Champers, bubbly, fizz…Call it what you will, Champagne´s reputation for adding a little sparkle to a party goes back for centuries. The French monk credited with inventing Champagne was said to have cried ‘come quickly, I´m tasting stars!’ and few would argue with the fact that its fizz has an effect unlike any other drink.
Viticulture can be traced in what is now known as the Champagne region of France right back to 79AD, but the story of Champagne itself really begins with the arrival of monasteries in France in the 11th Century. The region’s superior wines were considered of such high quality that they were the only wines used by the monks for holy sacrament and it was indeed a French monk who created Champagne as we white wine lovers know and love it today, adding a special technique that gave a magical sparkle to the superior still wines of the Champagne region.
By the early 1600s, wines from the Champagne region were considered to be superior to all other French wines except those of Burgundy, with both regions making use of the Point Noir grape. A fierce rivalry raged between the two wine-producing regions, with the wine producers of Champagne beginning to find a market in countries that had previously been reluctant to buy wines other than those from Burgundy.
So famous was the rivalry that the most celebrated writers and poets of the age even recorded the wine wars in poetry and prose, with Voltaire praising the merits of the Champagne wines. At this time, both regions were producing only still red wines, but the superior quality of the grapes and the wines produced from them meant that Champagne was already becoming synonymous with class and sophistication as well as deliciously drinkable wines.
The styles of the wines were markedly different, with the Champenois (locals of the Champagne region) producing wines that became increasingly lighter in colour than those of Burgundy. This white wine was popular among the social elite of Paris and quickly became seen as the most fashionable wines to drink among high society. The pale, ‘vin gris’ (grey wine) produced by the Champenois began to find its way onto the tables of London´s fashionable elite by the 1660s, when King Louis XIV’s courtier, having been dismissed in disgrace from the French Court, fled to England and introduced the white wine to the country’s top tables.
The introduction of that all important fizz to Champagne is said to have been, in fact, the result of a happy accident. When exported abroad, the young vin gris white wine often began to re-ferment en route to their destinations and the cork stoppers that were increasingly in use plugged in a little of the resultant sparkle to the white wine. The result was found to be unexpectedly pleasant and wine producers set about trying to find ways to achieve this fizziness in a more controlled fashion. The monasteries of Epernay and Pierry established a technique of blending wines from various vineyards to produce and use cork stoppers to produce a sparkling wine that was enjoyable to drink, even if scarcely comparable to the magnificent Champagnes that were to follow. These wines were usually sweet and there were still problems with finding a way to reliably add the fizz to the drink – sometimes the white wine would remain disappointingly flat, seemingly at random. There were also problems with bottles exploding during the fermentation process.
In 1836 advances were made in fermentation technology, with experts discovering the ideal quantities of sugar needed to add fizz to the white wine without causing explosions! The resultant white wines were so delicious that, by the 1840s, production of still wines in the Champagne region had all but ceased in favour of sparkling versions. The wines were already becoming famous world wide and over time the public taste for sweet Champagnes began to wane, with the monks developing drier wines for those who did not possess a particularly sweet tooth. The wines brought in huge amounts of money to the region and production increased and the first Champagnes to be given a ´vintage´ were recorded in 1842.
Champagne escaped relatively unharmed from the phylloxera plague that wiped out vineyards across the world during the late 1800s – although many were destroyed, enough vineyards survived to ensure reliable production continued. Today, the wines of Champagne continue to create sparkle that is rarely matched by bubbly from other parts of the world and European law now dictates that the name ´Champagne´may only be applied to wines that do indeed hail from the famous wine producing region.
