Songfacts®:

• Taylor Swift wrote this piano ballad with "William Bowery" - the pseudonym of her actor boyfriend Joe Alwyn. He is also credited as a songwriter on two other Evermore songs, "Coney Island" and the title track. Swift revealed Apple Music's Zane Lowe that Alwyn started "Champagne Problems" and it was him who "came up with the melodic structure of it."
• When the then-unknown William Bowery was credited as co-writer on the Folklore tracks "Exile" and "Betty," fans wondered about the identity of the mysterious songwriter. It was only when Swift's Disney+ concert film Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Session, that she confirmed Bowery was an alias for Alwyn.
  
  Many fans were convinced by that stage that William Bowery was Swift's boyfriend. They posited that William is the name of Alwyn's great-grandfather, who was a music teacher, composer, and conductor. Also, Swift and Alwyn spent time together in the early days of their relationship at New York City's Bowery Hotel.
• Evermore continues Swift's leap away on Folklore from autobiography to songs that come from her imagination. This is the first of the full story songs on the album, detailing a girl walking away from her beau on the night he planned to propose. She leaves her would-be fiancé crestfallen, with his mother's ring in his pocket. Swift described this song as, "The one where longtime college sweethearts had very different plans for the same night, one to end it and one who brought a ring."
• There are several references to champagne throughout the song:
  
  Your heart was glass, I dropped it
  Champagne problems
  
  The idiom "champagne problems," which appears several times during the song, generally means easy problems that you don't have to worry about; such difficulties are nothing compared to issues of poverty and natural disasters. It is not clear to us why Swift is using the phrase here, as the breakup is a catastrophe for the would-be fiancé.
  
  Your sister splashed out on the bottle
  Now no one's celebrating
  
  The guy's family are also left hanging by his sweetheart turning down his marriage proposal
  
  Dom Pérignon, you brought it
  No crowd of friends applauded
  
  Dom Pérignon is a brand of vintage prestige champagne. This lyric has a double meaning; Swift's unfortunate dude bought some expensive champagne, planning to celebrate his engagement with family and friends, but he also "bought it" by believing something false to be true. Sadly, his girlfriend did not love him as he believed she did. In the live chat on YouTube leading up to the release of her Evermore album, Swift warned this track was "NOT bubbly."
• Nick Jonas also recorded a track titled "Champagne Problems" back in 2016. Coincidentally, Swift dated his brother Joe Jonas in her late teenage years (about the same age as the college sweethearts in this song).
• Swift previously sang about champagne on the Folklore track "The Last Great American Dynasty" when the heiress Rebekah Harkness fills her swimming pool with bubbly.