September 18, 1989

LEAD: It should be time for the Champagne industry to break out the bubbly, as grape growers cheer a vintage harvest and worldwide sales soar to record levels. Instead, the industry's unprecedented success is threatening to tear apart the closely knit Champagne region, an area of gentle slopes and generous vines 90 miles east of

LEAD: In an unusual development in management-labor relations, the employees and unions participating in the buyout of the UAL Corporation will not only own United Airlines but will have the final say over the parent company's major decisions and strategy, the leader of the United pilots' union said yesterday.

LEAD: Seven weeks before New Jersey elects a new governor, voters are being confronted with a stark choice on whom they wish to succeed Gov. Thomas H. Kean in a state that was once solidly Democratic but whose heart was won over by Republicans during the Reagan revolution in the 1980's.

LEAD: Companies

LEAD: Shoppers thronged to the new Abraham & Straus department store in Manhattan over the weekend, and cash registers rang up sales of $1 million a day. But questions remained about the store's ability to maintain its inventory in the wake of a cash crisis at its Canadian parent company, the Campeau Corporation.