Gaby
The countdown to the New Year usually starts with a festive glass of bubbling champagne. Sparkling wine has become a symbol of joy, celebration, romance, and fresh beginnings — its effervescence has inspired people for centuries.
The Product of Prayers
Evidence of sparkling wine goes back as far as Virgil and Homer. But champagne itself was first recorded in 1668, when a blind monk named Pierre Pérignon was put in charge of the Benedictine monastery wine cellars in the Champagne region. Would the world remember his name if not for a mishap: the 30-year-old cellar master left a stash of bottles of young wine in his cell, and one day his “supplies for prayers” all exploded at once, causing panic among the brothers.
After the abbot rebuked him for allowing the wine to ferment, the cellar master offered everyone a taste of what he called the “flavor of the stars” and served the explosive drink. The monks treated it as a divine nectar and decided the beverage was a heavenly gift worth renouncing worldly pleasures for — they dedicated themselves to the hard work of tending the vineyards.
A Strict Secret
From then on, the monastery used grapes from its entire harvest to make sparkling wine. Some grapes were lost to the unpredictable process: the frothy liquid would pop corks and sometimes shatter bottles. Initially, corks were wrapped in foil to protect them from rats; winemakers thought the foil would stop rodents from chewing the cork. That foil has stayed on the bottle ever since as a nod to tradition.
Statue of Pierre Pérignon at the historic winery Moët & Chandon. Victor Grigas
As he refined the technique, Pierre Pérignon developed a reliable way to seal bottles with cork and worked out ideal blends of wines from different harvests and grape varieties. Those improvements demanded investment and effort, so the method for making sparkling wine remained closely guarded for decades. That secrecy began to break in 1718, when the abbot of Reims Cathedral, Godino, published a book revealing the basics of champagne production. A few decades later, the first champagne house opened.
A Feminine Touch
Winemaking is often seen as a man’s domain, but women made major contributions to champagne. The most famous example came in 1805, when 27-year-old widow Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot took over her late husband François Clicquot’s business and transformed it. At first no one trusted the young heiress to run the Clicquot house; colleagues scoffed at the idea that a woman could manage a wine cellar. Instead, her tenure turned the Veuve Clicquot brand into a global benchmark for champagne quality.
Portrait of the founder of the “Veuve Clicquot” brand, Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin
Madame Clicquot introduced the “muselet” – the wire cage that holds the cork in place. Legend says the wire length of 52 centimeters came from the wire in Joséphine Clicquot’s corset, which she once used to secure a cork (before that, corks had been tied with string).
In the mid-19th century, Madame Clicquot’s success inspired another widow, Madame Pommery, to enter the business. By the early 20th century, Madame Bollinger and Madame Roederer continued the tradition of women leading major champagne houses.
A Drink for the Worthy
Crimean wine enthusiast Lev Golitsyn regarded sparkling wine as a drink for the worthy and paid careful attention to quality. He often chaired tasting panels and followed expert winemaking advice from Champagne. By example, he showed that Crimean sparkling wines could compete with the best French varieties.
The estate Golitsyn purchased in 1878 on the Black Sea became a model for modern winemaking. Factories in the New World and the village of Abrau-Durso near Novorossiysk produced wines that performed well at international competitions. Golitsyn’s 1899 sparkling wine (a run of 60,000 bottles) won top honors at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. For the first time, the Grand Prix was not awarded to a famous French firm.
“Soviet Champagne”
Sparkling wine became widely accessible during the Soviet era. In the early 1920s, Anton Frolov-Bagreyev, head of the “New World” factory, developed an accelerated production method that shortened fermentation from three years to about one month. Instead of fermenting in bottles, the wine fermented in 500-decaliter tanks (acratophors); on days 25 to 27 the reaction was stopped by cold, and the finished sparkling wine was bottled. The method was hailed as a national economic innovation and received the State Prize. Later, Professor H.G. Agabalyants, a student of Frolov-Bagreyev, developed a continuous-flow system using interconnected tanks.
During the Soviet period, more than 5,000 innovations and proposals were submitted for sparkling wine technology. Many of those ideas were implemented in new factories that produced affordable, quality wine under the “Soviet Champagne” label. Soviet sparkling wines won 230 medals at international competitions, including 103 golds.
Conditions and Rules
“Soviet Champagne” was exported under names like Soviet sparkling wine and Sovjetische sekt, because the exclusive right to the name “Champagne” was legally established after World War I. Officially, only sparkling wine from the Champagne region may be called champagne, and it is typically made from local grape varieties such as Chardonnay (white) and Pinot Noir (red).
Champagne made exclusively from Chardonnay is called blanc de blancs, while champagne made from black grapes such as Pinot Noir is called blanc de noirs. Grapes for champagne are usually harvested early to keep sugar levels low and preserve a delicate style. Champagne limits yields to about 13 tons per hectare to protect quality. Authentic champagne is produced through a natural secondary fermentation in the bottle and requires a minimum aging period before release.
For Aristocrats and Degenerates
Champagne is usually bottled in a standard 750 ml bottle, but a magnum (1.5 L) is often considered superior because it exposes the wine to less oxygen. In special cases, exclusive bottle sizes are produced.
Pol Roger even bottled champagne in a 0.6 L (imperial pint) bottle for Winston Churchill. The British prime minister famously drank champagne in the morning instead of coffee: he would wake around 11:00 AM and immediately have a glass. Despite the old saying that “champagne in the morning is for either aristocrats or degenerates,” many connoisseurs accept a light glass of bubbly at breakfast, reserving more robust styles for later in the day and cuvées for the evening.
Although champagne is sometimes labeled a “feminine” wine, many famous men admired it: Churchill and Eisenhower, Peter the Great and Louis XIV, Pushkin and Fleming, Khrushchev and Pasteur. Pasteur called champagne the most beneficial of alcoholic beverages — and who better to judge than a microbiologist?
