Champagne

• 1. Introduction

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  Champagne carries a violent secret behind its glamorous reputation. For much of the early eighteenth century, cellar workers in the region wore heavy iron masks on the job. Bottles of the aging wine could explode without warning, sometimes destroying a large share of a cellar's stock in a single night.

  Only wine bottled in one narrow strip of northeastern France is legally allowed to bear the Champagne name. That protection, enforced under French and European law, dates back more than a century. The monk most often credited with inventing the wine's fizz did not actually invent it. For the better part of two centuries, the champagne people actually drank was far sweeter than the champagne sold today.

  What turned an unstable, sometimes feared wine into the centerpiece of coronations, royal marketing campaigns, and Formula 1 victory laps? And why, generations later, is a small Swiss village still fighting for the right to put its own name on its own bottles?

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• 2. From Bacchus To Bursting Bottles

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  Vineyards first appeared in this corner of northeast France under the Romans, with cultivation tentatively underway by around the 5th century. An edict from Emperor Domitian ordering colonial vines uprooted slowed the region's early progress. When Emperor Probus, son of a gardener, reversed that order, a temple to Bacchus went up. The region then began producing a light, fruity red wine, in contrast to the heavier Italian brews of the time, which were often fortified with resin and herbs.

  The Catholic church later owned vineyards in the region, and monks made wine for use in the sacrament of the Eucharist. French kings were traditionally anointed at Reims, and champagne featured in their coronation festivities. The Champenois envied the acclaim their Burgundian neighbors to the south enjoyed, and tried to match it. Champagne's northern climate made that hard: grapes there struggled to fully ripen, often producing wine with sharp acidity and low sugar. The resulting reds were lighter and thinner than the Burgundy wines the Champenois hoped to rival.

  Contrary to popular legend, Dom Perignon did not invent sparkling wine, though he did improve the quality of both still and sparkling Champagne. The oldest recorded sparkling wine is Blanquette de Limoux, created by Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire near Carcassonne in 1531. They made it by bottling the wine before its first fermentation had finished. Over a century later, English scientist and physician Christopher Merret documented adding sugar to a finished wine to trigger a second fermentation. That happened six years before Dom Perignon ever set foot in the Abbey of Hautvillers. Merret presented his findings to the Royal Society in 1662, describing what is now called methode traditionnelle. English glass-makers of the era could produce bottles strong enough to survive that pressure; French glass-makers at the time could not. By 1663, the poet Samuel Butler was already referring to "brisk champagne" in his writing.

  Bottles that shattered on their own gave France's first sparkling champagne a grim nickname: "the devil's wine," le vin du diable, since bubbles back then were considered a flaw rather than a feature. In 1844, Adolphe Jaquesson invented the muselet, the wire cage that keeps a champagne cork from launching on its own. Early versions were awkward to fit and difficult to remove. For a long stretch, champagne was still made using the cruder methode rurale, where wine was bottled before its first fermentation ended. The region did not switch to methode champenoise until the 19th century, roughly 200 years after Merret's paper. That century saw explosive growth: production rose from 300,000 bottles a year in 1800 to 20 million by 1850. In 2007, champagne sales hit a record high of 338.7 million bottles.

  In the 19th century, champagne was noticeably sweeter than today's versions. That began to change when Perrier-Jouet chose not to sweeten his 1846 vintage before shipping it to London. Pommery went further, creating the designation Brut Champagne for the British market in 1876 using the 1874 vintage. That same drive for authenticity would soon collide with lawmakers, who set out to decide exactly which bottles in the world were allowed to be called Champagne at all.

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• 3. Guarding The Name

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  Only wine bottled within 100 miles of the Champagne region can legally be labeled Champagne. That rule has stood since an 1891 treaty. The treaty required genuine champagne to come from the region, made from Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir, or Chardonnay grapes grown there. Enforcement runs through an industry body called the CIVC, the Comite Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne. It sets rules on where grapes can be grown and which varieties are allowed. It also governs vine pruning, vineyard yield, how hard grapes can be pressed, and how long wine must rest on its lees before bottling. The CIVC can even limit how much champagne reaches the market, to help keep prices steady. Only wine meeting every requirement can be labeled Champagne. The rules themselves still need final approval from the Institut national de l'origine et de la qualite, known today as INAO. It was formerly called the Institut National des Appellations d'Origine.

  In 2007, INAO, the government body that controls French wine appellations, was preparing the largest revision of Champagne's legal boundaries since 1927. Soaring demand and a limited grape supply were pushing prices up, and Champagne houses worried a consumer backlash could damage the industry for years. Political pressure from villages hoping to be added to the expanded zone added to the push. Any changes faced heavy scientific review. They were not expected to affect grape-growing until 2020, with a final decision due only in 2023 or 2024.

  That same 1891 treaty extended protection through what's called the Madrid system, reserving the Champagne name across the European Union and beyond. The protection was reaffirmed in the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. More than 70 countries have since adopted similar legal protections. Australia, Chile, Brazil, Canada, and China have all recently passed laws or signed agreements limiting the word "Champagne" to wine actually made in the region. The United States bans the term on any new American wine brand. Brands approved before 2006 may keep using it, but only if they also list the wine's true origin, such as "California." Most American sparkling wine skips the term Champagne entirely, and some states, including Oregon, ban producers from using it at all. Wine regions in Napa, Sonoma Valley, Paso Robles, Oregon, and Walla Walla in Washington came to see the leftover use of semi-generic labels as damaging to their own reputations.

  Even the phrases methode champenoise and "Champagne method" were outlawed by an EU court ruling in 1994, for wines made outside the region. Producers elsewhere now use their own terms: Spain calls its version Cava, Italy calls it spumante, and South Africa uses cap classique. An Italian sparkling wine made from Muscat grapes carries the label Asti; one made from Glera grapes is called Prosecco. Germany's term is Sekt, and France's own Burgundy and Alsace regions produce something called Cremant instead. In 2008, Belgian authorities destroyed more than 3,000 bottles of California sparkling wine that had been labeled "Champagne." Even so, some sellers still use Champagne as a generic term for any white sparkling wine, including a brand called "Korbels California Champagne."

  A village actually named Champagne, in Switzerland, has long made its own still wine under that name, with viticulture there dating back to 1657. In 1999, the Swiss government agreed with the EU that the village would phase out the name by 2004. Once the change took effect, sales dropped from 110,000 bottles a year to just 32,000. In April 2008, villagers voted in a Swiss open-air referendum to resist the restriction.

  In the Soviet Union, every sparkling wine was simply called shampanskoye, Russian for "that which is of Champagne." The name still appears today on brands from former Soviet republics, including Sovetskoye Shampanskoye and Rossiyskoe Shampanskoe. In 2021, Russia banned the use of shampanskoye on imported sparkling wine, even wine from the Champagne region itself, reserving the word for domestic producers only. None of these legal fights, though, explain how the bubbles themselves actually get into the bottle in the first place.

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• 4. Making The Bubbles

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  A few grams of live yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, mixed with rock sugar, is what actually turns still wine into champagne inside a sealed bottle, in a process now called methode traditionnelle. Each producer keeps its exact recipe secret. Appellation rules require a minimum of fifteen months for the wine to fully develop its flavor. In an exceptional harvest year, producers can declare what's called a millesime. That means making champagne from a single vintage instead of blending several years together, and the wine must then mature for at least three years. During this aging period, the bottle is sealed with a crown cap, the same kind used on beer bottles.

  Once aging finishes, workers manipulate each bottle, by hand or machine, in a process called remuage, or riddling in English, so the spent yeast settles into the neck. The bottles are then chilled until the neck freezes solid, and the cap is removed in a step called disgorgement. Pressure inside the bottle, around 6 bar, forces out the frozen plug of ice and lees on its own. Producers then top off the bottle with wine from earlier vintages and additional sugar, a mixture called le dosage, which also adjusts the finished wine's sweetness. The bottle is quickly re-corked afterward to trap the dissolved carbon dioxide.

  The first burst of fizz happens the moment champagne hits a dry glass. Those early bubbles form on tiny imperfections in the glass, a process called nucleation, or occasionally on leftover cellulose fibers from wiping and drying, as high-speed video cameras have shown. That initial rush fades quickly, because natural glass imperfections are usually too small to keep triggering bubbles once surface tension smooths them over. The real source of ongoing effervescence turns out to be deliberate: nucleation points etched into the glass, either by the manufacturer or later by the customer, using acid, a laser, or even a basic glass-etching tool. Not every champagne glass is etched this way. Researchers first developed this etching method in England in 1662, according to records kept by the Royal Society.

  At the Abbey of Hautvillers, Dom Perignon was actually instructed by his superiors to get rid of the bubbles, since pressure inside the bottles kept causing them to burst in the cellar. As sparkling wine production grew through the early 18th century, a single exploding bottle could set off a chain reaction among its neighbors. Cellars routinely lost 20 to 90 percent of their stock this way. The mysterious, poorly understood process of fermentation and carbonic gas left critics deeply suspicious of the wine.

  More than one hundred Champagne houses now share the region with 19,000 smaller vignerons, growers who tend their own vines. Together, these producers manage about 32,000 hectares of vineyard. A set of abbreviations printed on each bottle identifies what kind of producer made it. NM, negociant manipulant, marks companies, including most of the larger brands, that buy grapes from others and make the wine themselves. CM, cooperative de manipulation, marks cooperatives that pool grapes from their member growers. RM, recoltant manipulant, also called Grower Champagne, marks a grower who makes wine from their own fruit, buying no more than 5 percent of their grapes elsewhere. SR, societe de recoltants, marks an association of growers who share a Champagne without forming a cooperative. RC, recoltant cooperateur, marks a cooperative member selling the co-op's wine under their own name. MA, marque auxiliaire or marque d'acheteur, marks a brand name owned by someone else entirely, such as a supermarket. ND, negociant distributeur, marks a merchant simply selling wine under his own name. None of these designations, though, say anything about how champagne got tangled up with kings, revolutions, and shoes flung across racetracks.

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• 5. Selling A Fantasy

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  In the 19th century, champagne houses timed their marketing to major political moments, including the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1893 and the centennial of the Tennis Court Oath during the French Revolution's 100th anniversary. Those campaigns tied champagne directly to French nationalist sentiment. Negociants, the merchants who dominated the trade, also linked champagne to leisure activities and sporting events, and drew a sharp line between sparkling wine's special-occasion appeal and ordinary wine's everyday use. They built brand image around royalty and nobility, while also selling cheaper off-brand versions under importers' names. That cheaper strategy largely failed, because, as one historical account put it, "there was an assumption that cheap sparkling wine was not authentic." Since the start of the Belle Epoque, champagne had grown from a niche regional product into a commodity sold worldwide.

  Laurent-Perrier's advertisements in late 1890 claimed royal favor from across Europe. The list included Leopold II of Belgium, George I of Greece, and Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. It also named Margaret Cambridge, Marchioness of Cambridge, and John Lambton, 3rd Earl of Durham, among other nobles and military officers. Despite leaning on royal prestige, champagne houses also pitched the wine as a luxury anyone could enjoy, fit for any occasion at all. That dual pitch worked: by the turn of the 20th century, most champagne drinkers were solidly middle class.

  Champagne producers in the 19th century also worked hard to market their wine specifically to women. Sweeter styles were pitched as feminine, while dry champagne was aimed at men and at foreign buyers. That split cut against the traditionally "male aura" surrounding French wine, particularly Burgundy and Bordeaux. Laurent-Perrier again led the charge, touting the favor of the Countess of Dudley, wife of the 9th Earl of Stamford, the wife of Baron Tollemache, and the opera singer Adelina Patti. Champagne labels leaned into romantic love, marriage, and occasions women were expected to care about, such as a child's baptism.

  Bottles marking the 1789 French Revolution's centennial sometimes carried flattering images of Marie Antoinette, appealing to conservatives who saw the former queen as a martyr. Other labels on the same anniversary showed stirring revolutionary scenes, aimed at more liberal buyers. As World War I approached, houses printed soldiers and national flags on their bottles, customizing each design for the country it was exported to. During the Dreyfus affair, one champagne house went further still, releasing a bottle called champagne antijuif with antisemitic advertising, cashing in on a wave of antisemitism sweeping parts of France.

  British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a champagne reception to mark London's successful bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. Shipbuilders still smash a bottle over a new ship's hull at launch, and a bottle that fails to break is considered bad luck. Moet et Chandon helped root champagne firmly in motorsport by supplying it to Formula 1 Grand Prix winners. At the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, winner Dan Gurney started the now-familiar tradition of spraying the crowd and his fellow drivers. Bahrain, a Muslim-majority nation, banned champagne celebrations on its F1 podium in 2004, substituting a nonalcoholic pomegranate and rose water drink instead. In 2015, Australian athletes, most notably then Red Bull Racing driver Daniel Ricciardo, began celebrating wins by drinking champagne straight from their shoe, a stunt known as "doing a shoey." That shoey stunt, though, says nothing about the difference between a vintage bottle and the blended, non-vintage champagne most people actually drink.

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• 6. Vintage And Prestige

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  Most champagne sold today is "non-vintage," a blend of grapes from several different years. Producers typically build a non-vintage wine around a single year's harvest, then blend in 10 to 15 percent, sometimes as much as 40 percent, of wine from older vintages. When conditions in a particular year are especially good, a producer may instead make a vintage wine, composed entirely of grapes from that one year. Champagne regulations cap how much of a given vintage's harvest a house can use for vintage wine, at up to 80 percent. That rule guarantees at least 20 percent of each harvest stays available for blending into non-vintage bottles, keeping their style consistent from year to year. In a weaker vintage, some producers make a single-year wine anyway but still label it non-vintage, since the quality doesn't justify holding it back for future blending.

  Louis Roederer's Cristal, Laurent-Perrier's Grand Siecle, and Moet et Chandon's Dom Perignon all count as examples of a cuvee de prestige, a producer's proprietary top-of-the-line blend. Other well-known examples include Duval-Leroy's Cuvee Femme, Armand de Brignac Gold Brut, and Pol Roger's Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill. The first prestige cuvee widely available to the public was arguably Dom Perignon, launched in 1936 using the 1921 vintage. Before that, champagne houses made cuvees of varying quality, but a single wine crafted to the highest possible standard, and priced accordingly, was a genuinely new idea. Louis Roederer, in fact, had been producing Cristal since 1876, but strictly for the private use of the Russian tsar. Cristal only became available to the wider public with the 1945 vintage. Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne followed, with its first vintage in 1952. Laurent-Perrier released Grand Siecle "La Cuvee" in 1960, blending the 1952, 1953, and 1955 vintages together. Perrier-Jouet's own prestige cuvee, La Belle Epoque, joined them around the same period. Over the last three decades of the 20th century, most Champagne houses followed suit, often naming their prestige cuvees after notable figures and packaging them in unusual bottle shapes, echoing Dom Perignon's 18th-century-style revival design. None of these prestige blends, though, explain how a wine made from black grapes ends up perfectly white, or how a handful of houses turn it pink instead.

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• 7. Rose, Blends And Sweetness

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  Blanc de noirs literally means "white from blacks," describing a white wine made entirely from black-skinned grapes. Grape flesh is actually white regardless of skin color, so juice pressed with minimal skin contact yields a nearly white wine, sometimes tinted white-yellow, white-grey, or silvery from trace skin pigments. Bollinger's prestige cuvee, Vieilles Vignes Francaises, led other Champagne houses to release their own blanc de noirs cuvees, made from pinot noir, pinot meunier, or a blend of the two, the only black grapes permitted under the Champagne appellation.

  Rose Champagne stands out for its blush color, fruity aroma, and earthy flavor. It has been made since the late 18th century, and two storied houses, Rinault and Veuve Clicquot, have each claimed credit for shipping and selling the very first bottles. Winemakers produce it one of two ways. The saignee method leaves the clear juice of dark grapes macerating briefly with their skins, lightly tinting and flavoring the wine. The more common method, called d'assemblage, blends a small amount of still red wine into an otherwise ordinary sparkling cuvee, producing a more consistent, reproducible pink color.

  By the early 20th century, rose was known colloquially as "Pink Champagne," carrying a reputation for frivolity, even dissipation, after first being seen as a sign of extravagance. The 1939 Hollywood film Love Affair reportedly agreed to feature its two leads bonding over the then-unpopular drink, and sales rose after the film's release. The Eagles later name-checked it as the drink of choice inside their song "Hotel California." Rose Champagne, particularly the brut style, began regaining popularity in many countries by the late 20th century, and its complex flavor now makes it a common choice for food-and-wine pairings in fine dining.

  Just after disgorgement, producers add what's called liqueur de dosage, or liqueur d'expedition, a blend of cane sugar and wine that can contain up to 750 grams of sugar per liter. That addition adjusts the finished wine's sugar level and, with it, its sweetness. Today, winemakers use dosage less for sweetness itself and more to fine-tune how acidic the wine tastes. Caroline Latrive, cellar master at Ayala, a house that helped pioneer drier champagnes in the late 19th century, describes dosage as the final touch, one that has to stay subtle to strike the right balance. Dosage also protects the wine from oxidation, since the added sugar acts as a preservative. Benoit Gouez, cellar master at Moet et Chandon, says sugar helps champagne recover from the shock of disgorgement and supports its ability to age well.

  Wines labeled Brut Zero, more common among smaller producers, skip added sugar entirely and taste very dry, with less than 3 grams of residual sugar per liter. A formal scale also spells out bottled sweetness in more detail. Extra Brut has under 6 grams of sugar per liter. Brut has under 12. Extra Dry falls between 12 and 17. Sec falls between 17 and 32. Demi-sec falls between 32 and 50. Doux sits at 50 grams or more. Brut is the most common style sold today. Throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th, champagne was generally far sweeter, and outside Britain it was usually served as a dessert wine after the meal, rather than alongside it. At the time, sweetness levels were named for their destination country. Gout anglais, or "English taste," ran between 22 and 66 grams; today the same term instead refers to aged vintage Champagne. Gout americain, or "American taste," ran between 110 and 165 grams. Gout francais, or "French taste," ran between 165 and 200 grams. Gout russe, or "Russian taste," ran between 200 and 300 grams. Of these historic styles, only the driest, the English one, comes close to today's preferences. None of these sweetness levels, though, say anything about the bottle itself, the vessel built to survive years of pressure before anyone even pulls the cork.

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• 8. Bottles, Corks And Rituals

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  Champagne is mostly fermented in two bottle sizes: standard 750-milliliter bottles and 1.5-liter magnums. Magnums are generally considered higher quality, since they hold less oxygen relative to their volume and their surface-area ratio favors better-sized bubbles, though no hard evidence actually confirms this. Larger formats, mostly named after Biblical figures, are typically filled from wine already fermented in standard bottles or magnums. Gosset is an exception: it still ferments its Grande Reserve directly in Jeroboam-sized bottles. Sizes larger than the 3-liter Jeroboam are rare. The 27-liter Primat and 30-liter Melchizedek bottles are offered exclusively by the House Drappier. The same size names apply to bottles of regular wine and port, though Jeroboam, Rehoboam, and Methuselah actually refer to different volumes depending on the wine.

  The best-known unique-size bottle is the imperial pint, a 56.8-centiliter bottle produced between 1874 and 1973 for the English market by Pol Roger, closely associated with Sir Winston Churchill. In 2009, a bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet Champagne was opened at a ceremony attended by twelve of the world's top wine tasters. Guinness World Records officially recognized it as the oldest bottle of Champagne in existence. Tasters found the contents still drinkable, with notes of truffle and caramel; only two other bottles from that 1825 vintage are known to survive.

  In July 2010, Finnish diver Christian Ekstrom found 168 bottles of champagne aboard a shipwreck near the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea. Early analysis identified bottles from two houses, Veuve Clicquot of Reims and the long-defunct house Juglar, absorbed into Jacquesson in 1829. The wreck itself dates to sometime between 1800 and 1830, meaning these bottles may even predate the 1825 Perrier-Jouet bottle described above. While replacing the old corks, experts found a third house represented too: Heidsieck. In total, the wreck held 95 bottles of Juglar, 46 of Veuve Clicquot, and 4 of Heidsieck, plus 23 more bottles whose maker is still unidentified. Champagne experts Richard Juhlin and Essi Avellan, both Masters of Wine, described the surviving contents as being in very good condition. Most of the bottles were expected to be auctioned, each estimated at 40,000 to 70,000 pounds.

  Researchers led by Philippe Jeandet, a professor of food biochemistry, published their chemical analysis of that shipwrecked champagne in April 2015, nearly five years after its discovery. Although its overall composition closely resembled today's champagne, the historic wine contained noticeably more sugar and less alcohol than modern versions. Jeandet explained that adding sugar to wine at the table was common practice among 19th-century drinkers, particularly Russians. The old wine also contained higher levels of minerals such as iron, copper, and table salt than modern champagne does.

  Champagne corks are built from three separate pieces and are known as agglomerated corks. Their signature mushroom shape comes from two stacked discs of pure cork, in contact with the wine, cemented to an upper section made of ground cork bound with glue. Before it's inserted, a champagne cork is nearly 50 percent wider than the bottle's opening; it starts as a plain cylinder and gets compressed before going in. Over time, its compressed shape becomes more permanent, and the mushroom form grows more pronounced, so a cork's shape can hint at how long a bottle has aged since disgorgement.

  Holding a flute or tulip glass properly means gripping the long stem, to avoid smudging the glass or warming its contents with body heat. Holding either glass by the rim is possible but awkward, since it blocks the spot where a taster would actually sip, and it can smudge the glass too. Both styles can also be held safely by their flat, disk-shaped base. A coupe glass, with its short stem and wide, shallow bowl, leaves only one real option: holding it by the bowl itself, since its top-heavy shape rules out the base or stem, and its wide rim makes gripping there impractical.

  Opening a bottle safely means holding the cork still and rotating the bottle itself at an angle, rather than pulling the cork straight out, since the escaping gas moves at supersonic speed. Tilting the bottle also lets air in, which helps prevent the wine from geysering out. A saber can open a bottle with real ceremony, a technique called sabrage, a term also used loosely for simply knocking off the bottle's neck. When pouring, tilting the glass and letting the wine slide gently down its side preserves more bubbles than pouring straight down into a foamy head, according to a University of Reims study titled "On the Losses of Dissolved CO2 during Champagne serving." Colder bottles also lose less gas during pouring, and the industry has begun designing glasses specifically shaped to cut down on that loss.

  Poulet au champagne, a regional take on coq au vin, is a specialty of the Marne area, alongside dishes like huitres au champagne and Champagne zabaione. Prices stay high for a few clear reasons: the region's limited land, its worldwide prestige, and the sheer cost of the production process. The industry trade group Comite Champagne expected the region to sell 314 million bottles in 2023, a 3.7 percent drop from the year before, as nightclub sales held steady while at-home drinking kept slipping. More broadly, Champagne shipments run to roughly 325.5 million bottles a year, worth about 6.8 billion euros combined. Around 42.5 percent of that volume stays inside France, while the other 57.5 percent gets exported, and exports actually claim a larger 66 percent share of the total value, against France's 34 percent, since bottles sold abroad tend to command a higher price than the ones sold at home. With shipments down 3.7 percent and home consumption still slipping, the 2023 numbers suggest even a wine this old is not immune to changing habits at the dinner table.

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