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Portrait of Champagne

General knowledge · Food & drink

Champagne

Region delimited 1927; appellation d'origine contrôlée from 1936

Food and drink — the sparkling wine that is also a piece of French law

A sparkling wine that may only be called by its name if it comes from a strictly delimited area of north-east France and is made by a second fermentation in the bottle in which it is sold. The bubbles were not invented by Dom Pérignon, the Benedictine cellarer of Hautvillers who is credited with them; the earliest known description of deliberately making wine sparkle by adding sugar was given to the Royal Society in London by Christopher Merret in 1662. The region's boundaries were fixed by law in 1927 after riots by growers, and the name is defended in the courts more fiercely than almost any other in food and drink.

How to spot them

  • ▸Three principal grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot noir and Meunier — two of them black
  • ▸Second fermentation in the bottle, then riddling and disgorgement
  • ▸A monk at Hautvillers who is wrongly credited with inventing it
  • ▸Bottle sizes named after Old Testament kings and patriarchs
  • ▸Around six atmospheres of pressure — roughly three times a car tyre

Key facts

A blind Benedictine cellarer at Hautvillers, told to 'come quickly, I am tasting the stars' in a slogan invented by an advertiser (1715)

Dom Pérignon, who died in 1715. His real achievements were blending and pressing black grapes to make white wine.

Christopher Merret's paper to the Royal Society describing the adding of sugar to make wine sparkle (1662)

The earliest known written account of the method, given in London some thirty years before the monk's supposed discovery.

A young widow's cellar master devised the pupitre, a slanted rack for turning bottles neck-down (1816)

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin and Antoine de Müller — remuage, or riddling, which collects the sediment in the neck.

Grower riots in the Marne and the Aube ended in a law of 1927 drawing the boundary on a map (1927)

The delimitation that made the name a matter of geography rather than of style.

Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Methuselah, Salmanazar, Balthazar, Nebuchadnezzar

The large-format bottles, 3 to 15 litres, named for Old Testament kings; the magnum, at 1.5 litres, is merely Latin for 'large'.

Brut nature, extra brut, brut, extra dry, sec, demi-sec, doux — a scale running from driest to sweetest

The dosage: 'extra dry' is sweeter than 'brut', a trap that has caught many a quiz team.

Freezing the neck in brine so the plug of sediment shoots out under pressure

Dégorgement à la glace — disgorgement, followed by topping up with the liqueur d'expédition.

Key ideas

  • The legal principle is that a place name can be property. Everything is regulated: which villages, which grapes, the yield per hectare, the pressing ratio, the minimum time on the lees. The wine's identity is a set of rules, not a recipe.
  • Almost all of it is blended — across villages, across grapes, and usually across years. Non-vintage is the house's signature style, kept consistent by drawing on reserve wines.

Quick-fire facts

  • •The three main permitted grapes are Chardonnay, Pinot noir and Meunier; four others — Arbane, Petit Meslier, Pinot blanc and Pinot gris — remain legal but are rare
  • •A blanc de blancs is made from white grapes alone, effectively Chardonnay; a blanc de noirs from black grapes vinified as white
  • •The region was delimited by law in 1927 and gained appellation d'origine contrôlée status in 1936
  • •Non-vintage must spend at least 15 months in the cellar, 12 of them on the lees; vintage requires at least three years
  • •Internal pressure is around six atmospheres, and the standard bottle is much heavier than a still wine bottle to contain it
  • •Remuage — riddling — is credited to the house of Veuve Clicquot around 1816; the sediment is later expelled by disgorgement
  • •The sweetness scale runs brut nature, extra brut, brut, extra dry, sec, demi-sec, doux, and 'extra dry' is sweeter than 'brut'
  • •The chief towns are Reims and Épernay; the Avenue de Champagne at Épernay runs above miles of chalk cellars
  • •Christopher Merret described making wine sparkle by adding sugar in a 1662 paper to the Royal Society, predating the French claim
  • •The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 contained clauses obliging Germany to respect French appellations, an early piece of international name protection

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