The French take their Champagne very seriously. How seriously? Seriously enough that at the end of World War I, with roughly a tenth of their own people lying dead, they still insisted on writing Article 275 (out of 440) into the Treaty of Versailles, under which every signing nation agreed that only wine from the Champagne region of France could be called “Champagne” (that is why there is no Italian or German Champagne, but there is, oddly enough, California Champagne, since the United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles). Still, you can understand the French fear of losing their famous trademark. After all, didn’t they invent the Champagne we drink today? Well, the honest answer is: yes and no.
I Am Tasting the Stars
According to the classic version of the story, Champagne was invented in 1668 by a Benedictine monk named Pierre Pérignon, better known to us as Dom Pérignon (Dom is an honorific given to monks, taken from the Latin word dominus, meaning “lord”). This monk, who was in charge of the wine cellar at an abbey near Épernay in the Champagne region, supposedly discovered by accident that fermentation inside the bottle was responsible for the bubbles that make Champagne so special (legend has it that the first time he tasted the sparkling wine, he exclaimed, “I am tasting the stars!”). What gets left out of the story, though, is that Dom Pérignon actually spent most of his time trying to reduce the “bubbliness” of the wine, since the fermentation process kept causing the thin French bottles to explode, turning the wine cellar into something closer to a demolition site.
While Dom Pérignon was trying to cut down on the bubbles and turn Champagne into an ordinary still white wine, across the English Channel a little-known figure named Christopher Merret was trying to do exactly the opposite. Wine from the Champagne region had become very popular in England in the early 1660s, imported by the French adventurer Saint-Évremond, who had fled to England after getting into trouble with the law back in France. The wine he brought over was supposed to be flat, but fermentation inside the barrels led the English, too, to discover the charm of the bubbles. Unlike Dom Pérignon, who feared fermentation, the English, who at the time had just invented thick, sturdy glass bottles, actually liked the bubbles and tried to increase them. This is where Merret enters the story. Born in 1614 and educated at Oxford (already known back then as excellent training ground for drinkers), Merret was an amateur chemist who studied the fermentation process and wrote a paper describing how to intensify the bubbles in a bottle by adding sugar, at the very same time Dom Pérignon was trying to do the opposite. In the end, Merret’s method was a tremendous success, and the French adopted it along with the thick bottles, which allowed for stronger bubbles without the risk of explosion. Louis XIV, who loved the new wine, adopted Champagne and made it the official wine of the French royal court, and the rest is history.
Naturally, the French have done everything they can to make these historical facts disappear, and to be fair, after a few glasses of Champagne, that task becomes remarkably easy. But the next time you raise a glass of Champagne to toast the New Year, raise one for Christopher Merret too. He has earned it.