How was Champagne discovered?!

How was Champagne discovered?

Champagne wasn't so much discovered as refined using a number of skills.

You see, ever since people had been making wine they had noticed that, after the cold of the winter when the temperature warmed up in spring, some wines started to re-ferment in the bottle and when they did so (and in the few bottles that did not explode) they produced bubbles.

To make Champagne, the trick was to control the second fermentation. To do that they do what is still done today and added some additional yeast. But they needed stronger bottles and for that they needed the hotter furnaces better were being invented in the 17th century that produced better stronger glass.

Now they could create a sparkling wine -- but it wasn't clear. All the detritus of the second fermentation was still in the bottle -- the dead yeast cells are a cloud of gritty gray dust in the wine. So they had to invent a way to remove them without losing the bubbles.

It is this last technique that Dom Perignan is credited with --although there are other records that imply he copied the technique from Limousin in France or from England.

Because there are documents dating from before Dom Perignan in which Christopher Merret in England describe dhow to make sparkling wine and that it was being drunk in London 30 years before France and 70 years before the first Champagne house was founded.




If (instead of answering the question) 'Truth' is going to copy a entire page from my old mate John Holland's web site at http://www.champagnemagic.com/history.ht... then he should at least acknowledge the source.