Ace of Spades is absolute hot garbage. It costs almost as much as Cristal but reliably gets blown out of the water every single time in blind tasting. It's essentially a vanity marketing ploy to get people to way overpay for mediocre Champagne in a tacky bottle.
The reason Cristal is good is because it's make by Roederer, one of the oldest family owned Champagne houses. They buy grapes on contract from farmers to make wine each year, and in the 'best' years they make vintage Champagne from 100% juice from just that year. Because they are an old house, they have standing deals with farmers on those plots of land which make the best wines in places called 'Grand Crus' - because they are very far north for growing grapes, this means steep south-facing slopes on clay for Pinot Noir or east-facing slopes on chalk for Chardonnay. You can't just saunter into Champagne with big bags of money and buy these grapes, in some instances the grower, négociant, and distributor families have married into each other over the years.
A lot of the old family-owned houses were increasingly being bought up by big corporations like LVMH -part of the LVMH name is 'Moët,' an old Champagne house. They also own Veuve Clicquot. These corporations had a very sterile, glitzy, marketing-driven approach to Champagne. They discouraged vinotourism because at the end of the day it's a farming region and farmers are quirky and don't fit the highfalutin 'brand image' that these corporations wanted - they have goofy stuff like giant fake wine bottles in front of their farms. Roederer, being still family-owned, was more traditional.
Back in the day a lot of rappers took to chugging Cristal in videos or dumping it out as a show of wealth because it was so expensive. Someone asked Frédéric Rouzaud, the son of the owner who was the managing director of Roederer at this time, about this trend, and because he was an old-school guy and this wine is the crown jewel of their production that his family worked very hard on in the years when it was made, he thought it was disrespectful to dump the wine out. He said something to the effect of 'well, we can't stop people from buying it'.
Jay-Z spun this innocuous comment into some racist diatribe, screaming that Cristal was racist and that the owner hated black people drinking it. What the owner hated was (incidentally) black people acting like retards and wasting expensive wine in ape-like dominance displays. I doubt he curled his lips at the idea of Kathleen Battle sipping a flute of Cristal on her patio. Fast forward a short time and Ace of Spades is released by Cattier House under a mysterious new brand called Armand de Brignac. Cattier House is not a shitty Champagne brand, but it isn't well-established and sits in the mid range as far as quality goes. Their absolute best bottle, Clos du Moulin, retailed for a little over a hundred before this. Ace of Spades starts out priced more than double that. Jay-Z pushes this Champagne HARD as the alternative to Cristal while hiding the fact that he is heavily invested in the brand.
Long story short, Jay-Z took advantage of the ethnonarcissism of black people to rip his own people off for hundreds of dollars per transaction, selling them mediocre wine at ultra-premium prices in a shiny gold bottle. They thanked him for the privilege because they're dumb enough to think that a rich asshole cares about them just because they're both brown.
