The Champagne conundrum: Putin’s sparkling wine provocation highlights double standards of the West

Vladimir Putin has made a fine art of provoking the West. The Russian president does big provocations like possible cyber-hacking, influencing elections and poisoning critics abroad, but also smaller ones that still cause an uproar, like the recent government order to reserve the Russian term for ‘champagne’ for wine produced in the country, so even original French champagne must be labelled ‘sparkling wine’.

This is multi-layered defiance.