What do you think of this fact?
Ask who invented champagne and you’ll probably hear one name: Dom Pérignon. A monk, a cellar, a glass full of bubbles, done. Nice story. The real one runs the other way.
The monk who hated fizz
Dom Pierre Pérignon lived from 1638 to 1715 and became procurator of the Benedictine Abbey of Hautvillers, above Épernay in the Champagne region, in 1668. Back then, bubbles in wine were not a feature. They were a problem.
Wine that started fermenting again in the bottle built up pressure, and bottles of that era often burst. France Today notes that this accidentally fizzy wine was nicknamed “vin du diable”, devil’s wine. According to BBC History Revealed, Pérignon “worked tirelessly to eradicate bubbles” in the wine of his region.
He was still a top winemaker. He pushed for low yields and threw out damaged grapes, and he helped perfect white wine made from black pinot noir grapes. Just not the sparkle.
The bubbles came from England
In 1662, the English physician Christopher Merret described in a paper for the Royal Society how English wine coopers added “vast quantities of sugar and molasses” to wines. That sugar kicked off a second fermentation and made the wine sparkle. That was six years before Pérignon arrived in Hautvillers.
The English also had the right bottles. In 1615, King James I banned wood as fuel for industrial furnaces, so glassmakers switched to coal. It burned hotter and made stronger glass that could hold pressure similar to a car tyre. French glass of the time was too weak for that.
Bonus fact: According to France Today, an abbey near Limoux in the south of France has records of bubbly wine from 1531, made with a different method.
How the legend was born
The hero story was marketing. At the 1889 world’s fair in Paris, the one that debuted the Eiffel Tower, the champagne trade promoted Pérignon as the inventor of sparkling champagne. His famous line “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” is, according to BBC History Revealed, a 19th-century myth.
So the face of fizz is a man who spent years trying to stop it. Cheers to that.