Read Online The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo - Free Book Online

shows how it wasn’t until the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris that the region’s champagne producers saw the marketing potential and started printing brochures about Dom Pérignon. From that point on, the role of the celebrated monk became a truism.
    The truth is that no one in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century associated Dom Pérignon with the discovery of sparkling wine. His friend Dom François, writing the biography of the famous monk, never mentions bubbles, and even the abbey’s lawyers in the nineteenth century—looking for things to claim rights to—didn’t think they could convince anyone that Dom Pérignon had anything to do with making wine sparkle. As the lawyers knew, the monks at Hautvillers didn’t even start bottling their wines until the 1750s.
    For those who enjoy the romance of the Dom Pérignon legend, there is even worse news. Wine historians now claim that champagne did not even originate in France. Champagne was first “invented” in Great Britain, where there was already a small commercial market for sparkling champagne by the 1660s. British enthusiasts were investigating ways to control the production of its so-called mousse —the fizz—several decades before the wine was sold at all in France. It seems that wealthy British consumers, anxious to prevent their imported barrels of wine from turning to expensive vinegar, first bottled wines from the Champagne region and, in doing so, discovered sparkling wine.
    What would happen is this: Seventeenth-century British connoisseurs would order their fine table wines from vintners in the Champagne region, and, as required under French law in those days, it would be sold in wooden barrels. The wines arrived without a hint of bubbles. Winemakers in the Champagne, in fact, were not legally allowed to sell their wines in glass bottles until the passage of a special royal decree given to the city of Reims in the 1720s. Unfortunately, without a sealed bottle, there is no sparkling champagne. It just takes leaving a bottle open in the fridge overnight to learn how fast bubbly goes flat. Likewise, it did not take these British consumers long to discover that once a sealed cask of wine was tapped, it went off quickly, a result of the same oxidization process that spoils opened bottles of wine after a day or two in our own kitchens.
    So these wily merchants and consumers began considering ways to preserve their wines. It was no mystery that brandy could act as a preservative. They also began bottling. Great Britain was producing far stronger and less expensive glass than could be found on the other side of the English Channel, giving British wine lovers the advantage. After bottling their imported wines and maybe dosing them with brandy, people inevitably found that some of this wine—wine where a bit of yeast happened to be present—started to fizz. In their efforts to preserve imported still wines from the Champagne, they had haphazardly started the process of secondary fermentation required to make sparkling champagne.
    This, we now believe, was how champagne was discovered. This oenological curiosity soon developed a cult following, and one of history’s great gourmets, a Frenchman by the name of Charles de Saint-Évremond, helped to create its new celebrity. He had made an enemy of the king and was forced to flee for his life into exile in Great Britain. The consummate Frenchman, he brought with him a love of fine wines and good food. So when a small group of people learned about this new sparkling wine, he started spreading the news with an infectious enthusiasm. Soon sparkling wine became the status symbol of in-the-know London high society. While Dom Pérignon was laboring in the cellars of his chilly abbey at Hautvillers to get rid of the bubbles in his wines, British scientists were working hard to understand how to produce them.
    As a result, the process of making sparkling wine didn’t remain haphazard for long. When people want