BREAKING: Jay-Z profits from Armand de Brignac!

In an extensive waste of the journalism world’s precious resources, Zack O’Malley Greenburg has uncovered what we have known since 2006: Armand de Brignac is mediocre Champagne at best and Jay-Z profits from it!

Greenburg has a chapter of his forthcoming book on Jay-Z published in The Atlantic (although, mysteriously, it has been removed from their site and is available here). As we discussed back in 2006 (“Jay-Z puts an Ace in play“), drawing on stories in the WSJ and BusinessWeek, “Ace” is an absurdly priced nonvintage Champagne that came out of nowhere and relies on Jay-Z’s star power to sell it. If he has a financial stake in it, so what? People who buy it are overpaying to drink image rather than a quality wine, hardly the first time that has happened.

Here’s how Lyle Fass summed it up in Greenburg’s piece: “Everybody should take a lesson who wants to sell wine that sucks. Because it is probably the most brilliant marketing in the history of wine.”

Previous Ace coverage: Jay-Z puts an Ace in play
Reader mailbag: finding Ace of Spades champagne
Ace of Spades expands into a full house
Douchebauchery chronicles

4 Responses to “BREAKING: Jay-Z profits from Armand de Brignac!”


  1. Hey Doc-V,
    Do you have Jay-Z’s number? I have some good quality domestically produced wines available at value prices and could benefit from increased brand recognition.

    Jay-Z seems to be a keen businessman and “Rapitalism” seems to be alive and well in America.

    I laugh now when I recall how frustrating it was for me a decade ago while working in my new position as wine steward at a top restaurant. I constantly labored over the menu and wine list as they changed daily and was prepared to make unusual and exacting food and wine reccomendations, but several of the so called VIP customers only handed me back the unopened list and requested that I bring them the most expensive bottle of wine in the cellar.

    In retrospect these customers were a piece of cake to serve because they knew exactly what they wanted and all that was required of me was to fetch and open the bottle.

    On second thought Doc-V maybe I could get Jay-z’s phone number from Maitre-G.
    Thanks,
    Mike-G


  2. Celebrity women make perfume and celebrity men profit from some sort of alcohol. In both cases, prices are inflated and the quality is lost. What happened to just buying a regular priced item because its good?! Couldn’t agree more doc!


  3. Armand de Brignac is an international brand and the US is just one of their markets. I doubt a company that creates a completely hand-crafted product is paying dividends to a rapper from the US just to sell more product.

    Getting celebs to endorse your brand doesn’t make you a lower quality product. Jay-Z used to endorse Crystal before their leadership made some blatantly racist comments. Sounds like Greenburg has some racist friends over at Crystal and is just trying to help them out – probably why the article has been dropped already.


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