As we walk around the bright corridors of the Cattier headquarters, Bienvenu traces the origins of the company’s flagship champagne to Jean-Jacques Cattier’s mother, who first thought up the name in the early 1950s. “The name Armand de Brignac was created after the name of a book that Mrs. Cattier had read,” he explains. “She really loved this character, she found the name very elegant, and this is how she decided to use the name to create that brand.”²⁷

The brand, which wasn’t really even a brand at that point, remained dormant while Cattier focused on its existing brands like Antique Gold. According to Bienvenu, the house started to think about making Mrs. Cattier’s idea a reality during the early 1990s, but nothing was officially done until fifteen years later. Shortly after Armand de Brignac’s debut, Bienvenu claims, Jay-Z came across it purely by chance. “When we started to ship product to the U.S. and especially to New York, Jay discovered our champagne in a wine shop and bought a few bottles,” he says. “There has never been any partnership, any financial involvement, or something like this between Jay and us . . . It’s fantastic to have such an endorsement.”

“He discovered our champagne by pure coincidence in a wine shop and a few months after came to Monaco to shoot a video,” Bienvenu replies. “On that occasion, he ordered a few cases that we shipped to his hotel there. We couldn’t imagine when we shipped those cases that the purpose of this was to include our champagne in the video. We just thought that he wanted to enjoy our champagne during his stay in France.”

I nod politely. But when I ask Bienvenu for the name of the New York wine shop in which Jay-Z allegedly found his first bottle of Armand de Brignac, the affable Frenchman quickly becomes defensive.

All of this makes for a great story: a family-owned champagne brand dreamed up by a little old French lady in the 1950s, dormant until resurrected half a century later, promptly discovered by the world’s most famous rapper, by sheer coincidence. Even more fantastic is the notion that Jay-Z—a man who’d launched his own Scottish vodka brand four years earlier, just so that he could rap about it—would decide, out of the kindness of his heart, to include the mom-and-pop champagne in the music video for the biggest single on his comeback album. It’s about as believable as the notion that Jay-Z did his 2006 Budweiser commercial, carved from that same Monaco shoot, for free (in fact, a source tells me Anheuser-Busch financed the whole shoot and paid him $1 million on top of that for his efforts).

The first bottles of Armand de Brignac weren’t shipped until October 2006—months after Jay-Z’s video was filmed. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirms that the Armand de Brignac trademark was first used for commerce in November 2006.²⁸ Bienvenu himself admitted that the bottles were first shipped and released in the fall of 2006.²⁹ Obviously, it would have been impossible for Jay-Z to stumble upon a bottle of champagne in a New York wine shop during the preceding summer.

When I later confronted one of Cattier’s publicists about this inconsistency, she backtracked. “There’s a misunderstanding regarding how Jay saw the bottle. It was in New York . . . but not in a store,” she explained in an e-mail. “Prior to the launch of Armand de Brignac, our U.S. importer was showing the brand to selected ‘tastemakers’ to generate excitement and spread word-of-mouth in key circles. . . . Through some of these connections, word reached someone in Jay’s team of the brand and that’s how his interest was sparked. Like any new brand coming to market, a number of key people would have seen it, tasted it, and learnt about it before it was released.” Pressed on the nature of Jay-Z’s connection to the importer, Sovereign Brands, she responded: “I know there have been some discussions between the two sides about potentially forming a relationship.”³⁰

In the weeks following my return from France, I realized that the answers to Jay-Z’s champagne mystery were here in the U.S. all along. I spoke with a number of sources close to the matter—including a prominent executive at a major record label, a wine distributor with ties to the entertainment industry, and the chief executive of a notable liquor company, to name a few—and none of them would let me quote them by name for fear of damaging business relationships. But when I related everything I’d learned, all of these sources confirmed that Jay-Z receives millions of dollars per year for his association with Armand de Brignac. As I suspected, the connection wasn’t through the Cattier family, but through Sovereign Brands.

Jay-Z and those around him publicly deny any connection to Armand de Brignac because he wants to be seen as a champagne connoisseur, a trendsetter with the sophistication to anoint a successor to Cristal as hip-hop’s choice bubbly—not something as gauche as a paid promoter. Or, as Bienvenu offhandedly explained to me: “He doesn’t want to be considered a brand ambassador or something like this.” More important, Jay-Z realizes that the revelation of a financial connection could endanger the authenticity of his endorsement—and by extension jeopardize a very lucrative arrangement. Most of the people buying bottles of Armand de Brignac are doing so because they think Jay-Z prefers it to other fine wines simply because of its quality, much as he prefers Maybachs to Toyota Camrys. If they discovered that they were actually paying $300 for a gussied-up bottle of $60 Antique Gold, they might reconsider.

The math looks extremely favorable for Jay-Z. Like most expensive champagnes, the production cost per bottle is about $13; the wholesale price is $225.³¹ Armand de Brignac’s maximum output is sixty thousand bottles per year.³² If Jay-Z splits the $212-per-bottle profit evenly with Cattier and Sovereign, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests his annual take would be a little over $4 million. One of the industry sources who asked to remain anonymous confirmed that number, and added that Jay-Z may have received a Sovereign Brands equity stake worth about $50 million.³³ All for dropping a few lyrical references and featuring Armand de Brignac in a couple of videos.