Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!
- Dom Pérignon, the French monk who is said to have invented Champagne
I left Reims walking, alone, along the canal that connects the Aisne and the Marne rivers. After a few kilometres I could see a woman walking ahead of me, but I didn't recognise her until she sat down on a bench and I caught up - it was Elaine! We walked together as far as Verzanay, where she had booked a room.
After ten kilometres we left the canal, and soon we were in champagne country, surrounded by vineyards.
As everyone knows, champagne was invented by Dom Perignon in 1697, during the reign of Louis XIV. Right? Wrong!
In 1676, British poet and playwright Sir George Etherege already mentioned sparkling champaign in his play The Man of Mode:
So what exactly was the champaign Etherege was talking about?
A brief history of champagne
In 1662 British scientist, physician, naturalist and metallurgist Christopher Merrett wrote, in a paper presented to the newly constituted Royal Society, "Our wine coopers of recent times use vast quantities of sugar and molasses to all sorts of wines to make them drink brisk and sparkling and to give them spirit". This is the first document reporting on the process of putting the fizz into sparkling wine - intentionally, rather than as a chance by-product of accidental secondary fermentation. Because fizzy wine was probably first made by accident, in Britain or northern France, where temperatures drop low enough in winter to block the fermentation process. With the spring thaw, the yeasts revive and resume their activity, triggering a second fermentation process. Benedictine monk Dom Perignon dedicated his research to the attempt to stop this refermentation - in short, he tried to figure out a way to get the bubbles out of champagne!
 |
| Dom Perignon clearly failing to remove the bubbles from his champagne |
It's all a matter of technology
Dom Perignon wanted to eliminate the bubbles from champagne because the refermentation process represented a major problem for winemakers of his day. 17th-century French glass was not strong enough to withstand the pressure generated by sparkling wine - the pressure inside a champagne bottle being three times as great as the pressure inside a car tyre! Nor did the French have an adequate way of sealing the bottles: cork had been used by the ancient Romans, but since forgotten, until pilgrims (there they are again!) returning from Spain brought back some cork samples in 1685. In the intervening centuries, wine was stored in the barrel, or bottled and capped using a piece of wood wrapped in hemp - definitely unable to withstand the pressure created by the 250 million bubbles contained in a bottle of champagne! One French producer complained that out of 6,000 bottles of champagne bottled in 1746, only 120 bottles survived - making for a 98% failure rate. What a waste!
The British re-discovered the use of cork for sealing bottles 130 years before their rivals across the Channel, and British glass was stronger because it was heated by burning coal, rather than wood. In short, the British had superior packaging technology, capable of containing the pressure of 5 to 6 atmospheres typically found inside a champagne bottle.
Though Dom Perignon never did succeed in his quest to get the bubbles out of champagne, he did make several important contributions to improving the quality of the wine, such as figuring out how to make a clear white wine from black grapes (by separating the juice from the peel as soon as possible) and extensively blending different qualities of grapes from multiple vineyards.
Dom Perignon originally blended different grapes, whereas champagne producers today blend different wines: the basic wines made from pinot noir, pinot blanc, pinot meunier and chardonnay grapes following the first fermentation. These are particularly acidic wines which are not very tasty as-is, but are blended in the early months of the year following the harvest in the process of assemblage, taking advantage of the qualities of each grape varietal. Pinot noir forms the backbone and body of the wine, while chardonnay contributes fineness and longevity, and the fruity, floral bouquet of pinot meunier, grown particularly in the Vallée de la Marne, offers instant appeal, even in a champagne intended to be sold while still young. The resulting blend is called a cuvée, to which they winemaker adds liqueur de tirage: a blend of non-sparkling champagne wine, sugar, yeasts and clarifying agents unique to each winemaker, resulting in a champagne in their own signature style. This additional yeast and sugar causes the wine to ferment again, in the bottle, for anywhere from ten days to three months, after which the sugar is depleted, the yeasts die and fermentation stops. During the natural process of autolysis, the yeasts' cell membranes break down, releasing all the substances they had absorbed back into the wine and giving sparkling wines their characteristic yeasty flavour and aroma, reminiscent of bread crust.
Remuage is the technique of rotating the bottles and increasing the inclination at which they are stored during this fermentation time, so that the sediments collect in the neck of the bottle. The sediments are then removed, nowadays by freezing the neck of the bottle and then opening it, upon which the pressure inside the bottle forces the frozen block of sediments out through its mouth, a technique referred to as dégorgement à la glace. Before corking the bottle, the producer tops it up with liqueur d'expédition, consisting of wine and (except in the case of extra brut or pas dosé wines) a little sugar to compensate the acidity of the champagne.
The champagne widows
For centuries champagne rivalled burgundy as France's most popular and élite wine. Once the technologies permitting reliable production and packaging of sparkling wines had been developed, champagne rose in popularity: the sense of luxury and celebration associated with the sound of a popping cork and the sight of bubbles welling up in the glass was much appreciated by the newly wealthy class emerging from the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. Champagne became the most chic beverage in London, Paris and New York, and demand doubled within a few years.
Three widows played an important role in the history of champagne. Under 19th-century Napoleonic law, a woman in France could not hold property if unmarried - anything she might own would officially be the property of her father - or if married - in which case what was hers would become the property of her husband. But a widow was a case apart.
In 1798, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin married François Clicquot, who ran a small textile and wine business in Reims, Clicquot-Muiron et Fils. It was a financial disaster, and when François died in 1805, leaving Barbe-Nicole a widow at the age of only 27, she made the bold decision to take things into her own hands. She convinced her father-in-law to loan her the funds required to get the family business back on its feet, and the rest is history! She renamed her wine Veuve Clicquot, and the word veuve, meaning widow, lent a new respectability to a wine that had come to be associated with the wild, rowdy parties of the European courts of the day. Other champagne producers followed suit, creating off-brands with the word veuve in their names.
 |
| Madame Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin-Clicquot with her daughter, portrait by Léon Coignet, c. 1862 |
Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin-Cliquot refused to give up on the business even when the Napoleonic wars made trade within Europe difficult, if not impossible. She simply turned to a new market: Czarist Russia, making Klikovskoje the beverage of choice among the élite of Saint Petersburg. Ponsardin-Cliquot was not simply a manager, but underwent a four-year apprenticeship with a winemaker to learn all about technique, and invented the process of rémuage, in which bottles undergoing secondary fermentation are stored in a pupitre of wood with holes in it, allowing them to be turned regularly and their angle to be adjusted over time. She originally experimented by drilling holes in her kitchen table!
Other enterprising widows followed in Barbe-Nicole's footsteps, including Louise Pommery. Only eight days after her husband died in 1858, Louise stepped in to take over the family firm, baby in arms. Louise had been educated in England and took advantage of her knowledge of the market to launch a brut champagne designed to please the British palate in 1874. Much later, in 1941, Lily Bollinger took over her husband Jacques' champagne business upon his death, travelling all over the United States to promote her champagne there. None of the widows remarried, allowing them to maintain control over their own enterprises in an age when married women had no right to own and manage property.
Dom Perignon lives on
In 1937, Moët & Chandon purchased the brand name Dom Pérignon to use for their prestige cuvée. Dom Pérignon is now a part of the Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton empire, owned by France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, and is one of the most highly prized champagnes in the world. What remains of the Abbey of Hautvillers, where Dom Pérignon spent his adult life, is now also the property of Moët & Chandon.
Sources:
Il mondo del sommelier, Associazione Italiana Sommelier, 2004
L'universo del vino, Catarina Hiort af Ornäs, Enosis
The Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia, Tom Stevenson, Italian edition published as Sotheby's vini del mondo by De Agostini, 2005
https://www.historyhit.com/dom-perignon-the-champagne-monk/
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230301-the-little-known-history-of-champagne
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-39963098
http://thewinejokers.com/who-invented-traditional-method-sparkling-wine/
No comments:
Post a Comment