Another year has come and gone, and whether it was a good one or a bad one for you, New Year’s Eve always brings forth the promise of better times ahead. And on Saturday night, many of us will be ushering in 2017 with that most iconic of sparkling wines, Champagne. But, did you ever wonder what makes Champagne, Champagne? And why do we associate it with celebrations? Weddings, launching of ships, the winning of the World Series, (so, now even you Cubs fans know what Champagne tastes like), anytime there is cause for jubilation, Champagne is the go to beverage.
Besides Champagne there are lots of different kinds of sparkling wines; France also has Cremant. Spain has Cava, Italy has Asti and Prosecco and Moscato. Portugal, Germany, Australia, South Africa, even Russia all have sparkling wines. But, usually when we think of such, we first think of Champagne. And there’s a reason for that!
From the very beginnings of Champagne as we know it, was a product of intense marketing, and born out of a rivalry with other wine varieties. You see, Once upon a time, in late medieval France, there were some monks who were trying to make a better wine out of what everyone thought was a really shitty wine…
Lying in Northeastern France is the region of Champagne (proun: sham-PON-ya). It’s on the very edge of the wine growing regions of Europe. The mean annual temperature in Champagne is only 50 degrees Fahrenheit, so grapes have a difficult time fully maturing on the vine.
Another problem that wine makers have historically had in Champagne is that because of the colder winters in the region, wine doesn’t always finish its fermentation cycle, with the yeast going into hibernation once the temperature dropped to a certain point, and the wine doesn’t finish fermenting in the bottle until the spring when it warms up. This used to be a big problem, but as is often the case, what once was a problem eventually became an asset.
The Romans first arrived in the Champagne region shortly after the defeat of the Gauls by Julius Caesar at the Battle of Alesia in 52 BC. The name Champagne comes from the name Campania, a province and rolling hillside country just south of Rome. The area in France reminded the Roman settlers of the area in Italy, but its climate was a bit cooler.
Champagne Region of France. Note that this is not the political region known as Champagne-Ardenne, but the region of France where grapes for Champagne are produced.
During the Roman period, vineyards were attempted in the region, but always with just marginal success because of the cool summers. But beginning in the mid to late First Millennia CE, Northern Europe experienced a warming climate. Just a few degrees, but it lengthened growing periods and shortened winters enough that viticulture expanded greatly in Champagne in this period. The Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Franks Charlemagne, and the Carolingian kings that followed him, encouraged the expansion of vineyards in all of Northern France beginning in the 8th Century CE.
This warming period is known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, and carbon dating analysis from the period puts the temperature almost 2 degrees warmer over the period than it was before or after it ended in the early Second Millennia CE, when it was followed by another anomaly called the Little Ice Age which lasted until the 19th Century.
A two degree increase in average temperature doesn’t sound like a lot, but it saw the expansion of agricultural activity all across Europe during the period, and because many groups had gained strength and prosperity through increased agricultural output, it triggered migratory movement all through world, by groupsthe Vikings, Huns, and Mongols, who expanded from their native lands into new territories. Another result of the climatic anomaly.
In 987 Hugh Capet was crowned King of France at the Cathedral of Reims in Champagne, and for the next 8 centuries, it was the location of the Kings of France coronation ceremony. The area began to be regarded as the spiritual center of France, and with these great ceremonies being held there, the local wines received quite a bit of attention and were considered to be the vintage of the French royalty.
The rolling hills of the Champagne Region
But, as the climate cooled beginning in the middle of the Second Millennia CE, the wines of Champagne were not as rich as they had once been before. Their red wines were lighter in color and body, and the white wines made from red grapes were kind of grayish or a very pale pink in color. The wines of the region produced from white grapes were found to have a dull flavor, did not fully ferment and spoiled quickly, and this was all due to just a very slight decrease in the growing season. At this same time the region of Burgundy to the south was producing rich, robust red wines that had become the favored wines of all European nobility. Flemish traders traveled over routes through Champagne to get to Burgundy where they would buy the deep red wines, and would return with their wagons full, and not even give the wines of the Champagne a second thought. It was a dark time for the Champenois wine growers.
But then from a small local village in the province, along came the son of a clerk whose family owned a number of vineyards in the region. His name was Pierre, and was the youngest of seven children, so his hopes of inheriting any property were nonexistent, and at the age of 17 he took up the vows of the Benedictine order. In 1668, at the age of 30, he was assigned to the Abbey Saint Pierre d’Hautevillers in Champagne, where he served as the wine cellarer until his death in 1715. Under his care, the abbey and its vineyards flourished, all of the while he worked tirelessly to improve the wines of the Champagne region.
You already know Pierre, you know who he is, you just know him by another name. Dom Pérignon.
Now there’s some legend surrounding Dom Perignon, we have to get these out of the way first. He didn’t invent the sparkling wine we call Champagne. Nobody invented it, the carbonation occurred naturally as a by product of stunted fermentation. The temperature would drop in the autumn, the yeast in the wine would go into hibernation, the wine would be bottled, and then some time in the spring as temperatures rose, the yeast would then again become active, naturally carbonating the wine in the bottle, a process known as refermentation,- and it was an enormous problem for winemakers at the time. It was an undesirable condition; sparkling wine was considered to be an inferior product, and it was also dangerous. The carbonation caused pressure within the bottle, which would at the least cause the cork to pop, and at the worst cause the bottle to explode, and the flying glass would cause a chain reaction by striking bottles next to them that were also under pressure and they too would explode. So if you were a worker in the cellar or racking house in the spring, and bottles started exploding, your life could be in danger.
Another thing, Dom Perignon is credited with saying “I am tasting the stars,” upon his discovery of Champagne. Well, again he considered sparkling wine a flawed wine, so Perignon wouldn’t have said that, and the first appearance of that quote being credited to Perignon was in the 19th Century and wasn’t really popularized until the 20th Century by the Moët et Chandon House, who began to sell a top shelf brand of Champagne under the name Dom Perignon in 1936, and theyhave used the quote as part of various advertising campaigns ever since.
What Dom Pérignon did do was learn how to get the most out of the vineyards of the Champagne region. He believed in only using Pinot Noir grapes for both red and white wines. He believed that the Pinot Noir grapes specifically, and red grapes in general, were less “volatile” as he described them and less likely to cause bubbles from appearing in the wine, which he believed, as stated before, was an undesirable trait. So again, he would have never said, “I am tasting the stars.” He might have said, “ah I am tasting swill, this wine is shit.” Or something like that.
Other innovations that were triumphed by Dom Perignon included aggressive pruning, keeping the vines to less than three feet in height, producing smaller yields and a better quality grape. He also championed harvesting in the morning when it was cool, so the heat of the day would not take any moisture out of the grape. Another practice he advocated was pressing the grapes quickly and efficiently and keeping the grape skins from leaching into the juice and imparting of off flavors and dark colors. These measures helped Perignon produce exceptionally good white wine from red wine grapes.
Abbey Saint Pierre d’Hautevillers where Dom Pierre Perignon perfected the art of wine making in the 17th & early 18th Century.
As Dom Perignon was perfecting the wines of the Champagne region, they began to gain a popularity in a most unexpected place; London. Not being able to grow grapes in England, the English depended upon importation of wine from the continent. Because of the influence of an exiled nobleman of the French court, Charles de Sainte Evremond, who preferred and promoted the wines of Champagne among the nobility of the English, these wines became very popular with King Charles II and his court beginning in the 1660’s.
At that time the wine from France would be shipped in barrels, and it would then be bottled in England. The English had a superior process in the manufacturing of glass bottles that made them stronger than their French counterparts. The English also perfected the process of corking the bottles, which is basically the same manner in which traditional sparkling wines are sealed today. Consequently, when the refermentation process occurred in England, the corks wouldn’t prematurely pop, nor would the bottles explode from the pressure of the build up of carbon dioxide. And lo and behold, the English developed a taste for the bubbly wine from Champagne. Other European courts, seeing the popularity of Champagne among the English Royalty soon followed suit, and by 1715 even the Duke of Orleans, the Regent of France, had grown into a huge fan of the bubbly.
This created a fashion trend in Paris- like that’s never happened before or since- as the elite restaurants and high society were eager to follow the Duke’s lead and wanted to serve and drink sparkling wines. The Champanois winemakers, including the disciples of Dom Perignon, began to switch production methods to produce sparkling wines rather than the still wines to meet the demand of the Parisian market. The marketing and sales of the wines changed dramatically at this time; rather than the vineyards selling their wines, Champagne Houses began to emerge, including some that are still very famous today, including Moet et Chandon and Taittinger. These Champagne houses bought select grapes from various vineyards, and blended them to make their select sparkling wines. Each house had sales agents who went to all of the royal courts of Europe, with samples of their vintages, and it basically became a champagne arms race between these competitors.
It did not take long before the Champagne houses overtook the monasteries and secular owned vineyards in production of sparkling wine in the Champagne region, as the established wine makers were reluctant to abandon the production of still wines that they had been making for many years. As the bubbly became more and more popular among the aristocrats of Europe, the monastic and secular vineyards tried to move into the sparkling wine market, however the Champagne houses were already well ahead of them, and rather than beating their heads against a wall to compete, the vineyards reluctantly sold their grapes to the established and experienced marketers of the champagne houses.
By the time of the Napoleonic era, Champagne was being drank by all of the royalty of Europe, from Spain to Russia, Norway and Denmark to the Ottoman Empire, Champagne was the of the toast of the realms, thanks to the work of sales agents and marketing men of the Champagne houses of France. Through the 1800’s, year after year, the production of champagne increased, and by the end of the Century, two of the largest markets for France’s unique sparkling wine, were the industrial juggernaut of the United States and the Tsarists controlled Russian Empire.
This was great for Champagne - until the early 20th Century… and then there were problems. In 1917, the Romanov Regime of Russia was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who immediately prohibited the importation of Champagne, declaring it to be decadent and bourgeois, in direct repudiation of the Marxist philosophy of Communism. Follow that up with the passing of Prohibition in the USA in 1920, with the loss of many tycoon and industrialists fortunes, two of the largest markets for champagne were gone.
Internally the French were also dealing with some issues; during World War I, which found the Champagne region on the western battlefront, wartime devastation, along with crop failures, seriously disrupted grape production, causing local prices to soar in the Champagne region. The production houses looked to other regions to purchase cheaper produce. The grape growers of Champagne were outraged; how can you call a wine Champagne if it is not from Champagne? The French government stepped in, defining specific boundaries where grapes had come from to be used in the production of the wine before it could be called Champagne.
During World War II, under Nazi occupation, Champagne production, for the most part, was uninterrupted, primarily because of the German officers corps affinity for the bubbly wine. Only towards the end of the war in late 1944, as the Allies marched across France and with fighting moving through the Champagne region, did the viticulture experience any disruption. The European theatre of the war actually ended in Champagne, in Reims, on May 7, 1945, when Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, Dwight D Eisenhower accepted the unconditional surrender of the German Commander, Alfred Jodl. The event was celebrated by the Allies with the toasting and drinking of six cases of 1934 vintage Pommery Champagne.
Since the end of the war, for the past 70 years, Champagne production and sales from France have continued to grow exponentially. There are nearly 20,000 independent growers of grapes in the Champagne region, and over 300 houses that purchase their harvests, producing more than 200 million bottles of French Champagne annually.
But, most of the Champagne that is drunk in the United States is not really Champagne. It’s American champagne, with a little ‘C’. So how do the American vineyards and producers of sparkling wine get away with calling their product Champagne?
Going back to the 1860’s, before the name Champagne was recognized internationally as being only those wines produced in the region of Champagne, California winemakers were producing sparkling wines that they called Champagne. Consequently, by the early 20th Century, all sparkling wines in the United States were called Champagne, regardless of where they were made or the production method used to make them.
See, in France, for a sparkling wine to be called Champagne, it must come from Champagne, and it must have its second fermentation done in the bottle. This method of fermentation is called Method Traditionelle. But, other countries do not necessarily follow this method. Most American “Champagnes” are made by a process known as Method Charmat, which does the second fermentation in large vats and then the wine is bottled, OR a still white wine is infused with CO2, Carbon Dioxide, after the fermentation is finished and then it is bottled.
Both Method Charmat and CO2 infusion are considered by wine connoisseursto be inferior methods of sparkling wine production. Whether it is or not is a matter of personal taste. I can tell you this… I have drank much more American substandard sparkling wine, and Italian sparkling wine, than I have the good stuff, but on the occasions when I have been so lucky to be able to imbibe of a quality French Champagne, oo la la, vive la difference. It is worlds apart in the quality.
So back to- Why can American wine producers call their sparkling wines champagnes when they are not? Well, according to American law some can and some can’t, and this is still a major bone in the craw of French champagne producers for many years. The American producers claimed that they had been calling these types of sparkling wines champagne since the beginning of American wine production, and American consumers were completely fine with that. But the American producers wanted to sell their product internationally. In agreement with the EU and other countries, they could sell their product to the European and other international markets, as long as they agreed to call and label their product as ‘California Champagne’ or ‘American Champagne,’ however some American producers did not go along with the deal, and still continued to call their product simply Champagne, and are completely content to only sell to the domestic US market. And, then as of 2006, the US government declared that only those companies that were calling their product ‘Champagne’ prior to 2006 could continue to do such, and they must also post the place of origin.
Allen Tatman: Producer, Writer, Narrator
Brian McGeorge: Technical Director
Hishtory Podcast recorded at Rivers Edge Studios and Paddy Malone’s Irish Pub
A Wylde Irish Production, LLC All Rights Reserved
Works cited:
Into Wine. “Champagne: France, History of Champagne, Dom Perignon.” http://www.intowine.com/champagne.html
Gallante, Meredith. “Happy New Year: Here’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Champagne.” Business Insider. December 31, 2011. http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-champagne-2011-12
Johnson, Hugh. Vintage: The Story of Wine. New York, Simon & Schuester, 1989.
Robinson, Jancis, ed. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition (2006). Oxford, 1994.