Gaby
The countdown to the New Year often begins with a glass of bubbly. Sparkling wine has become a symbol of joy, celebration, romance, and fresh starts; its effervescence has been part of festivities for centuries.
The Product of Prayers
Mentions of sparkling wine appear as far back as Virgil and Homer. Champagne production has been documented since 1668, when oversight of the wine cellars at the Benedictine monastery in the Champagne region was entrusted to a blind monk named Pierre Pérignon. Pérignon, then a 30-year-old cellar master, once left a stash of bottles of young wine in his cellars; one day they all exploded, causing panic among the brothers.
After the abbot reprimanded him for allowing the wine to ferment, the head of the Ouvilliers cellars invited everyone to taste what he called the “flavor of the stars” and treated the community to the fizzy drink. The brothers took it as a heavenly gift and committed themselves to the hard work of tending the vineyards.
A Strict Secret
From that point on, the monastery used grapes from its own vineyards to make sparkling wine. Some grapes were lost to the unpredictable process—bottles would pop corks and sometimes shatter. Early on, corks were wrapped in foil to protect against rats that might chew the cork; winemakers hoped the foil would deter rodents. That foil has remained on bottles 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 method for sealing bottles with a cork and established optimal blending proportions for wines made from grapes harvested in different years and varieties. Those improvements required significant investment and effort, so sparkling wine production stayed a closely guarded secret for a long time. The vow of silence broke in 1718 when the abbot of Reims Cathedral, Godin, described the method in a printed book. A few decades later, the first champagne production facility opened.
A Feminine Touch
Winemaking is often seen as a man’s domain, but women made some of the most important contributions to champagne. The most striking example came in 1805, when 27-year-old widow Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot boldly took over her late husband François Clicquot’s business and became a legend in the world of sparkling wine. At first, people doubted the young widow’s business sense; some even joked that when a woman entered a cellar, the wine would turn to vinegar. Instead, the Veuve Clicquot brand became a benchmark for champagne quality worldwide.
Portrait of the founder of the “Veuve Clicquot” brand, Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin
Madame Clicquot’s successors adopted her invention, the “muselet”—a wire cage that holds the cork in place. The wire used for the cage measures 52 centimeters, the same length as a piece of wire from Josephine Clicquot’s dress corsage, which she used to seal bottles; before this invention, corks were 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, two more widows of winemakers, Madame Bollinger and Madame Roderer, followed suit.
A Drink for the Worthy
Prince Lev Golitsyn considered champagne a wine for the worthy and took great care to ensure the quality of his sparkling wines. He chaired tasting juries in several countries and was well versed in elite beverages. He famously said, “for a worthy person, wine is precious,” and he followed the advice of winemakers from Champagne. By example, he showed that Crimean sparkling wines could compete with the finest French varieties.
The estate Golitsyn bought in 1878 on the shores of the Black Sea became a model winemaking enterprise with advanced agricultural techniques. The factories in the New World and the village of Abrau-Durso near Novorossiysk produced wines that held their own in international competitions. Golitsyn’s sparkling wine from the 1899 harvest (a run of 60,000 bottles) was unanimously recognized as the best at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. For the first time in winemaking history, the Grand Prix went to a producer other than a world-renowned French firm.
“Soviet Champagne”
Sparkling wine became widely accessible during the Soviet era. In the early 1920s, Anton Frolov-Bagreyev, the head of the “New World” factory, developed an accelerated method of production that reduced the fermentation process from three years to just one month. Unlike the classic method, the wine ferments not in bottles but in 500-decaliter tanks (acratophores), and on the 25th to 27th day the reaction is halted with cold and the finished sparkling wine is bottled. This technology was recognized as a national economic asset and awarded the State Prize. Later, Frolov-Bagreyev’s method was improved by his student, Professor G.G. Agabalyants, who invented a continuous-flow system for producing sparkling wine in interconnected tanks.
During the Soviet era, more than 5,000 inventions and rationalization proposals were submitted for improving sparkling-wine technology. Many ideas were applied in new factories that produced affordable, quality wine under the “Soviet Champagne” brand. At international competitions, Soviet sparkling wines won 230 medals, 103 of them gold.
Conditions and Rules
“Soviet Champagne” was exported under names such as Soviet sparkling wine and Sovjetische sekt, since the exclusive right to the “Champagne” name was legally defined by treaties after World War I. Officially, only sparkling wine from the Champagne region may be labeled 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 (“white from white”), while Champagne made from Pinot Noir or Pinot Meunier is called blanc de noirs (“white from black”).
Grapes for Champagne are often harvested underripe to keep sugar levels low and preserve the wine’s lightness. To protect quality, Champagne authorities limit harvest yields—official rules prohibit harvesting more than 13 tons of grapes per hectare. Artificially speeding fermentation or injecting foreign gases is forbidden: authentic Champagne is produced only through natural secondary fermentation, with minimum bottle aging required.
For Aristocrats and Degenerates
Champagne is usually bottled in a standard 750 ml bottle, but a magnum (1.5 L) is considered premium because it contains less oxygen. In special cases, exclusive formats are produced for collectors and events.
For Winston Churchill, the Pol Roger house bottled champagne in a 0.6 L (imperial pint) bottle. The wine was served to the British prime minister in the morning instead of coffee. Churchill reportedly woke at 11:00 AM and immediately “fueled up” with sparkling wine. Despite the old quip that “champagne in the morning is only for aristocrats or degenerates,” many connoisseurs accept a glass of bubbly at breakfast—light varieties in the morning, fuller styles in the afternoon, and a cuvée in the evening.
Although champagne is often considered a “feminine” wine, many notable 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 he could be trusted on that—after all, he was a microbiologist.
