By Rod Byers

Article from Issue 6

“I am drinking stars!” are perhaps the most famous words in the history of wine that were never actually spoken. They were not spoken by the monk Dom Pérignon, who is generally credited, in a blinding light bulb moment, with the invention of champagne. From 1668 to 1715, Dom Pérignon was in charge of winemaking at the Abbey of Hautvillers in the Champagne district of France, but he was hardly the first to recognize the wine’s unusual properties.

First of all champagne was not invented. Champagne happened. There are references to wines with fizz as far back as Roman times. Benedictine monks in Limoux in the south of France had been producing a sparkling wine since 1531, a century and a half earlier. So how did Pierre Pérignon get all the credit and did he deserve any of it? It is even more curious considering he devoted himself to keeping the bubbles out of the wine. Author Hugh Johnson writes is his book, Vintage, The History Of Wine,  “It was his life work to prevent champagne having bubbles.”
Nonetheless Dom Pérignon truly was the right man in the right place to change history. And in the process he left an indelible footprint that still matters today, 300 years later. The district of Champagne had been a  region noted for its non-sparkling wines for several centuries before the arrival of Dom Pérignon. Located in northern France, Champagne is the equivalent latitude of northern North Dakota. It’s not surprising that vintners had a difficult time getting their wine through fermentation before cold winter weather set in, stopping the process. With the return of warmer spring weather, fermentation would restart and with it  came the production of carbon dioxide – making the wines fizzy. But the wines were kept barreled and the carbon dioxide would simply dissipate into the atmosphere, resulting once again in non-fizzy wines.

Given Champagne’s relative proximity to Burgundy, it is not surprising the region adopted Pinot Noir as it’s primary red grape. But because of its more northern latitude, Champagne could not match the richness or depth of flavor that the Pinot’s of Burgundy offered. It was Dom Pérignon who realized that instead of matching Burgundy’s quality of red wines he would make a superior white wine while still using the dark-skinned Pinot Noir grape. And in that process he set down the production guidelines for sparkling wines that are still in use today, with one small exception. He tried to eliminate the bubbles, not capture them.

He focused his attention on Pinot Noir because he was less pleased with wines produced from white grapes. The white wines were not as aromatic, tended to darken in color quickly and were, he thought, especially more likely to re-ferment in the spring, causing the bubbles he was trying to avoid.

In a red grape the pigment is in the skin while the juice is clear. The principles he established were first to prune the vines severely limiting the size of the crop. Then he harvested carefully, in cool weather, keeping the grape berries intact, rejecting any with bruised or broken skin. During picking it was imperative not to crush the grapes, which would allow the pigmented skin to darken the juice. Instead he constructed shallow presses placed near the vineyards that could gently press the whole berries letting the clear juice run free. He monitored the color of the juice using the lightest, clearest juice for the best wines. He also perfected a system of blending grapes from different vineyards creating more complex, balanced wines. All his techniques are still basic standard operating procedures today.

Glass wine bottles were another invention of that era. Decorative glass bottles and decanters had been in use for centuries but were much too fragile for general wine bottling and certainly too fragile for the extra pressure of sparkling wine. But the English development of a modernized, coal-fired furnace in the early part of the seventeenth century allowed for a much stronger glass bottle. The reintroduction of corks as stoppers, forgotten since Roman times, provided the perfect closure.

As part of his cellar work, Dom Pérignon realized that exposure to air was a problem that was causing his wines to oxidize and lose their unique aromatic qualities. He preferred bottling the young wines, which kept them fresh and clear. But it also trapped any carbon dioxide created by re-fermentation. To counter that he developed an elaborate racking system using bellows to push the wine from one barrel to another, removing the lees (sediment) while keeping oxidation to a minimum. The result was a non-sparkling, very pale-colored wine often referred to as “oeil de perdrix” or eye of the partridge.

Dom Pérignon’s non-sparkling wines were the rage of Paris and the fashionable drink of the royal court. Again, according to Hugh Johnson, “Louis XIV had simply never drunk anything else.” But that is not exactly the way it was turning out across the English Channel.

At the end of the  seventeenth century it was illegal to sell or transport champagne in anything other that barrels. Bottling was not permitted. Consequently, barrels of champagne would arrive on the docks of England and then be transported directly to English cellars where the wine was bottled in the new, stronger English glass without any of Dom Pérignon’s careful precautions. Any carbon dioxide generated by still-fermenting barrels was captured when bottled. The result was sparkling wine.

The English aristocracy went mad for the fizz, and couldn’t get enough of it. The French considered the English odd and this new sparkling beverage an aberration. But by the dawn of the eightenth century, fizz was king and the bubbles were here to stay. Even though it became fashionable to leave the bubbles in, then as now, the guiding principles Dom Pérignon laid out for the production of champagne remain true to this day.