All of the great revolutions in human affairs we have encountered thus far—the Renaissance, the Reformation, the decline of feudalism, and the discovery of the New World—culminated in the most epochal transformation of this millennium: the scientific revolution. The belief that experimentation and reason could explain the world around us, rather than ancient texts or God’s mysterious ways, irrevocably ushered in the modern era.
French scientists—or as they were known then, “natural philosophers”—were among the most pivotal figures of this age. The philosophical arguments of René Descartes, captured in the famous phrase “I think, therefore I am,” helped establish the very modern notion that humans could use their own reason in pursuit of truth, rather than depending on divine revelation. Descartes was also one of the leading mathematicians of the early seventeenth century, developing the initial principles of analytic geometry. Pierre de Fermat, another legendary mathematician, invented differential calculus and, with yet another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, formulated the theory of probability.
Naturally, this era of rapid innovation and experimentation featured advances in the gastronomic world as well. Better understanding of chemical and anatomical principles gradually displaced the emphasis on balancing “humors” within one’s diet, and preferences of taste began to be prioritized over medical advice.1 But if there is one product that captures the shift from serendipity to science in French gastronomy, it is champagne—one of the most beloved wines of France, and indeed the world, but only because of decades of obsessive tinkering and experimentation.
As with many French wines, we would not recognize the earliest versions of champagne, produced in the region of the same name in northeast France. Lying on the extreme edge of possible winemaking terrain, its vineyards historically produced a thin, pale pink wine. Local vintners strove to compete with the renowned wines of nearby Burgundy and benefited from the royal tradition of staging coronations—with all the excessive drinking they entailed—in Reims, the central city of the Champagne region. For hundreds of years, wine from Champagne was highly valued in both France and England—but as still wine, not the sparkling beverage we know today.
In fact, throughout the medieval and early modern eras, bubbles were seen as a major flaw in Champagne’s wines. They were a quirk of the region’s northerly climate: after the fall harvest, the fermentation of the wine during the winter months could be prematurely halted by the excessive chill. Then, as temperatures rose again in the spring, the fermentation would restart and produce an excess amount of carbon dioxide. For several weeks, the wine would churn and froth in its barrels, until the gas completely leaked out and the wine settled into a still form, ready to be distributed.
But beginning in the sixteenth century, winemakers and merchants throughout Europe began storing and selling wine in bottles instead of barrels. This proved problematic for champagne because if it was bottled before the second fermentation began, the carbon dioxide had no way to escape, and the bottle would often randomly explode into bits.2 The wine acquired the nickname vin du diable, “the devil’s wine,” in keeping with the traditional inclination to attribute misfortune to otherworldly agents. Vintners at the time made use of fermentation without actually understanding the chemical processes at work, and so they did not know how to prevent these calamities.
Those bottles that survived the winter intact yielded a wine with a bubbly, sparkling quality that drove the vintners of Champagne to despair. But the English upper classes took a liking to fizzy champagne and were the first to recast it as a glamorous indulgence. It was actually an English scientist, Christopher Merret, who first presented a paper to the eminent Royal Society in London, in 1662, on the practice of adding sugar to wine during fermentation in order to intentionally produce sparkling wine. French products were very fashionable in London in the 1660s, following the Restoration of King Charles II and his nobles, who had spent a lengthy exile in France. The wines of Champagne and Bordeaux profited a great deal from his return to the throne.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the French legends surrounding champagne tend to omit these English contributions and focus instead on the colorful character of Dom Pierre Pérignon. He was a Benedictine monk at the abbey of Hautvillers, in the Champagne region, who coincidentally was born and died in the exact same years as Louis XIV (1638–1715). He was in charge of the abbey’s vineyards, and according to legend he had an amazing superpower: he could taste a grape and tell you exactly which vineyard it had come from. Some say this was thanks to his extremely limited diet, or perhaps it was because he was blind.
Dom Pérignon originally sought to prevent the secondary fermentation thought to be so ruinous to champagne, but by the 1670s, as the sparkling variety became more popular in both England and France, he embarked on a series of innovations intended to make the winemaking process more predictable. He is credited as the originator of la méthode champenoise, the “traditional method” of champagne making, which vintners continue to use today. He developed a new white wine blend for the initial fermentation, produced from red grapes via a new pressing method. According to the French, it was Dom Pérignon who discovered the trick of using sugar to intentionally induce secondary fermentation, after observing the effects of using sweet beeswax to seal wine bottles. Legend says that he got the idea of using cork to plug the bottles, which helped them resist the intense pressure building up inside them, from a pair of traveling Spanish monks (but like many elements of his legend, this may be purely apocryphal). He built wine cellars deep within the chalky soil of his abbey to limit temperature variations. By the time of Dom Pérignon’s death, champagne making was still a volatile and not fully understood process, but it had progressed considerably down the road to modernity. In the nineteenth century, his vineyards at the abbey of Hautvillers were acquired by Moët & Chandon, who later gave his name to one of the world’s finest champagnes.
Champagne was introduced to Versailles in the late seventeenth century, but it became more widely popular in France during the Régence, or Regency, after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Louis had ruled for so many years that his sons and grandsons had preceded him to the grave, and so the crown passed to his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV. The old king’s nephew, the Duke of Orléans, ruled on the child’s behalf until 1723. The Regency was a more relaxed era, when the French people—and especially the nobility—felt liberated from the stifling autocracy they had endured under the Sun King. The court returned to Paris, with the regent ensconced at the Palais-Royal, and the famous Parisian salons became popular gathering places for political and cultural discussion. The upper classes reveled in extravagant celebrations, and the bubbly sparkle of champagne seemed to fit the zeitgeist perfectly. Its popularity continued into the reign of Louis XV—his mistress Madame de Pompadour famously declared that “champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it”—and on into the present day.
The Regency is also when the Enlightenment, known in France as le siècle des Lumières (the century of lights), is commonly held to have begun, as the revolutionary thought of philosophers and scientists crescendoed in a broad movement advocating liberty, religious tolerance, and human progress through reason. The roots of modern liberalism were planted here in the eighteenth century, with Paris as an epicenter of intellectual rebellion against the political and religious dogmas of the day. Montesquieu developed the idea of the separation of church and state, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau put forward his vision of the “social contract,” in which a ruler’s legitimacy is derived not from God but from the consent of his people to be governed. Voltaire, one of the greatest writers of this or any period of French history, suffused his philosophical and literary works with a quintessentially modern belief in religious tolerance and human progress, and advocated passionately for the abolition of torture and other barbaric punishments of the time.
Voltaire was also an enthusiastic devotee of champagne. He wrote, in 1736:
A wine of which the pressed foam,
From the bottle with sleek force,
Like a thunder made the cork fly;
It lifts off, we laugh; it strikes the ceiling.
The sparkling froth of this fresh wine,
Is the brilliant image of our French.3
Painting by Jean-François de Troy, Le Déjeuner d’huîtres (The Oyster Lunch), 1735. On the far left, a bottle of champagne has been opened, and several diners admire its cork flying upward—perhaps one of the earliest representations of the “devil’s wine” in action. From the collection of the Musée Condé, Chantilly.
Unfortunately for the makers of champagne, their homeland in northeast France lay astride one of the best invasion routes into the country. But one of the most famous innovators of champagne found a way to turn this to her advantage. Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin had married François Clicquot, the head of a small champagne-producing enterprise, in 1798. After his untimely death in 1805, she took over the family business and renamed it Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin (veuve meaning “widow” in French). She introduced a number of techniques to champagne production that produced an exceptional wine, considered by some to be the first truly modern champagne.
Disaster loomed, however, with Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow and slow retreat back to France, pursued by a coalition of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian armies, which entered Champagne in 1814. Most of her fellow producers buried their wares and fled, but the widow Clicquot decided to take a different approach, offering her wines freely to the occupying troops before the looting began. She was betting that the Russians, in particular, would develop an affinity for her brand, famously declaring: “Today, they drink. Tomorrow, they will pay!” And sure enough, when she undertook a massive gamble the following year and shipped several thousand bottles of champagne to Russia, she found the aristocracy already clamoring for it. The tsar himself, upon sampling her best vintage, declared that he would drink nothing else, and the Russian obsession with Veuve Clicquot endured as long as the tsars themselves.
Eventually, in the nineteenth century, a young French chemist named Jean-Baptiste François figured out how to calculate the right amount of sugar to add to champagne, thus making it easier to control fermentation and limit the damage caused by exploding bottles. The great Louis Pasteur, in his studies of beer and wine, discovered exactly how the fermentation process worked. And so finally, the apostles of science managed to subdue the devil’s wine, making its production safer and more predictable.
They could not, unfortunately, protect champagne from the ravages of nature and humankind. In the late nineteenth century, the region’s vineyards were virtually wiped out by phylloxera, a microscopic pest inadvertently imported from North America. After a long struggle to rebuild the vineyards, World War I broke out, and the front line ran directly through the Champagne region. Women and children struggled to harvest the grapes as artillery attacks and ground offensives swirled about them, and in the end perhaps 40 percent of the region’s vineyards were destroyed. With the end of war came the double whammy of the Bolshevik Revolution and American Prohibition, which destroyed two of the wine’s biggest markets. Yet the producers of champagne prevailed, rebuilding their vineyards and focusing on other markets—in particular, the British, who preferred a drier version of the wine and thus permanently altered the predominant style of champagne produced. In 1936, an AOC was awarded that meant no wine grown outside of the region could be called champagne (a rule the French have been trying to get foreign producers to respect ever since).
Over the years, many notable figures have professed a love for champagne. There is some controversy over whether it was Napoleon or Churchill who first said, “In victory, you deserve champagne; in defeat, you need it,” but there is no doubt that both adored the wine, along with millions of others around the world. Today, more than 300 million bottles of champagne are produced annually to satisfy the world’s thirst for extravagance.4 It may be the quintessential French product: passionately grown, elaborately curated, imparting an evanescent joie de vivre and sense of liberating escape from the travails of everyday life. Thanks to the stubborn efforts of vintners and scientists, champagne has truly escaped the devil’s clutches and lodged itself firmly within the pantheon of French gastronomy.