The champagne that François and Barbe-Nicole tasted wouldn’t have been a pretty light blond color, either. We would probably describe it as rosé. But it was an earthy sort of rosé. The finest wines from the region were a brownish pink. In fact, one of the earliest uses of the word champagne as a color described it not as the pale golden straw hues of the twentieth century, but as “a faint redish colour like Champane wine.” The locals had a better term for it. As one eighteenth-century wine lover put it, the color of the “natural Wine of Champaign…they call Oiel du Pedrix.[sic]” This translates as “eye of the partridge,” and it was a kind of tawny pink, with rich honey highlights.
The colors came from the winemaking process. To give customers the jarringly sweet champagne they wanted, winemakers added generous dollops of sugar syrup and brandy to the bottle before the final corking, and the brandy often tinted the wine a light golden brown. The pink color came when the skins of the grapes stained the clear juice inside. It was a sign that the red grapes had not been crushed quickly enough at harvest or early enough in the morning to produce a perfectly clear white liquid, known as the must. A bit of staining was so common that even when the technology improved, some winemakers began deliberately coloring their champagnes a brighter red, using elderberry syrup. People had come to expect color in their bubbly.
Sometimes people also described their champagne as gray, which doesn’t sound like the most appetizing color for a glass of sparkling wine. Eighteenth-century wine manuals talk about the gris de perle, or pearl gray tints. Pearl gray at least begins to sound almost glamorous. Fortunately, champagne never actually looked like dirty dishwater. The word here is deceiving. These authors are describing not the color of the wine but, rather, the grapes that went into its production. As one wine tourist in the 1760s tried to explain: “In the Champagne gray wine refers to those wines which in other places are called white Champagne. Gray wine is made with black grapes.” The logic was simple: Black and white makes gray. So gray wine was a white wine crafted with some black—or what people today often call red—grapes. Under current French law, champagne is still made in this same way. Strict regulations assure that real champagne can use only three grape varietals—the black pinot meunier and pinot noir grapes and the white chardonnay grape.
The blend of these grapes creates the style of the wine, and today, there are two styles of champagne. Blanc de noirs is a white wine made with at least one of the black grapes in the mix, while blanc de blancs is a white wine made only from white grapes. Since chardonnay is the only white grape used in champagne, blanc de blanc champagne is essentially a sparkling chardonnay. Since pinot meunier doesn’t hold up particularly well in aging, a lot of vintage blanc de noirs are actually just sparkling pinot noir wines. In our modern era, the style is designated on the label, along with information about whether it is vintage (using grapes from a single harvest) or nonvintage (using grapes from a blend of harvests). At the end of the eighteenth century, when Barbe-Nicole and François were first imagining a future in the wine business, nobody put labels on their bottles. And champagne was made only as a blanc de noirs—the style then known as gris de perle.
At least the champagne that François and Barbe-Nicole tasted would have bubbled like ours. Or if not exactly like ours—poor glassmaking in the eighteenth century meant that bottles started bursting at about half the pressure champagne makers use today—it did bubble. This would not have been the case had they lived only a century before. Even today, the history of how champagne got its sparkle is an astonishing tale, filled with deception and controversy.
The story of champagne begins sometime in the seventeenth century, although people had been making wine in this region for at least a thousand years. According to legend, the Romans first cultivated vineyards in the chalky fields of the Champagne. Others date the appearance of vines in the area around Reims to the fourth century AD. By the seventeenth century, the Champagne was already famous for its wines.
The best wine-growing areas in the region were either in the little villages that grew up along the banks of the river Marne or along the sunny slopes of the mountain to the southeast of Reims. Today, these two areas are in the heart of the Champagne wine country, and wines made in this microregion—crafted mostly from pinot noir grapes—are labeled simply with the appellation “Montagne de Reims.”
It was here that many of the Clicquot family properties were located, and the names of most of the best winemaking villages are still famous. Modern guidebooks direct tourists and hopeful wine tasters to villages such as Aÿ, Dizy, Cumières, Ambonnay, Verzenay, Chigny-les-Roses, Bouzy, Sermiers, Épernay, and, of course, Hautvillers. Long before consumers could turn to the familiar rankings we now find in Wine Spectator or pasted to grocery-store shelves, customers had to depend on the reputation of the region—or even the particular village—where the wine was grown. In the seventeenth century, wines made in the heart of the Champagne were known for their excellence, said to rival even those grown farther to the south in the verdant Saône valley of Burgundy.
This was a business in still wines, many of which were hearty reds. Winemakers in the region did not look on the development of bubbles with any happiness. Wine that sparkled was wine that had gone wrong. By the seventeenth century, it seemed to be happening more and more often. So in the 1660s, Dom Pierre Pérignon, the legendary father of champagne and cellar master of the abbey at Hautvillers, was given the task of finding a way to get rid of the bubbles ruining the local wines. Had he been successful, champagne in France might have ended before it ever got started.
This curious sparkle that appeared in the wines of the Champagne region first began to plague the local vintners during the Middle Ages, and it was apparently the result of unexpectedly cold weather. By the end of the late fourteenth century, Europe was experiencing what has been called “the little ice age.” This shift in climatic patterns, which lasted well into the nineteenth century, transformed winemaking in France as dramatically as scientists now predict global warming will.
The trouble with this extended cold spell was that the Champagne had always been a cool climate. Today, hovering along the forty-ninth parallel latitude, it is still one of the most northerly wine-growing regions to produce excellent fruit. (Although perhaps not for long. Scientists think it might take only another few degrees before this northerly range extends across the English Channel to Great Britain.) With this further drop in temperatures during the little ice age, at its worst from about 1560 to 1730—in other words, during the long seventeenth century—winemakers found that the natural process of fermentation needed to transform grape must into wine often stalled over the winter.
Normally, the process of winemaking is simple. The ripe grapes, with their rich fruit sugars, are harvested and crushed. The must from the earliest pressings is used to make a good-quality still wine. The later pressings are used to make local farm wines of descending quality. In the eighteenth century, the peasants even drank a wine known as piquette, a watery pomace wine made from the pulp that remained after all the richness and flavor had been pressed out of the grapes at harvest.
Next, the must is placed in unsealed wooden casks. Here, within the right temperature range, the yeasts naturally lurking on the grape skins begin to consume the fruit sugars. There are two important by-products of this “hot” organic reaction: carbon dioxide, which escapes into the air; and alcohol, which thankfully stays put. When the fermentation runs its course—when the yeast has consumed all the sugar—the wine is then racked and clarified to remove the residue, including the yeast cells, which begin to die and decompose. At this point, we could drink the wine, although it would taste quite sharp. So instead, eighteenth-century wines were usually put into sealed wooden casks sometime during the winter and stored until the next autumn, letting them mellow. During the freezing cold winters of the seventeenth century, winemakers in the Champagne discovered that they had live yeast showing up again in the spring, pumping out more carbon diox
ide and more alcohol after the wines had been placed in those sealed casks. Since now the carbon dioxide had nowhere to go, the result was fizzy wine.
What had happened was that the temperatures went too low in the winter for the yeast to finish consuming all the sugar. It had just gone dormant. Without the technology to test the amount of sugar remaining in a barrel of wine, the winemakers were at the mercy of the seasons and their intuition. When the warmer temperatures returned in the spring, the process of yeast fermentation just picked back up again. Winemakers today refer to this as a “secondary fermentation.” Winemakers in the seventeenth century had a less charitable phrase for it. They called a bubbly vintage the devil’s wine.
This process of a second fermentation where the bubbles get trapped is still the basis for the production of sparkling wine in the méthode champenoise, or champagne method. Today, owing to legal restrictions on use of the word champagne, which allow only wines made in the Champagne region of France to be identified in this way, it is often also known as the méthode traditionnelle, or traditional method. At its most basic level, champagne is a still wine that has been coaxed into undergoing a secondary fermentation process in a bottle. This time, the carbon dioxide is concentrated in the wine, giving it the celebrated sparkle.
For winemakers in the rural Champagne during the little ice age, this second fermentation was occurring by accident. In time, winemakers and wine lovers would discover that it was possible to make wine sparkle on purpose by adding dissolved sugar, brandy, and yeast before bottling. New sugar and yeast would kick-start the fermentation process again. This mixture is known in champagne production as the liqueur de tirage, and it is essential to producing those nose-tickling bubbles that we enjoy in fine champagne.
In the seventeenth century, however, winemakers were anything but delighted by the voluntary sparkle that developed in their casks come spring. When Dom Pérignon was cellar master of the ancient hillside abbey in the village of Hautvillers in the 1660s, no one in France wanted fizzy wines, and the bubbles were ruining the abbey’s lucrative wine trade. The monks were not crazy. In truth, the bubbles could turn a bad wine into something undrinkable. Sealed in casks rather than bottles, these wines fizzed only lightly: They did not have the exuberant sparkle that we associate with commercially produced champagne.
Perhaps more important, only rare wines are improved by the addition of bubbles. Making wine sparkle takes some knowledge; making champagne requires the art of a master blender. The base wine used to make champagne is often a blend or, in French, assemblage of over forty different growths, and a master blender is like an alchemist of the senses, capable of transmuting the lowly grape into a silky liquid gold. Dom Pérignon was justly famous for his superb skills as a blender—but his legendary wines did not have bubbles.
This is one of the great ironies—we might even say great deceptions—of wine history, for conventional wisdom tells us that Dom Pérignon was the delighted inventor of champagne. He is supposed to have quipped to one of his sandal-shod brothers, “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!” Yet it only made sense that Dom Pérignon wanted to rid champagne of its bubbles. There was no market for sparkling wines yet. In France, nobody wanted them. So, over the course of the next decade, Dom Pérignon dedicated himself to experimenting with ways to stop the development of bubbles.
In fact, the idea that Dom Pérignon invented champagne was always just imaginative marketing. It was a brilliant but misleading sales pitch. The popular legend has its origins in a late-nineteenth-century advertising campaign, started at a time when sparkling wine was already big business. In her book When Champagne Became French, scholar Kolleen Guy shows how it wasn’t until the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris that the region’s champagne producers saw the marketing potential and started printing brochures about Dom Pérignon. From that point on, the role of the celebrated monk became a truism.
The truth is that no one in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century associated Dom Pérignon with the discovery of sparkling wine. His friend Dom François, writing the biography of the famous monk, never mentions bubbles, and even the abbey’s lawyers in the nineteenth century—looking for things to claim rights to—didn’t think they could convince anyone that Dom Pérignon had anything to do with making wine sparkle. As the lawyers knew, the monks at Hautvillers didn’t even start bottling their wines until the 1750s.
For those who enjoy the romance of the Dom Pérignon legend, there is even worse news. Wine historians now claim that champagne did not even originate in France. Champagne was first “invented” in Great Britain, where there was already a small commercial market for sparkling champagne by the 1660s. British enthusiasts were investigating ways to control the production of its so-called mousse—the fizz—several decades before the wine was sold at all in France. It seems that wealthy British consumers, anxious to prevent their imported barrels of wine from turning to expensive vinegar, first bottled wines from the Champagne region and, in doing so, discovered sparkling wine.
What would happen is this: Seventeenth-century British connoisseurs would order their fine table wines from vintners in the Champagne region, and, as required under French law in those days, it would be sold in wooden barrels. The wines arrived without a hint of bubbles. Winemakers in the Champagne, in fact, were not legally allowed to sell their wines in glass bottles until the passage of a special royal decree given to the city of Reims in the 1720s. Unfortunately, without a sealed bottle, there is no sparkling champagne. It just takes leaving a bottle open in the fridge overnight to learn how fast bubbly goes flat. Likewise, it did not take these British consumers long to discover that once a sealed cask of wine was tapped, it went off quickly, a result of the same oxidization process that spoils opened bottles of wine after a day or two in our own kitchens.
So these wily merchants and consumers began considering ways to preserve their wines. It was no mystery that brandy could act as a preservative. They also began bottling. Great Britain was producing far stronger and less expensive glass than could be found on the other side of the English Channel, giving British wine lovers the advantage. After bottling their imported wines and maybe dosing them with brandy, people inevitably found that some of this wine—wine where a bit of yeast happened to be present—started to fizz. In their efforts to preserve imported still wines from the Champagne, they had haphazardly started the process of secondary fermentation required to make sparkling champagne.
This, we now believe, was how champagne was discovered. This oenological curiosity soon developed a cult following, and one of history’s great gourmets, a Frenchman by the name of Charles de Saint-Évremond, helped to create its new celebrity. He had made an enemy of the king and was forced to flee for his life into exile in Great Britain. The consummate Frenchman, he brought with him a love of fine wines and good food. So when a small group of people learned about this new sparkling wine, he started spreading the news with an infectious enthusiasm. Soon sparkling wine became the status symbol of in-the-know London high society. While Dom Pérignon was laboring in the cellars of his chilly abbey at Hautvillers to get rid of the bubbles in his wines, British scientists were working hard to understand how to produce them.
As a result, the process of making sparkling wine didn’t remain haphazard for long. When people want evidence that the British were making champagne first, they usually turn to the lecture presented in 1662 to the Royal Society of London by a scientist named Christopher Merrett. In his treatise, he explained how adding sugar to wines would help produce the desired fizz. But Merrett’s lecture on winemaking, Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines (1662), which borrowed some of its ideas from the ancient English tradition of cider making, was just one of several sources from which hobbyists and gentlemen could learn the essentials of making champagne. Many of the same principles for making sparkling liqueurs in the bottle are described, for example, in contemporary texts such as John Evelyn’s Pomona; or, An Appendix Concerning Fruit-Trees in Rela
tion to Cider, published by order of the Royal Society in 1664. Most wine experts now believe that the British were converting their barrels of imported wine from the region around Reims—wine with a natural tendency to fizz easily—into sparkling champagne by the 1670s, a full decade before the wine was first produced in France.
In France today, the idea that the British discovered champagne is naturally controversial. Among those who support the French claims, there are some who contend that whatever the British role in developing a gourmet and commercial market for sparkling champagne, the monastic tradition of winemaking in France was already centuries old by the late seventeenth century. Obviously, monks like Dom Pérignon knew that the local wines could sometimes sparkle, even if they considered it a nuisance. And scientific and historical records show that the climatic changes of the little ice age—those decades of unusually cold weather that stalled the fermentation process in the winter and allowed for the natural and unwelcome springtime emergence of bubbles—had been disrupting agriculture in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century. Surely French winemakers had not managed to escape the cold-weather effects on their wines for over a century.
Even if Dom Pérignon and his predecessors did not discover champagne, by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine. Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle, and in order to support his taste for bubbly, the king gave the city of Reims an exclusive license to sell their wines in bottles. It was the beginning of a regional monopoly that would survive, in one form or another, for centuries. In the 1720s, Barbe-Nicole’s Ruinart ancestors founded the first champagne house, but soon there were a dozen more, and dealers selling “foamy” wines from the Champagne enjoyed a period of rocketing sales until as late as the 1740s. After all, if Louis XIV began the fashion for sparkling wine, his successor Louis XV turned it into a royal frenzy. He would do anything to please his mistress, the powerful Madame de Pompadour—a woman whose family conveniently owned lucrative property in the Champagne. For more than thirty years, local winemakers could command astonishing prices by supplying the king of France and his friends with bubbly.
The Widow Clicquot Page 5
