New year, same drink

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

New Year’s Eve parties and Champagne toasts go hand-in-hand in the modern imagination, but though the beloved sparkling wine is now an institution, it had a long, forgotten history of successes and failures stretching back to the 1500s.

Vineyards in the Champagne region of France began with the Romans, who were the first to establish fields that far north. These vineyards produced light red wine, which failed to compete with the hotter regions farther south, leaving vintners looking for an alternative product. Champagne’s winemakers weren’t the first to create sparkling wine, however. That honor goes to the Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire near Carcassonne, France, who made the first documented batch in 1531 by bottling a wine before it had finished fermenting. Sparkling wine was subsequently discovered by accident in Champagne, where it was initially considered a fault in the wine — not because it didn’t taste good, but because vintners couldn’t keep their bottles from exploding. The relative instability of glass and corks at the time meant bottles would often explode in storage due to the pressure from the carbonation, leading producers to dub the drink le vin du diable or “the devil’s wine.” Exploding bottles would often trigger one another, setting off a chain reaction that sent most of the wine down the drain and endangered cellar workers, who took to wearing iron masks to protect themselves. Eventually, producers stopped trying to remove the carbonation and began investing in sturdier hardware.

The French government instituted formal protections on the name “Champagne” in 1891, but it only later began establishing the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée label in around 1908 — which, among other things, determines what sellers can and cannot label as Champagne. At that time, they began mapping the geographical boundaries that would separate Champagne from regular sparkling wine by mere miles. These rules were controversial and came about during a difficult time for winemakers, whose vines were rapidly dying due to infestations of phylloxera louse, accidentally imported from the U.S.

Tensions reached a fever pitch during the Champagne Riots of 1910 and 1911. Regional growers, angry that some Champagne houses were using grapes grown elsewhere, began intercepting trucks and pushing them into the Marne River. They then descended on the warehouses — and random homes — looting and throwing wine by the barrel downstream. The angry farmers eventually burned down the village of Aÿ, at which point the French government sent more than 40,000 troops to stanch the rebels.

Europe reaffirmed protections on the use of the name “Champagne” in the Treaty of Versailles — you know, the one that ended World War I.

To this day, the Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne mercilessly regulates what qualifies as Champagne. It must be made from approved varieties — generally a blend of pinot noir, pinot meunier or chardonnay grapes, all grown in the Champagne region — and be bottled within 100 miles of the area. They also place restrictions on everything from proper vine pruning to the amount of time the wine should sit with its lees, or the dregs of dead yeast that collect at the bottom during fermentation.

To achieve the designation of Champagne, winemakers must ferment the wine in barrels, then transfer it to bottles, top each up with sugar and yeast, and ferment it a second time. It then ages for 15 months, at which time vintners position the bottles so the lees settle in the neck — a process called “riddling” — for easy extraction. They then freeze the neck and extract the unwanted sediment, adding more sugar or wine to the bottles to make up the difference.

Once ready to serve, Champagne is poured into either a flute or a coupe glass, which, though once synonymous with Champagne, largely fell out of style in the 1960s. Champagne flutes are better suited to the drink, as they feature a narrow bowl that helps maintain carbonation. Imperceptible etchings at the glass’s bottom create nucleation sites, where clusters of molecules form spontaneously, resulting in the famous lines of bubbles that extend from bottom to rim. Still, whether served in a flute or a shoe, one thing’s for certain: Champagne is the drink of the new year, and the year before that, and the year before that.