He ruled his empire around 600 BC, but his fame has lasted until the present day. His empire was the Babylonian one, and he was that rare world ruler whose name is remembered both for his towering achievements and dark villainy.
On the positive side, his brilliant military campaigns made him the longest reigning king of the 1500-year Babylonian Empire. And aesthetically, he created one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for his queen, who was homesick for the mountains and plant life of her native land.
His transgressions were far-reaching as well. He destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem, razed the city, and initiated the three-generation Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish people. For all I know, an Engel ancestor was among the dispersed.
And so I should be the last to propose a champagne toast to this mightiest of Babylonian kings, whom some of you must know was named Nebuchadnezzar. And yet, not only would it be fitting to toast him, but it must be done properly, especially when there are 208 people doing the toasting from a single bottle.
What? Yes, there are even still today special bottles of champagne that hold a full twenty liters of the bubbly! This is the absolute pinnacle of champagne bottle sizes, and so it has been dubbed “a nebuchadnezzar” in honor of the pinnacle of power held by this Biblical ruler.
Oh, but this gets better. Believe it or not, there are bizarre names for other super-sized champagne bottles. But since they hold significantly less than the nebuchadnezzar, they have been named for significantly lesser biblical kings: the jeroboam, the rehoboam, the salmanazar, and the balthazar.
But where — and why — did this naming originate? Not in France, the home of champagne. No, it began in England when champagne was recognized there as the most popular alcoholic beverage of the terribly wealthy, roughly around the late 19th century. Young 20-something aristocrats, with absolutely nothing better to do (they were as allergic to work as Maynard G Krebs was in “Dobie Gillis”), lounged around guzzling champagne from these enormous bottles that only the rich could afford.
And as a lark, they began inventing ridiculous names for these bottles. You know the type of idle young men to whom I refer. You’ve seen plenty of these wastrels as characters in Brideshead Revisited and PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Bertie novels. They didn’t waste time or their creativity on champagne bottles that held less or even as much as a magnum—a piddly ten glasses only. After all, the lowly upper-middle classes could afford those bottles, which offended the sense of hereditary privilege that these young dissipates cherished.
Since champagne was clearly the drink of kings, these immature peers of the realm decided to go back two and a half millennia to find the most royal kings of all—those that had the extra cachet of being included in the Bible. Even their own Henry the Eighth could hardly compete in ancient prestige with Nebuchadnezzer. That king held the ultimate “street cred” with these silly, idle young men, because he ruled before there even were such things as streets!
Now, I must admit that I am not 100% certain about the origin for the names of these enormous champagne bottles. In my research, I did discover more than one theory as to why they would be named for kings in the Old Testament. This explanation is simply my favorite. So perhaps you’d better take my thesis here with a grain of Lot’s Wife.