The champagne industry is one of the world's most successful and profitable enterprises, striking evidence of the marketability of distinction and carbon dioxide in drink. Annual production is about 200 million bottles, barely enough to satisfy a greedy elite, at least in times of prosperity. The rise of the champagne industry partly compensated for the economic and demographic decline of the Champagne in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the fall in prices for wheat and beet sugar, land was left fallow; in 1914 agricultural production was half what it had been around 1850. The area covered by vines dropped to 38,000 hectares because of phylloxera and competition from the Midi. In 1835 vines covered 18,495 ha of the Marne; by 1900–9 the figure was 14,860; and in the period 1920–49 the figure was always less than 9000 ha. By 1980–7, vines covered 19,214 ha. The amount of land covered by vines in the Marne has just more than doubled in the twentieth century, with production of wine having increased about fourfold.

The champagne trade came to be controlled by the négociants, whose power had its origins in the eighteenth century but grew strikingly in the nineteenth century with the rise in sales. One of the distinguishing features of the industry was the presence of the champagne widows (Bollinger, Clicquot, Laurent-Perrier, Pommery, and Roederer). In recent years financial groups have replaced many of the famous family houses, the “rois du Champagne.”