The commune itself extends up the slopes of the montagne, but even today lies mostly on the river valley and contains only 80 hectares of vines, producing wine which is not as highly rated as that from neighbouring communes. So the Brularts’ wine, like virtually all its successors, was a blend marketed under a brand name and not produced from a single vineyard. The pattern had been set. Yet for three centuries even the most expert authors described Sillery as though it were a village producing a distinct type of wine. The name became, and remained, synonymous, especially in Britain, with the finest still wines Champagne could produce. The Sillerys even promoted their wines with special labels. As one contemporary author noted: ‘there are even some Lords who embellish their flagons with their coats of arms, but this adds a mere three sols per cent to the price.’
The wine which Louis XIV made fashionable was a still wine, neither truly red nor white. Even today, the Pinot Noir grape grown in Burgundy makes pale wines two years out of three. Wines from the same grapes growing 150 kilometres further north three hundred years ago – when the climate was colder than it is today – were likely to be even paler. Until the late seventeenth century, the better wines from Champagne were referred to as clairet, that light colour generally associated with claret and referred to by contemporaries as ‘partridge eye’ or ‘onion skin’ (presumably seventeenth-century onions were red rather than pale yellow in colour). This did not mean it was characterless. One of the customers of the eighteenth-century wine merchant, Bertin de Rochelet, described it as ‘a wine which fills the mouth’. St Evremond said that his favourite wines from Aÿ, made the old way, had a ‘peach-like taste’.
The forty years following Louis XIV’s coronation set the pattern for the combination of technical innovation and high-pressure salesmanship which has been the key element in the history of champagne ever since. Nevertheless, experimentation was in the air, and a number of winemakers, mostly clerical, were all moving in the same direction. As time went on, the new developments became particularly associated with one Dom Perignon, procureur for forty-seven years of the Abbey of Hautvillers while in London a few fashionistas were enjoying the taste of sparkling champagne for the first time.
2
THE SPARKLE – AND THE WINE
In the second half of the seventeenth century, there were two crucial – and apparently unrelated and contradictory – developments which laid the foundations for champagne as we know it today. In London the natural fizz was tamed and the result appreciated, while in the abbey of Hautvillers near Epernay a Benedictine monk was imposing a discipline which resulted in far better wines which, he hoped and assumed, would not sparkle (to him a sign of poor-quality wines).
Whatever the method employed, deliberately making a wine which fizzed was one of the few dramatic changes in winemaking, an art and a science which has otherwise been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Chemically it is simple enough. Any wine made late in the year in a cold climate (and remember the latter half of the seventeenth century witnessed what has been described as a Little Ice Age) may well not finish its fermentation before the winter paralyses the yeasts which transform the grapes’ sugar into alcohol. The fermentation starts again in the spring creating bubbles of carbon dioxide if the wines have already been bottled, imparting a definite sparkle. The phenomenon is still exploited in what is called the méthode rurale or méthode traditionelle of making sparkling wine.
Edward Hyams got it right when he wrote: ‘Champagne invented itself’.5 It was, however, no coincidence that the first sparkling champagne was launched in London in the 1660s, thanks to an unlikely combination of technical advancement, and an atmosphere of careless hedonism, reinforced by an admiration of all things French. As André Simon put it: ‘Sent from Reims or Epernay shortly after the vintage, the river wines were bottled in London before the following spring, as it had been soon recognized that they were far too delicate to keep well in cask. Bottled thus early, and drunk quickly, it is obvious that these wines were effervescent when consumed – creaming, if not actually sparkling.’ The wines from the Montagne de Reims would start to fizz best if bottled in the summer. Since they were usually shipped in the spring following the harvest, they, too, would have been bottled at the ideal time for the fizz to develop. But, as we will see, these wines were emphatically not those made famous by Dom Perignon.
HEDONISM – AND STRONG BOTTLES
The ‘taming of the fizz’ was possible only in the very special world of Restoration London. In 1660 the period of severe Puritan rule that prevailed under Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard was brought to an end with the return from exile of King Charles II, the son of the executed Charles I. The subsequent years are still recognized as a period of unbridled license, of wine, women and song – indeed new types of wine played an important role in the mores of the period. The tone was set by the king himself, who had a very close – almost treasonable – relationship with his cousin Louis XIV who paid him a regular subsidy. France was, for the English, the model of a civilized society. Love of France – and the thirst for new and better wines and spirits ensured that the cafe society of Restoration London formed the first market for some of the drinks which remain desirably superior beverages to this day.
It was an exiled aristocrat, the Marquis Charles de St Evremond who personified the model of what French civilization represented. He was descended from a noble Norman family and distinguished himself as a blunt-speaking soldier but in 1661 he had been exiled to London because he was too closely associated with Fouquet, too self-important and big-spending a minister for Louis’ taste. Before his expulsion he had been a gourmet, a former member of the Ordre des Coteaux. Saint Evremond was best known as a poet and writer. Although he refused to allow any of his works to be published in his lifetime, when he died at the age of ninety in 1703 he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey surrounded by Britain’s finest native poets.
He was welcomed by Charles who gave him an enormously profitable sinecure, the Wardenship of Duck Island, a tiny grassy islet big enough only for a few trees, in St James’s Park, next to St James’s Palace, the home of the king, an undemanding task for which he was paid the then enormous sum of £300 a year. As a highly influential figure, the leading authority on French – and thus the smartest – fashions in every aspect of life, he proved an ideal ambassador for the wines of Champagne.
These wines were not part of the normal wine trade. ‘Such choice, delicate and perishable wines,’ wrote A. D. Francis, ‘were not good business for the ordinary merchant and tended to be ordered more often than not privately by the rich and noble through their personal connections in France.’6 This was a habit started by Saint Evremond and continued for more than a century after his arrival, during which most of the trade seems to have been conducted through ‘diplomatic channels’. He also, incidentally, introduced the idea of the flute-shaped glass still in use, his object being to appreciate the clarity and colour of the wine.
The still wines of Champagne and Burgundy were the only pure juice of the grape which became fashionable. The English preferred their wines strongly fortified with sugar and brandy. Indeed, they had to be. Ports, sherries and clarets had to face days traversing the stormy waters of the Bay of Biscay on their way from Jerez, Oporto or Bordeaux. By contrast, wine which had merely to float 160 kilometres down the peaceful waters of the Marne could be sold more or less in its natural state. The process of adding sugar – and in some cases brandy as well – was in fact a routine procedure when preparing other table wines to suit the palates of English aristocrats.
Yet it required another aspect of the world of Restoration London to lead to the creation of sparkling champagne. The Royal Society – founded in 1660 and given the royal seal of approval by Charles three years later – was the modern world’s first purely secular scientific institution and remains one of the world’s most exclusive scientific organizations to this day. It was in December 1662 that a well-known doctor and scientist D
r Christopher Merret gave a now famous lecture ‘Some Observations concerning the Ordering of Wines’, in which he described how to make them sparkle through the creation of bubbles of carbon dioxide in the bottle. As he put it: ‘our wine-cooper in recent times use vast quantities of Sugar Molasses to all sorts of wines to make them drink brisk [effervescent] and sparkling and to give them Spirits, as also to mend their bad tastes.’ Curiously, Merret was born in a village in Gloucestershire in the West of England where there is a street called ‘Vineyard Street’.
Crucially the bottles – and their stoppers – had to be strong enough to withstand the additional pressure provided by the carbon dioxide, reckoned then at three times normal pressure – in today’s champagnes it is six times! In fact, as Professor Henri Enjalbert points out in his authoritative Histoire de la Vigne et du Vin the British were exploiting Italian technology:
Italian immigrants had introduced Venetian techniques into England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. To save what remained of the country’s woodlands [the wood from their oaks, required when building ships for the country’s ever more important navy] a Royal edict of 1614 had forbidden burning wood in glass-making furnaces. New factories were immediately built using coal [which provided a hotter and more reliable source of heat]. They enjoyed the greater success because between 1650 and 1660 the privileges of the master glassmakers were suppressed. The model of bottles with stout bodies and long necks – the type used by Dom Perignon – was defined in 1662 in a permit granted to Henry Holden and John Golenet, who mass-produced them. Furnished with cork stoppers imported from Catalonia they were used to store wine and beer [such cork was widely imported into both France and Britain]. By the end of the seventeenth century the glassmakers provided all the containers and stoppers needed for maturing and distributing wines.
The idea of adding sugar – and/or brandy – to an alcoholic beverage to create a fizz as proposed by the learned doctor was not a novelty. Sir Kenelm Digby, a notorious pirate, dilettante, swordsman and dueller who, conveniently, owned an estate in a coal-producing region was ‘also a keen experimenter with glass, oxygen and carbon dioxide’ and, as Stephen Skelton puts it: ‘He used to experiment with coal-fired glass production. He is also credited as the first person to use corks to seal bottles and preserve wine for longer periods than had hitherto been possible, as wines with dissolved carbon dioxide in them and sealed in strong bottles with leak-proof corks could last many months longer than wines kept at normal pressures.’7 In 1662 he was credited with the invention of the modern wine bottle and his glass was known by the French as verre Anglais.
But even the strongest bottles were useless for containing sparkling wine without proper stoppers, rather than the lash-ups of wood and hemp soaked in olive oil used since Roman times. Corks, produced by Catalans, often in exile in Britain or France, could be relied on to provide adequately strong stoppers. Their introduction has been attributed to the all-creative Dom Perignon, but cork was used too widely in both France and England for Dom Perignon to have been solely responsible for its introduction. Corkscrews, another essential element if the fizz didn’t do the job, were first mentioned in print, by one N. Grew in 1681 as a ‘steel worm used for the drawing of wine out of bottles’.
But it was not only winemakers who could take advantage of the new technology and the opportunities it offered. In fact the English were already used to drinking a sparkling alcoholic beverage. In 1657 the second edition of a book by Ralph Austen, who owned a cider factory in Oxford, mentioned the idea of adding sugar to cider and a month before Dr Merret’s lecture the Reverend Richard Beal presented a paper on sparkling cider, also to the Royal Society, mentioning using a ‘walnut’ – that is, a piece of then-precious sugar of that size – when bottling cider to induce a sparkle, an idea referred to in two other papers presented to the Society the following year.
Within a couple of years the fashionable satirical poet Samuel Butler was referring to ‘brisk’, that is, sparkling ‘champaign’ – Britain’s upper-class drinkers have always been careless in their spelling – the new drink could also be spelled ‘campaign’, ‘champaign’, ‘champaigne’, ‘shampain’ or ‘champain’. To this day one can hear the cry for a glass of ‘shampoo’ or simply ‘fizz’ in London’s smarter men’s clubs. Two years later ‘shampaigne’ was mentioned in the cellar-book of the Earl of Bedford, which was clearly completely different from the Sillery he had imported the year before. The idea of champagne as a sparkling wine – as opposed to wines like Sillery and Bouzy, still wines from specific villages – soon entered into the language of the wits-and-poetasters-around-town and thus into print. A number of playwrights followed – two plays by Thomas Otway and three by Farquahar mentioned champagne. Typically, in Farquahar’s Love in a Bottle, first performed in 1697, one character remarks of the champagne sold at Wills’ Coffee House – the prime market for any fashionable drink – ‘How it puns and quibbles in the glass.’ Inevitably, too, it quickly gained its habitual reputation as a sovereign aphrodisiac, as Sir George Etherege put it more bluntly:
Then sparkling Champaign Puts an end to their reign;
It quickly recovers Poor languishing lovers.
The only barrier reducing the success of the wine (apart from its scarcity) was that it was French, and for most of the time between 1678 and 1715 Britain was at war with Louis XIV. Inevitably champagne, like every other French wine, suffered from fits of anti-French sentiment and, more specifically, from the restrictions on trade with France which were applied at various times in the long period of hostilities until a lasting peace was finally established in 1713. Even though in wartime French wines could be smuggled into Britain in Spanish casks, it was considered an unpatriotic drink when compared with port from Britain’s ally Portugal. As Jonathan Swift wrote, true patriots:
Bravely despise champagne at court
And choose to dine at home with Port.
By contrast, Henry Luttrell describes sparkling champagne as a drink for the metropolitan elite which rather despised the ostentatious patriotism of provincial bumpkins:
While Champagne in close array,
Pride of Rheims and Epernay,
Not in bottles, but in dozens,
(Think of that, ye country cousins!)
Stood, of every growth and price,
‘Peeping forth’ its tubs of ice—
The sparkling wine from Champagne was also the most expensive drink on the market, costing over a third more than burgundy, which was itself dearer than claret, while port and sherry were available at a quarter of the price of the fizz. Nevertheless, like many later fads which also upset traditionalists, like the use of white grapes and the taste for pink champagne, sparkling champagne proved to be a lasting habit, not just a passing fancy.
Dom Perignon himself, though the figure is purely imaginary.
_______________
5Dionysus, A Social History of the Wine Vine.
6The Wine Trade
7UK Vineyards Guide 2010.
3
THE MONK’S WINE REVOLUTION
THE REAL PERIGNON ...
The Abbey of Hautvillers provides one of Champagne’s most effective theatrical experiences. The site has an unequalled view over Epernay and the valley of the Marne, source of the vins de la Rivière already famous in the mid-seventeenth century. Ecclesiastical man was already exploiting the site before the turn of the millennium, and although most of the original abbey was destroyed during the French Revolution, enough remains to convey a sense of eternal consecration to a devout purpose. The ruins are genuine enough to inspire a suitable sense of historical awe – a feeling intensified by the archaeologists still painstakingly examining the stones to determine the exact size of the abbey in the early Middle Ages.
Art and nature combine to seduce the visitor into the delusion that sparkling champagne was invented here during the near half-century between 1668 and 1715 when Dom Perignon was procurator of the abbey. The myth also introdu
ces an agreeable paradox – that so hedonistic a wine should have been invented by a monk. For its apparently holy origins greatly help legitimize a drink originally associated exclusively with dissipation and seduction. Even today so reputable a publication as the Encyclopaedia Larousse names Perignon as the creator of sparkling champagne.
In reality Dom Pierre Perignon, the procureur – all-powerful administrator – of the Abbey of Hautvillers for nearly fifty years after his appointment in 1668 was revolutionizing the wine itself, but emphatically not providing the sparkle. Indeed, even within Champagne the revolution consisted of a number of evolutionary developments over a period of nearly two centuries. Dom Perignon was simply one of the most distinguished ‘evolutionaries’ in developing the region’s wines. In the words of the French writer Fernand Woutaz: ‘If Dom Perignon did not “invent” champagne, all the same he was its “inventor” in the legal sense of someone who uncovers buried treasure... during forty-seven years of unceasing and methodical work, Dom Perignon lifted to the highest possible level all the stages of making white wine, from the cultivation of the vine to bottling the wine, so uncovering a “treasure” which was soon to make the fortune of everyone connected with the wines of Champagne.’ He was – no mean achievement – the pioneer in producing the still wines we know today. But there was nothing he, his rivals and successors, and sophisticated wine drinkers in general for up to a century after his death, disliked so much as the mere thought of sparkling champagne. To Dom Perignon’s generation of winemakers, wines which sparkled were not, as the mythologists would have it, the final and deliberate result of the whole careful process. They were a problem, pure and simple. Making a still wine was a sophisticated process, but making a sparkling wine emphatically wasn’t. For sparkling champagne was not invented. It just happened, partly because of technical inadequacies, rather than technical innovations. In the words of the French wine writer Raymond Dumay, ‘he knew of no enemy more dangerous than wine which “worked”, that is to say wine which, despite everything, was determined to bubble for the whole of its life.’
The Story of Champagne Page 3