Read Online The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tilar J. Mazzeo
Tags: Historical, Biographies & Memoirs, Cookbooks; Food & Wine, Business, Women, Wine & Spirits, Professionals & Academics, spirits, Beverages & Wine, Culinary, Specific Groups, Champagne, Drinks & Beverages
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evidence that the British were making champagne first, they usually turn to the lecture presented in 1662 to the Royal Society of London by a scientist named Christopher Merrett. In his treatise, he explained how adding sugar to wines would help produce the desired fizz. But Merrett’s lecture on winemaking, Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines (1662), which borrowed some of its ideas from the ancient English tradition of cider making, was just one of several sources from which hobbyists and gentlemen could learn the essentials of making champagne. Many of the same principles for making sparkling liqueurs in the bottle are described, for example, in contemporary texts such as John Evelyn’s Pomona; or, An Appendix Concerning Fruit-Trees in Relation to Cider , published by order of the Royal Society in 1664. Most wine experts now believe that the British were converting their barrels of imported wine from the region around Reims—wine with a natural tendency to fizz easily—into sparkling champagne by the 1670s, a full decade before the wine was first produced in France.
In France today, the idea that the British discovered champagne is naturally controversial. Among those who support the French claims, there are some who contend that whatever the British role in developing a gourmet and commercial market for sparkling champagne, the monastic tradition of winemaking in France was already centuries old by the late seventeenth century. Obviously, monks like Dom Pérignon knew that the local wines could sometimes sparkle, even if they considered it a nuisance. And scientific and historical records show that the climatic changes of the little ice age—those decades of unusually cold weather that stalled the fermentation process in the winter and allowed for the natural and unwelcome springtime emergence of bubbles—had been disrupting agriculture in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century. Surely French winemakers had not managed to escape the cold-weather effects on their wines for over a century.
Even if Dom Pérignon and his predecessors did not discover champagne, by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine. Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle, and in order to support his taste for bubbly, the king gave the city of Reims an exclusive license to sell their wines in bottles. It was the beginning of a regional monopoly that would survive, in one form or another, for centuries. In the 1720s, Barbe-Nicole’s Ruinart ancestors founded the first champagne house, but soon there were a dozen more, and dealers selling “foamy” wines from the Champagne enjoyed a period of rocketing sales until as late as the 1740s. After all, if Louis XIV began the fashion for sparkling wine, his successor Louis XV turned it into a royal frenzy. He would do anything to please his mistress, the powerful Madame de Pompadour—a woman whose family conveniently owned lucrative property in the Champagne. For more than thirty years, local winemakers could command astonishing prices by supplying the king of France and his friends with bubbly.
Although these were heady times, in reality the royal court was still a tiny and very elite market. The entire Champagne region sold fewer than twenty thousand bottles of sparkling wine a year in the 1730s, and often more than 50 percent of it was sold directly to the palace at Versailles. The customer base was limited to the trendsetters among Europe’s nobility, who were enjoying a passing fad. From the beginning, champagne was always the drink of celebration for the lucky few. But even at the height of its first popularity, during those twenty years of royal fame, it never became a broader cultural phenomenon. The average person on the street never dreamed of tasting it. Only the richest of
In France today, the idea that the British discovered champagne is naturally controversial. Among those who support the French claims, there are some who contend that whatever the British role in developing a gourmet and commercial market for sparkling champagne, the monastic tradition of winemaking in France was already centuries old by the late seventeenth century. Obviously, monks like Dom Pérignon knew that the local wines could sometimes sparkle, even if they considered it a nuisance. And scientific and historical records show that the climatic changes of the little ice age—those decades of unusually cold weather that stalled the fermentation process in the winter and allowed for the natural and unwelcome springtime emergence of bubbles—had been disrupting agriculture in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century. Surely French winemakers had not managed to escape the cold-weather effects on their wines for over a century.
Even if Dom Pérignon and his predecessors did not discover champagne, by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine. Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle, and in order to support his taste for bubbly, the king gave the city of Reims an exclusive license to sell their wines in bottles. It was the beginning of a regional monopoly that would survive, in one form or another, for centuries. In the 1720s, Barbe-Nicole’s Ruinart ancestors founded the first champagne house, but soon there were a dozen more, and dealers selling “foamy” wines from the Champagne enjoyed a period of rocketing sales until as late as the 1740s. After all, if Louis XIV began the fashion for sparkling wine, his successor Louis XV turned it into a royal frenzy. He would do anything to please his mistress, the powerful Madame de Pompadour—a woman whose family conveniently owned lucrative property in the Champagne. For more than thirty years, local winemakers could command astonishing prices by supplying the king of France and his friends with bubbly.
Although these were heady times, in reality the royal court was still a tiny and very elite market. The entire Champagne region sold fewer than twenty thousand bottles of sparkling wine a year in the 1730s, and often more than 50 percent of it was sold directly to the palace at Versailles. The customer base was limited to the trendsetters among Europe’s nobility, who were enjoying a passing fad. From the beginning, champagne was always the drink of celebration for the lucky few. But even at the height of its first popularity, during those twenty years of royal fame, it never became a broader cultural phenomenon. The average person on the street never dreamed of tasting it. Only the richest of
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