Wine History
Wine History: The Story of Champagne
Riddling, lead crystal and other curiosities of the champagne revolution
Champagne is some of the most luxurious and exclusive wine in the world. But how did it come to being and how did monastic practices of medieval France influence its creation? What makes it fizz and why was this a problem, not a plus, in its early stages?
History
Wines have been fizzy for thousands of years — the first recorded mention of a sparkling wine was recorded in Ancient Egypt on a papyrus in 522AD. However, from Ancient Egypt until the medieval era, these wines were considered defective and unfit for trade. The fizzing was seen as a fault which broke containers and made wine difficult to transport.
All wine is produced by fermentations, which involve yeast transforming grape sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This is the common step for all winemaking. Effervescent or sparkling wines take this fermentation and do it again, only this time inside the bottle. By fermenting a small amount of sugar inside the bottle, a small amount of carbon dioxide is trapped inside the bottle and dissolved into the liquid as carbonic acid, resulting in a pressurised bottle which shoots out corks and a fizzing wine.
Making sparkling wines in a methodical (as opposed to accidental) way was first explored in 1662 by a Dr Christopher Merret. Merret was a member of the Royal Society in London and catalogued the experiments of English cider and winemakers, who were adding sugar to cider to create a bubbling drink, predating Dom Pérignon’s literature on bubbling champagne.
The Devil’s Wine
Before Dom Pérignon, the champagnes sold outside Champagne were mostly still white wines. These were made in a Burgundian style to primarily sell to Parisians. The cold winters in Champagne led to the fermentation of the wines being halted, as yeasts will not undergo fermentation in such cold weather. However, come spring, fermentation would restart so vigorously that cellars throughout Champagne were filled with exploding bottles as carbon dioxide was quickly produced.
In the early days of Champagne, not only were the wines so bubbly that the bottles exploded, the secondary fermentation also produced a sediment in the form of the lees, then referred to as the marc — dead yeast cells which lie as a sediment on the bottom of the wine. There was so much of this sediment that early champagne glasses in the 18th Century were made with dimpled surfaces to hide any sediment in the wine and the wine was served by straining it through a sieve. In years with lots of excess sediment and excessive secondary fermentation, the process of dépotage was sometimes carried out — decanting the wine into another bottle, rinsing the first one, and refilling it.
Dom Pérignon
Dom Pérignon was a real person. He was a Benedictine monk who lived from 1638–1715 at the Abbey in Hautvillers, Champagne. Dom Pérignon is a misunderstood figure, and many legends about his life abound. He was said to have been blind, but studies undertaken by optometry specialists do not find any evidence of blindness. He was said to have created champagne itself, which is not true — he only created a set of rules on how to make it consistently and safely. And he was said to be the first person to put cork stoppers in wine bottles, which is disproven below.
His name from birth was Pierre Pérignon — the prefix ‘Dom’ is often given to Benedictine abbots and stands for the Latin word Dominus, or ‘Master’. That Dom Perignon was a monk is not surprising. The monastic community drove much of wine science throughout the medieval period, especially the Benedictine and Cistercian orders. Benedictine monks of the time were allowed to drink a hemina of wine, a little over a cup, for each monk each day. Most critics typically attribute the earliest version of the champagne method (or ‘methode champenoise’) to him as opposed to Merret. The method which Pérignon helped to develop incorporated the use of sugar or a liquer de tirage, in a similar way. This liquor was added into bottles when bottling, and helped secondary fermentation by providing the yeast with sucrose to convert into alcohol under anaerobic conditions.
Rationale
Pérignon initially tried to wage war on sparkling wine for two reasons:
- The monastic community at Hautvillers held that sparkling wine was the Devil’s wine, and it was God’s will that the faulty bubbles be eliminated.
- Champagne was in direct competition with Burgundy wines, as the trade route to Burgundy from Paris passed through Champagne — if white wine could be made in a Burgundian style (i.e. still) in Champagne which the court enjoyed, Champagne wine makers stood to make a fortune. It would be cheaper to run wine from the closer Champagne to Paris.
Pérignon created a set of essential rules to eliminate bubbles, which were captured by the Godinot - a fellow priest from the monastery of Saint Thierry, a few kilometres north of Hautvillers - and published three years after his death. Dom Pérignon spent much of his life at the Abbey in Hautvillers, Champagne, but much of what we know of his work comes from second-hand sources. This is because the monastic record of the Abbey was lost in 1790, when the Abbey was destroyed during the dechristianization of France during the French Revolution.
Winemaking Specifications
Pérignon’s greatest contribution was arguably the winemaking specifications which were published 3 years after his death. Additional guidelines were published in 1724 by Frère Pierre, who worked as Pérignon’s assistant and succeeded him after his death. These guidelines, among other things, advocated:
- The use of the Pinot Noir (a red-skinned grape) in champagne, as white wine grapes had an increased tendency to re-ferment. The juice from Pinot Noir additionally produced wines the same colour as a clear crystal, which is the namesake of the Cristal champagne house.
- Stronger bottles and better-sealed corks to contain the secondary fermentation.
- Use of a coquard press, a soft press that doesn’t put undue pressure on the seeds or stems. The seeds and stem release a more bitter juice than the pulp and skins alone.
Following the guidelines resulted in a wine less likely to explode in the cellar, and which, on bottling, contained smaller bubbles that were more stable than before. These guidelines were intended to reduce the amount of gas in champagnes, and partially succeeded. However, the guidelines do not mention Pérignon — the memoir instead emphasizes that the winemaking revolution was a group of monastic collaborators in the Champagne region. The importance of Dom Pérignon in the champagne movement has perhaps been overstated by Dom Grossart in 1821, Pérignon’s last successor who spun many myths about the famous monk and attributed many technological advances to him, despite having been born well after his death.
Glass Technology
The main difficulty in transporting Champagnes and other sparkling wines, once bottled, is the pressure: champagne corks have 6 times the kinetic energy of a pellet from a BB gun. This caused many bottles to explode as the glass was unable to contain the pressurized fluid. Throughout Pérignon’s era, many advances were being made in glass technology which led to the recommendation in the guidelines.
In England, one George Ravenscroft invented lead crystal in the 17th Century, or ‘flint’ glass, which made attractive wine glasses. Sir Kenelm Digby then invented a stronger shape of glass bottle in England. At this time, France still had weak bottles, and Dr Merret (the same Merret who logged English tirage methods) records some bottle making techniques in new coal furnaces. He found that coal burned hotter than wood, and could make stronger bottles.
In Champagne, a glasshouse near Reims, at Ste-Menehould, hired English glassblowers and installed coal-fired glassworks to make stronger bottles in the English technique, which Pérignon’s monks began to use to bottle the champagne. Considering that Pérignon copied Merret’s glassmaking techniques, it seems likely that he also took inspiration from Merret’s 1662 method of sugar addition — which means that that it was in fact the English who invented the methode champenoise.
Corks
Up until this time, bottles in France were sealed with a piece of wood wrapped in hemp that had been dipped in olive oil. Whilst these stoppers kept the dust out of the wine, the seal was not strong enough to retain the carbon dioxide gas. It is said that two Spaniards who stayed at the Abbey inspired Pérignon. They sealed their waterskins with cork which was then restrained by string. However, it is known that champagne was being stoppered with cork as early as 1665, when Pérignon would have been just 17, with the household accounts of the Duke of Bedford showing expenses for “Champaign wine, also 2 dozen glass bottles and cork”. It is unclear, however, whether champagne was transported in these corked bottles with stronger glass, as a great many corked bottles were unstable and prone to exploding during shipping. This led to the first known patent for a corkscrew in 1795, which confirmed the viability of bubbly champagne as a tradeable commodity.
Thus, we see that Pérignon did not pioneer the methode champenoise, create stronger bottles or the idea to cork and reinforce bottles, which are all commonly misattributed to him. But he did bring all of these ideas together, invent the coquard press, and be the driving force behind guidelines on how to minimize bubbles in champagne. Pérignon soon became so famous that Parisians mistook him for a wine-producing village like Aÿ, and looked for him on the map.
A Post-Pérignon Era
White grapes, contrary to the instructions of Pérignon, began to be planted throughout the Champagne region and a Champagne made entirely from Chardonnay or Pinot blanc grapes came to be known as Blanc de blancs. Famous champagne houses such as Taittinger still produce Blanc de blancs, and the use of the Chardonnay grape is a source of pride rather than a deviation from the classical ‘true’ champagne style.
The fight against effervescent champagne was a battle which Pérignon and the monastic community eventually lost, by the way — the French court in Paris preferred the slightly bubbling white wines from Champagne over those made in the traditional still style. This type of Champagne became known as saute-bouchon, and became wildly popular, especially with a group of English noblemen who became known as the Ordre des Coteaux at the time because they drank nothing but wines from Champagne Coteaux. In 1744, de Rocheret notes that the town of Avize “enormously enlarged over the last 12 or 15 years by the frantic intervention for sparkling wine…this abominable drink”. This may have something to do with the sweet tooths of the time — champagnes of this era had extraordinarily high sugar contents and were over 14 times sweet as today (140g/L compared to todays’ <10g/L).
By the 17th Century, champagne was widely traded in England as a sparkling drink — Samuel Butler refers to the wine as “brisk Champagne”, and a talk given at the Royal Society even gives instructions (for the English-influenced tirage method) “Our wine-coopers of later times use vast quantities of Sugar and molasses to all sorts of wines, make them drink brisk and sparkling.”
The Veuve Cliquot
The next great development in sparkling wine was put forward by Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin (1777–1866), also known as the Veuve Clicquot. Veuve translates to widow in English. She was so named as she ran her wine business after her husband, François Clicquot, died and left his business to her in his will. She used the English-style tirage method, which involved the addition of liqueur de tirage, a syrup of wine, sugar and yeast which encouraged secondary fermentation. This addition of a sweetened liquor is also commonly used to make fortified wines such as port and sherry.
The development that she championed was invented by her employee, Antoine de Muller. He invented a process called reumage — the clarification of sparkling wine by riddling racks. Riddling racks act to move the dead yeast lees into the neck of the bottle forming a plug. This ensured they would be expelled as the cork was removed, instead of remaining as sediment in the wine. The cork end of the bottle was then chilled, and the frozen plug of lees could be removed in a process called disgorgment. This means that far less gas was lost from the wine when the sediment was removed, and upon topping the bottle up with a liqueur it could simply be rebottled and shipped. This is still the dominant method of making champagne today, and removed the need for the wine sieves and dimpled champagne glasses that were once so common when serving the wine.
Champagne Today
Nowadays, Champagne has many rules protecting the AOC — wines cannot be bottled until the second day of January following a harvest, and there are various regulations governing vine training, grape varietals and yields of must. But from 1650–1850, it was an area of great experimentation, which resulted in a differentiated wine and the rules now followed today. This led to an explosion in wine production in the area, fuelled in part by patronage from Louis XIV in 1691. Louis XIV drank champagne exclusively, and relaxed the regulation surrounding its trade, and many political leaders have been passionate about champagne since, including Sir Winston Churchill.
