The fact that a wine fizzed was simply proof that there was something wrong with it. Its only advantage was that the carbon dioxide released as fizz separated the wine from the oxygen in the air and thus stopped it from oxidizing and turning into vinegar.
The abundant loose talk over the centuries of Perignon’s ‘secret’ is ridiculous, he merely imposed a firm and detailed discipline at all stages of the grape growing and winemaking. He used grapes from the right sites and the right varieties and while he certainly didn’t ‘invent’ sparkling champagne he introduced proper winemaking techniques – ones still recognizable today – for the first time. There were few other winemakers as sophisticated as him elsewhere in France. Among his most important innovations were that of making white wine from black grapes and blending wines from different coteaux. Careful harvesting ensuring that the grapes didn’t burst, combined with constructing presses nearer the vineyards, ensured the freshness of the juice. The quality of the wine was improved because he selected the first pressings.
Like every other reputable winemaker in Champagne, Perignon knew that the wines of Champagne were peculiarly prone to fizz once in the bottle. As André Simon explained ‘owing to the calcareous nature of the soil on which the grapes grow, Champagne wines contain a large proportion of carbonic acid gas. They always had such a marked tendency to effervesce that the greatest care had to be taken to check their effervescence, which, for a long time, was considered as impairing the quality of the wine.’8 Obviously the less ripe the grapes, the more acid the wine, the colder the temperature at which it was fermented – and all three conditions were present to a much greater extent in Champagne than in warmer, more southerly vineyards – the less likely it was to have completed its fermentation before winter stopped the yeasts’ work.
Dom Perignon had a number of advantages over other abbatial winemakers. For one thing his abbey was more important. For several centuries its wine had been mentioned as one of the finest crus in the region. But the abbey had been devastated during the Fronde so there were only twelve monks when he arrived (the number had doubled by the end of the century). To rebuild the abbey he needed money, and the most obvious source of income was the wine for which it was already well known.
But he was not the only clerical winemaker to be improving wines. The firm of Taittinger put forward the claims of Dom Jean Oudard who occupied the same role as Dom Perignon at the abbey at Pierry, a subsidiary house of Hautvillers. Dom Oudard, like other procureurs, was a fine winemaker. After browsing through a major collection of original seventeenth and eighteenth-century documents a nineteenth-century writer, Armand Silvestre, was left exclaiming: ‘O noble Jean Oudard, O precieux Dom Perignon.’ Oudard, sixteen years younger than Dom Perignon, outlived his master by twenty-seven years, well into the age of sparkling wine. The vineyards he supervised included a number in choice communes on what is now the Côte des Blancs, at Pierry, Chouilly and Cramant, and the wines from Pierry are often mentioned in the same bracket as those from Hautvillers. When he died in 1742 he was given the unusual honour of burial in the nave of the abbatial church, and a delegation from Hautvillers (including Dom Perignon’s successor) came to the funeral and signed the register. Nevertheless, Perignon rightly remains the symbol of the winemaking revolution of the late seventeenth century.
DOM PIERRE PERIGNON
Dom Pierre Perignon was born in Lorraine of a solidly bourgeois family. He was twenty-nine when in May 1668, he was sent to Hautvillers. Soon after his arrival he was appointed procureur, or administrator. As such he was both treasurer and cellarer, in charge of all the wordly goods that provided a living for the abbey and its monks. His was a difficult role. According to Chapter 31 of the rules laid down by Saint Benedict himself ‘as cellarer of a monastery should be chosen a brother who is both wise and of mature character, and sober in what he eats and drinks. He must not be too proud, nor agitated, nor unjust, nor slow, nor too spendthrift.’
He ran the estate and, as the man responsible for supervising the tenants of the abbey’s lands, also had charge of the wines they and he produced. He occupied the position, second only to a series of aristocratic abbots, for nearly half a century, dying in 1715 at the ripe old age of seventy-six, still in charge of the winemaking. Ironically, he appears to have been a teetotaller, living the frugal life appropriate to his religious calling. Twelve years after his death the Mercure de France noted that ‘this monk whom one could assume was some sort of gourmet never drank wine and lived almost entirely from fruit and dairy products.’
Perignon took every possible opportunity to increase the size of the abbey’s vineyards and the quantities of wine and grapes passing through its hands. A great deal of land had been left fallow, apparently ownerless, as a result of the widespread misery and destruction caused by the Fronde and France’s war with Spain which ended in 1659 with the Treaty of the Pyrenees. It helped that pious locals left the abbey considerable sums of money while he also increased the landholdings by lending money to the peasants (apparently at around 5 per cent), and then seizing their land if they could not repay their debts. He inherited 10 hectares of vines, an estate which had increased to 21 hectares by the time he died. He was pretty ruthless, and not only with the peasants, for he appropriated as much as he could, taking disputed cases right up to the King’s Grand Conseil. His other achievement as treasurer was to increase the value, as well as the quantity, of the wine sold by the estate. By 1700 the wines from Hautvillers, like those from Sillery and a handful of other ecclesiastical estates, were worth four times that of ordinary wines from Champagne and twice as much as a superior Champagne wine. Improving the still wines of Champagne was a full life’s work for anyone even if he had had the inclination to induce the fizz.
The wines of Hautvillers came partly from the abbey’s own vineyards, partly from the dime, the eleventh or twelfth part of the tenants’ crop to which the abbey had the rights, notably at Pierry, Avize and Mesnil-sur-Oger, famous vineyards then as now. The abbey also had many other agricultural holdings, as well as windmills and fishing rights. The dime could be paid either in money, in grapes taken au pied de la vigne, or in wine. As always in pre-revolutionary France local habits were utterly confused even in the same village. In Aÿ and Dizy, two key parishes, most landowners paid in cash, but the Hautvillers estates had always made every effort to get their rights in wine.
As a result, in the words of Emile Roche: ‘Taking the dime in kind provided the Abbey of Hautvillers with a quantity of wine infinitely greater than could have been produced by its own vines – a fact which explains why throughout the ages the ecclesiastics had blended their wines and why what was known as “vin de Hautvillers” was simply the wine blended at and sold by the Abbey but not necessarily coming from its immediate neighbourhood.’9 Roche estimated that just before the Revolution, only an eighth of the 1,025 pièces of wine – enough to fill 280,000 bottles – sold by the abbey came from its own estates, the rest came from the dime. So Hautvillers, like Sillery, was a brand name for a blend of wines, only part of which came from the village of the same name. In selling the wines Perignon had the advantage that under the incredibly complicated internal tax system prevailing in pre-revolutionary France wines from ecclesiastical estates paid lower dues on their entry into Paris than those from private citizens, who themselves paid less than merchants.
Thanks to Dom Perignon and other clerical winemakers the Champenois mastered the art of making white wine from black grapes in a matter of a few decades, although they were probably red rather than truly black. They remained alone in their mastery for centuries. As a late eighteenth-century author put it: ‘Except for Champagne, all the white wines made elsewhere come from white grapes.’ A few old-timers, like St Evremond, deplored any attempt to interfere with natural colouring, or lack of it, particularly where the vins de la montagne were concerned for he was none too keen on the successful attempts by Perignon and his successors to make a white wine from black grapes.
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nbsp; Commercially, white wine was more profitable than red. Unfortunately, the white wine made from white grapes by Dom Perignon’s predecessors didn’t last: it often went yellow by the spring after the vintage, whereas the tougher, redder wines from the Montagne de Reims lasted five or six years. One of Dom Perignon’s achievements – and one which we rather take for granted now, although contemporaries clearly didn’t – was to make a white wine which stayed white. To confuse matters, however white the wine, it was called vin gris because it was made from black grapes. It could thus easily be confused with the previous, tinted, vin gris – indeed, the fact that two different wines shared the same name has masked Dom Perignon’s achievement in developing a new wine.
In trying to remove the colour from the wine Dom Perignon had the advantage that he was dealing with grapes from the rivière. In the words of Nicolas Bidet, ‘There are two types of vineyards in Champagne, those of the Montagne de Rheims and those of the River of the Marne. The first produce a red wine with lots of body as well as straw-coloured wines, but these are so strong and cloudy that one can scarcely drink them except after several years. The latter produces fine and elegant vins gris, a direct result of the nature of the terroir... the wines from near Rheims... are more capable of producing red wines... while those from Ai, Epernay and others from the river produce red wines only with the greatest difficulty.’ Nevertheless, there was a considerable gap between making a rosé wine, and the discipline and skill required to make a truly white one, untainted by the colour in the skin of the grape.
... AND THE MYTH
The myth that Dom Perignon was the inventor of sparkling wine did not start in his lifetime. As so often with similar legends, it originated well after the death of the man concerned, and this one was created by Dom Grossard, Perignon’s last successor before the Revolution swept away the monastic order. In 1821, at the height of the Bourbon reaction against the Revolution and all its works, the aged Grossard, by then reduced to a simple parish priest, was naturally not averse to exaggerating the achievements of his most distinguished predecessor. Grossard arrogated to Dom Perignon all the many advances in viticulture and winemaking which had occurred in his lifetime. But in a letter the aged Grossard added one crucial point: ‘It was the famous Dom Perignon who discovered the secret of how to make both sparkling and still wines properly; before him people knew only how to make wine which was “gris”, or straw-coloured.’ The letter was published by the historian Louis-Perrier in 1865 with the warning note that: ‘If the quality of the wines of Hautvillers consisted exclusively in an intelligent blend or marriage of the wines, all that would remain of Dom Grossard’s assertion would be the points concerning fining and clarifying the wines’ – in reality he seems to have tasted the grapes before they were fermented.
Grossard piled on the fantasy by claiming that Perignon went blind. His affliction had not been mentioned by any of his contemporaries, but was instantly accepted by popular writers and commemorated in the painting of the aged monk, so miraculously accomplished that he could tell the source of grapes simply from their flavour. The contemporary evidence removes the foundations for both the mythomanes and their opponents, for theirs is an argument based on an unsustainable thesis: that a winemaker as distinguished as Dom Perignon would want to make sparkling wine in the first place. Although sparkling champagnes were first made and sold during his lifetime, until well into the eighteenth century, a generation after his death, mousseux champagne was despised as a decidedly inferior beverage. Neither he, nor any other contemporary winemaker proud of his wine would have been willingly associated with it.
Normally the ‘secrets’ of distinguished winemakers were written down shortly after their death. At Hautvillers this role was performed by the Abbé Pierre, Dom Perignon’s immediate successor. But his memoir was lost for nearly two centuries and only retrieved by Paul Chandon-Moët10 at the end of the nineteenth century. So most of our information about the methods used by Dom Perignon and his colleagues derives from a memoir first published in 1718, three years after his death, entitled ‘Manière de cultiver la vigne et de faire le vin en Champagne’ – ‘How they cultivate the vine and make wine in Champagne’. The work was obviously popular, for it ran through three editions in four years and emphasizes just how much modern winemaking in Champagne owes to Dom Perignon and his contemporaries. The memoir was anonymous, although it is now generally attributed to Canon Godinot, a priest in Reims probably connected with the monastery of Saint Thierry a few kilometres to the north.11 Unfortunately for the Dom’s disciples, it does not mention him – or any other winemaker for that matter – by name. This rather startling omission is explained by the fact that the author came from Reims, already a jealous rival of Epernay’s. But the anonymity of the winemakers in Godinot’s memoir emphasizes that the ‘Perignon revolution’ was not confined to his work, nor to Hautvillers, although it is invariably mentioned as one of a group of two or three sources of fine wine.
The only contemporary advice on actually encouraging mousse is a short addition tacked on to the end of the third edition of the memoir. This talks of the ‘famous secret of Dom Perignon’, confided to the author by ‘a credible witness’. It was the first recipe for encouraging mousse, and although it comprises a great many rather curious ingredients – including peaches and nuts – these do include the crucial sucre de candi, the sugar, required, then as now, to encourage the formation of the mousse. The recipe was probably tacked on to the memoir to try and associate the generation of mousse with the mainstream of winemaking in Champagne, for the first edition is concerned rather with the prevention than the creation of mousse.
Dom Oudard, who continued making wine for twenty-seven years after Dom Perignon’s death, had to bow to the times. This was the more inevitable because the vineyards from which he drew his grapes, at Pierry, Chouilly and Cramant, are in what we now call the Côte des Blancs, planted exclusively with white grapes. And for up to a century these, supposedly inferior, grapes were virtually the only ones used to make sparkling wines. One customer even asked Bertin de Rochelet for a ‘good sparkling wine from Pierry produced according to Dom Oudard’s methods’.
The memoir was reproduced by the author of a treatise called the Nouvelle Maison Rustique and by the two other authors on whom we depend for most of our information on the period, Abbé Pluche and the army officer Nicolas Bidet, whose family owned vines at Aÿ. Although Pluche was a friend of Godinot’s, both he and Bidet pay repeated tribute to Perignon’s work. The memoir makes clear that Perignon’s technical innovations, however important, were less crucial than his role in instilling the primordial fact about champagne then as now: the painstaking, scrupulous and disciplined care required in making it. The discipline he imposed applied not only to the abbey’s own lands, but also to tenanted land farmed by sharecroppers.
‘THE MOST DELIGHTFUL WINE’
Twenty years after Perignon’s death Pluche summed up the control achieved by his generation of winemakers. He attributed the success of the wines of Champagne to ‘the precautions taken by the inhabitants of Champagne for fifty years past. Their wine was indeed very excellent and much esteemed before that time but it wanted a sufficient body and was incapable of transportation to distant parts; till at last the natives, by a long course of experience, acquired the proper methods of providing it with the complexion of a cherry or the eye of a partridge; they could likewise brighten it into the whitest hue or deepen it into a perfect red. In a word they improved it to such a degree that it will now retain all its fine qualities for six or seven years and very frequently for a longer space of Time.’
The memoir starts by boasting that the wines from Champagne are ‘the most delightful’ in the kingdom. The author admits that ‘it is a mere fifty years since they started studying how to make lightly coloured wine that was virtually white; nevertheless, their wine, even though it was red, was made with more care and cleanliness than any other in the Kingdom.’ Quality, then as now, was based on
two fundamental points: poor soil and, consequently, low yields. The memoir insisted that ‘the subsoil should be sound, slightly stony and not in itself damp. The texture of the earth in Champagne is very fine and has a particular quality which is not to be found in any other province.’ The locals already realized that they had a source of additional nourishment in their cendres noires12 which they carted to the vineyards and kept in deep trenches called magasins – stores. But they didn’t want to push yields too high by pouring on too much manure. As the memoir put it: ‘You must use only a little manure: too much makes the wine soft and insipid and too inclined to get greasy.’ This again was a novelty. In the words of one Jacques Boullay, writing about the Orleanais at the beginning of the eighteenth century: ‘In Champagne they are so convinced that manure detracts from the quality of the wine that share-croppers are expressly forbidden to manure the vines.’
Yields were restricted, not only by using manure sparingly, but also by pruning severely, another habit which has lasted until today. As a result, the vines produced fine wine but very little of it, only deux pieces a l’arpent – around 500 bottles’ worth per acre. This was half the normal yield at the time and a mere fifth of what today’s winemakers can expect in a good year. If the vines were pruned too early, before February, they would burst into bud prematurely and would thus be exposed to the late spring frosts which are an inevitable accompaniment of grape growing in a northern climate. Some greedy vignerons, said the memoir, took on more vines than they could manage, so they had to start pruning dangerously early. The same phenomenon was seen after the terrible frosts of January 1985 when thousands of hectares of vines were devastated, some because they had been pruned too early.
The Story of Champagne Page 4