The web is full of articles on the birth of Champagne, and Enosearcher is no exception. Each text, however, adds a small detail to the overall picture.
The history of Champagne is still much debated and the narrative of the last few centuries is often controversial. Birth, like any myth, must have a place, and the birth of Champagne is said to have been at Hautvillers Abbey, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in France. At that time, and we are talking about many centuries ago, the church found funds for sustenance in the production of wine and spirits. The abbey is located in the northern part of France, in the Marne Valley, about 150 kilometers from Paris and not far from the cathedral city of Reims, where the kings of France were crowned
Until about 1500, Champagne wines were still still wines, as they were just about everywhere, and they competed to a large extent with wines from Burgundy, with which they had a commercial advantage because they were easier to transport to Paris along the Marne River. Around 1500 the climate in Champagne was not what it is today, average temperatures were much lower, and this brought with it certain complexities that were also the trigger for a series of events.
As we said, at the time, temperatures in Europe, and particularly in Champagne were low, and it is reported that large bodies of water, such as the Thames and the canals of Venice, froze throughout Europe. In the Champagne region, during the harvest, the low temperature meant that the yeasts with which fermentation was created (indigenous yeast, directly present in the grape skins) stopped working and the transformation of sugar into alcohol stopped. This process, as every wine enthusiast knows, is the basis of winemaking. At that time, all the bottles that were filled with wine were real bombs, since with the arrival of spring and the rise in temperature, the yeasts awakening would resume their work and the carbon dioxide produced would explode the bottles. Some of them, however, would not explode and would return a sparkling wine that in a sense can be considered as the ancestor of Champagne. However, remember that at the time, a sparkling wine was considered a defective wine.
The French aristocracy did not appreciate this "fizziness" and considered it a sign of bad winemaking and this should not be surprising, as it is easy to imagine, at that time wine was still and this alteration was not perceived well. The market for still Champagne wines gradually collapsed and eventually it was Burgundy that came out on top, in fact thanks to different temperatures, Burgundy wines were less prone to refermentation in the bottle.
Champagne wines would go through two hundred years of hardship before the Catholic Church, which had a great interest in Champagne vineyards and was experiencing revenue losses, decided to address the problem. In 1668, the Church assigned a Benedictine monk named Dom Pierre Pérignon the task of eliminating bubbles from their wines and returning to still wines, such as those Champagne winemakers had previously produced with great success. Dom Pierre Pérignon was appointed as the new cellar master of Hautvillers Abbey and proceeded to develop several empirical methods to reduce (but not completely prevent) bubbles.
Pierre Pérignon's task, then, was to try to make sure that the wines stayed firm, since that was what customers expected
In the meantime, as Dom Pérignon struggled with bottle refermentation of the abbey's wines, tastes began to change. Sparkling wine was "taken better" by people and suddenly became fashionable in French high society and, even in England.
In fact, it seems that sparkling wines already existed in England in some form at least two or three decades before they were produced in Champagne. In December 166, long before Pierre Pérignon entered Hautvillers Abbey, an Englishman named Christopher Merret presented a paper on sparkling wine production to the newly formed Royal Society of London. Merret had discovered that simply adding sugar to still wines from Champagne made them effervescent and increased their alcohol content, and he stated this in his paper. In this regard, we point out that Champagne still wines were mainly marketed in wooden barrels and bottling was paid for by customers. Bottling directly in Champagne cellars came a few years later. As a result, in England, many nobles ordered still (not sparkling) wine in cask, added a dose of sugar, and then bottled it.
In France, even members of the royal court at Versailles under Louis XIV began to appreciate bubbles in wine. In the late 17th century, therefore, Dom Pérignon was ordered to reverse his efforts and devise methods to increase bubbles in wine. Although it was not Dom Pérignon who introduced bubbles into still wine, he continued to develop new ways to increase bubbles in wine.
Pierre Perignon is credited with many improvements even though some of them are false myths. In particular, he developed an efficient cork to be used as a stopper for bottles instead of the typical wooden and hemp corks. This same cork produced some curious effects, such as raising the internal pressure generated by carbon dioxide and making it explode. Because French glass technology was not yet highly developed at the time, and therefore bottles were not able to withstand such high internal pressures, many champagne bottles in the cellar or during transport.
The English apparently had a similar problem in producing glass strong enough to withstand the high internal pressures of their sparkling wines. However, in the early 17th century, glass technology made tremendous progress in England thanks largely to an admiral named Sir Robert Mansell. He expressed his concerns to King James I and succeeded in convincing the king to prohibit glassblowers from feeding their furnaces with wood. As a result of this decree, new coal-fired furnaces were developed, which were able to reach such high temperatures that they changed the internal structure of the glass so that it could be used to produce darker but much stronger bottles, ideal for storing champagne.
Dom Pérignon also invented and developed the art of blending, which today represents the essence of winemaking in Champagne. Blending involves mixing different base wines from different grapes, vineyards, and vintages to create a wine that is superior to all its parts.
In 1715, Dom Pierre Pèrignon died, and a few decades later, King Louis XV recognized the importance that winemaking could have as an industry for France, and in 1728 he issued a decree granting the city of Reims exclusive permission to market bottled champagne. Many of Champagne's industries, often related to textile production, began to invest in Champagne production, buying grapes from small vignerons and producing large quantities of bottles.
In 1729, Nicolas Ruinart founded the first registered Champagne house, and in 1743 Claude Moët founded what would become the largest Champagne house in existence today, Moët & Chandon.
Moreover, since the basic principles established by Dom Pérignon for the production of champagne and sparkling wines are still used around the world today, it should come as no surprise that a large statue of Dom Pérignon adorns Moët & Chandon's headquarters. In 1936 the company paid even greater tribute to this man of influence by launching its own brand, Dom Pérignon.