Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Champagne

Starting point is 00:00:00 Located in northern France is one of the most well-known wine-producing regions on earth. In fact, it's so well-known that it has legally protected the name of its signature product around the world. It's the preferred drink for both royalty and rappers, and you'll find it at nightclubs and brunches. Yet, its discovery was believed to be an accident. An accident that is today a $6 billion industry. Learn more about champagne, how it was created and its place in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:52 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Wine has been produced around the Mediterranean four thousands of years. However, it probably didn't reach northern France until about the fifth century. The wine which was grown at this time was just wine, not radically different from the wine you'd see grown in other regions. By all accounts, the wine originally produced in the Champagne region of France was a light, fruity wine, in contrast to the darker, heavier wines found in Italy.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Perhaps most importantly for the winemakers in Champaign, their wines weren't considered as high quality as the wines in the neighboring region of Burgundy. The main city in the Champagne region is Rams, or as it's often pronounced in English, reams. This is noteworthy because in 987, the French king Hugh Caput was crowned in Roms. After this, almost every French king was crowned in the Roms Cathedral. For centuries, the wine of champagne was overshadowed by Burgundy. They eventually tried to shift production to white wines to differentiate themselves from Burgundy, but that didn't really work. It wasn't a bad idea, given how far north champagne is, but it just didn't pan out.

Starting point is 00:02:08 Eventually, in the 16th and 17th centuries, they stumbled upon the idea of producing a white wine from red-gray. The initial results tasted fine, but they had a gray or pinkish hue, making them rather unpopular. Most of the vineyards at the time were actually owned by monasteries, because of the need for sacramental wine, and because they just owned a lot of land. One of the monks who worked at the Benedictine monastery of Huvilliers was an especially good winemaker and took the science of winemaking quite seriously, and he had a name that you've probably heard before. His name was Dom Perignon.

Starting point is 00:02:41 Don Peronionian figured out how to clarify the white wines which were made out of red grapes. He focused on the cultivation of Pinoir and was considered to be a perfectionist by the other monks. Today, the primary grapes still used for the creation of champagne are Pinoir, Pinoir, Pino-Munier, and Chardonnay. He actually figured out a whole host of techniques that improved wine production, including how to prune the vines and how and when to press the grapes. However, there was still a problem with the production of wine in the region. Because it was further north than most wine-producing regions, it would be colder in the winter, and it would get colder faster in the autumn. The lower temperatures would stop the fermentation process, which would result in undigested yeast and sugars in the wine. These sugars would form carbon dioxide gas in the spring when the yeast reactivated, and would cause the bottles to literally explode.

Starting point is 00:03:34 The exploding bottles would often cause nearby bottles to explode as well, which resulted in a disastrous chain reaction. The bottles that didn't explode would often have bubbles and would be very effervescent. The bubbles in the wine were considered a flaw in the product and something that should be eliminated. Bubbly wine became known as Le Vand du Diebel, or the Devil's Wine. Beginning around the 17th century, the non-bubbly wine from the champagne region began being very popular in England. A French writer by the name of Charles Descente of Armand was exiled to England where he became a hit in the elite social scene, and he was a huge promoter of wines from champagne. When wines were shipped from champagne to England,

Starting point is 00:04:15 some of them would occasionally be the unwanted bubbly variety. But it turned out, the English loved it. A whole bunch of innovations took place about the same time in the mid-17th century, which made the drink that we now know as champagne possible. The first was a paper published in 1662 by the scientist Christopher Merritt. He actually figured out why wine sparkled and how to make a drink. it happen on purpose. He realized that if you put sugar into any wine before it began to ferment, it would end up sparkling. Most of the non-sparkling wine imported from champagne was actually

Starting point is 00:04:50 delivered in large casks and then re-bottled once it got to England. Many of the English merchants began making the wine sparkle themselves, which led to the very odd historical fact that the first purposely created sparkling wines from the champagne region were actually created in England. The next big innovation was in the area of glassmaking. Mid-17th century England was in the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. One of the earliest innovations in England was the ability to make stronger bottles. The English were using coal in their glassmaking versus French wood-fired glassmaking, which allowed for higher temperatures. These new thicker bottles were resistant to exploding and were critical to the creation of sparkling

Starting point is 00:05:31 wine. The final innovation was actually a rediscovery of something that the Romans did centuries before but had been lost. The use of cork to stop bottles. Believe it or not, the French initially used oil-soak rags to stop bottles. According to legend, Dom Perignon himself rediscovered the use of tree bark from the cork tree to stop bottles. Some people dispute the legend, but either way, it was during this time that corks came into use. With champagne becoming so popular in England, it soon began to spread in popularity with other royal courts in Europe. At the beginning of the 18th century, it began to gain popularity amongst the French elite. The French regent at the time, the Duke of Orleans, began serving champagne at his parties in Paris,

Starting point is 00:06:14 which caused it to gain in popularity with the French nobility. The rise in French popularity of sparkling wine in the early 18th century resulted in many of the winemakers of the champagne region, shifting their production from traditional wine to sparkling wine. Houses like Moet and Chandon and Tatinger, were all established during this period in the early 1700s. There were further improvements made in champagne production. One problem was sediment, which collected at the bottom of bottles. Normally, champagne would just be decanted into a new container,

Starting point is 00:06:43 which works fine with most wines. With champagne, however, if you did that, it would lose its effervescence. This was solved through a process called riddling. Riddling is allowing the sediment to collect in the neck of the bottle by storing it with the top of the bottle pointing down. When the bottle was opened, the pressure of the gas inside the bottle would eject the sediment. In the 19th century, extra sugar was added to champagne to make it sweeter. However, the British preferred drier champagne with less sugar.

Starting point is 00:07:12 This led to the creation of what was known as Demisec champagne, which was half a sweet, and finally to champagne with no sugar at all, which became known as Brute Champagne, which is the most popular type of champagne made today. Over time, as champagne consumption spread, several traditions and northern, forms develop surrounding the consumption of champagne. One of which is that there are particular types of glassware that are used for drinking champagne, and there are two very different types of glasses with different theories behind them. One is the champagne flute, which is a very long and slender glass. The theory is that it has a very small exposed surface area at the top

Starting point is 00:07:49 to prevent bubbles from escaping. However, it also doesn't allow for the wine to be swirled and for aroma to escape. The other is a very wide and shallow glass. which is pretty much the opposite of a flute, known as a champagne coupe. This is the choice of most wine aficionados. Coop glasses can be stacked into a tower for some special events. The tower should always be stacked such as there is only one glass at the very top that the champagne is poured into. The champagne will then overflow and fill all of the glasses below it. The world's largest champagne glass tower was built in January of 2022 in Dubai.

Starting point is 00:08:25 It was a pyramid that consisted of 54,700,000. 40 glasses and stood 8.23 meters or 27 feet tall. One tradition which is done on formal occasions is the opening of a bottle of champagne with a sword or a saber, known as a Sabrage. It involves swinging a saber such that it would catch the glass slip near the top of the bottle and take off the glass and cork in one fell swoop, if it's done correctly. The tradition supposedly developed when Napoleon's troops were marching back in victory and people threw them bottles of champagne in celebration, as it was hard to open on a horse, they just used their sabres. The proper way to open a bottle is actually to use the blunt side of the saber, not the edge,

Starting point is 00:09:07 and you aren't cutting the bottle so much as just pushing the top off. And if you're ever at a fancy restaurant with a sommelier and order champagne, you might ask them to open the bottle with a saber if you'd like something special. Most trained salmoliers should know how to do it. If you open a bottle normally, you should always hold it at an angle away from anyone, as the cork can actually be dangerous when it flies out. Champagne has become the way many sports teams and race car drivers celebrate championships. It primarily has to do with the fact that champagne is under pressure,

Starting point is 00:09:38 and when you open it, especially if you shake it up, it will spray everywhere. The tradition is believed to have started with Moet and Chandon, donating champagne to winners of Formula One races in 1967. Champagne bottles can be found in multiple sizes. A typical bottle is 750 milliliters. The smallest bottle is called a Pistol. Ticolo, which is only 187 milliliters, and the largest is the Melchizedek, which can hold up to 40 standard bottles of champagne. One of the biggest issues surrounding champagne has to do with the name. If you're a wine producer in, let's say, Napa Valley, California, Australia, or even a different

Starting point is 00:10:14 part of France, you cannot market wine under the name champagne. This is called Appalachian. It designates a location where grapes were grown and a wine was created. By the Treaty of Madrid, which governs international trademarks, the term champagne is protected, and only sparkling wine from France's champagne region can use the term. A sparkling wine produced anywhere else can be called champagne, so Prosecco is a sparkling wine from northern Italy, and Kava is a sparkling wine from Spain. Both are very similar to champagne, but they can't use the name. There are many champagne sellers you can visit if you visit the Champagne region of France. Within walking distance of the Cathedral of Verne,

Starting point is 00:10:54 rums, there are several old champagne sellers that you can visit, and I highly recommend it if you're in the region as the sellers and vineyards are actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Champagne has had an outsized impact on culture compared to every other type of wine. It is considered the beverage for wealth and celebration, and it's what you order when there's a special occasion. And all of this is due to some winemaking monks in France, who accidentally created exploding bottles of wine several centuries ago. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener 845 Limited over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write,

Starting point is 00:11:40 Top Shelf. New to this pod, or maybe not. I discovered this about a week ago and have absolutely binged it. I don't even look at the title subject because regardless, every episode is totally interesting. And the signal-to-noise ratio is at the top. The perfect word is succinct. He delivers every bit that the subject needs and waste not even one moment with nonsense, fluff, or awful humor,

Starting point is 00:12:02 something that most pods haven't figured out yet. For what he packs into a 10-minute episode, this podcast rates six out of five. Well, thank you, 845 Limited. I succinctly, and without any cheesy humor, acknowledge your review. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Champagne

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