Champagne
A flawed drink became a luxury, and how this transformation occurred.
Making wine is quite a simple process.
Wash the jar, crush grapes, add them to the jar, add sugar, yeast and seal it in the jar, which can breathe. The fermentation begins. This process produces carbon dioxide and hence a jar that breathes so that the gas can find its way out.
Temperature helps with the fermentation and also makes the wine sweeter. The hotter, the sweeter. If you pour a glass of wine, hold it against a white cloth and look through it, you can tell how hot it was when the wine fermented by the darkness of the wine. The hotter, the darker.
Porto, also known as Port Wine, is sweet because it is made in Portugal, where it’s warmer.
Typically, the fermentation of wine is finished in a couple of weeks. Once the fermentation is finished, the wine will not produce any more carbon dioxide, no matter how long you leave it. It is then allowed to age, which enhances the taste.
The wine growing belt in the South of France is also located along the Pyranées. This provides the vintners the right temperatures to produce a wine that is not too sweet. There are also regions around Paris, such as Burgundy and Champagne, that are great for wine growing.
Champagne is located slightly north of Paris and hence is used to having low temperatures. Once the grapes were crushed and seals, the wine would ferment, but the cold winters of Champagne would halt fermentation. Only for a process called refermentation to occur when spring returned. This produced another round of Carbon-dioxide and the wine would become bubbly. This was considered a defect in wine.
In the 16th century, such defective wine used to be thrown away.
Dom Perignon
I suppose monks in that part of the world had a lot of time on hand. They put that time to use brewing. They produced wines in France and hundreds of different beers in Belgium.
Dom Perignon was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey at Hatevillers. He was hard at work to get rid of the bubbles from the wine and also to produce white wine from red grapes. He failed at one and succeeded at the other.
Perhaps his greatest contribution to making champagne was to secure the cork with hemp, which kept the cork from blowing out. Because of these blowouts, champagne also used to be known as devil’s wine or le vin du diable.
Lore has it that Dom Perignon tasted wine from one such blown bottle and said, ‘Come quickly, I am drinking the stars.’
This may or may not have happened, but one account has it that this was just the marketing needed to get the fizzy wine sold. He may not have managed to get the bubbles out of the wine, but he did establish the method for creating champagne that is still in use today.
Madame Clicquot Ponsardin
Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was the daughter of Baron Ponsardin, a wealthy textile merchant. She married François Clicquot, also a wealthy textile merchant who happened to own a vineyard in Champagne.
While the textile business was thriving, the couple decided to make something of the vineyard. At the age of 30, François fell ill and died. Barbe-Nicole was 27 and had a 6-month-old daughter to take care of. Her father-in-law planned to sell the vineyard when she went to him with a proposal to run it.
She went through an apprenticeship to prove her worth and became the first woman to take over a champagne house. Her business thrived, and she launched her new venture, ‘Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin’.
She is credited with many innovations, including the Riddling Table process that clears up the wine and gets rid of all the sediments. Prior to this, the remains of the yeast in the wine would make the wine cloudy. She is also known for having invented the rosé.
She not only sold in France but also managed to open up a market for her product in Russia.
She played a pivotal role in establishing the supremacy of the Champagne.
Today, Veuve Clicquot is part of the LVMH portfolio, and so is Dom Perignon. Both are some of the most expensive Champagnes on the market.