The History of Champagne — From Accident to Luxury

In 1940, the German army entered the Champagne region and appointed a special official, the Weinführer, the wine commander. It is perhaps the only title in history that sounds at once like a military rank and a dream job. His task was to requisition champagne for the Third Reich, systematically on an industrial scale, complete with paperwork and receipts. Local producers hid bottles behind sealed cellar walls, buried them underground, and even poured concrete over the entrances to their wine cellars. The Mumm family concealed more than 100,000 bottles in tunnels carved into the ancient chalk deposits of the region. After the war, some of those bottles were never found. They are still down there somewhere, 30 meters beneath the ground. But that is only one of the stories. The monk who discovered sparkling wine considered it a disaster, not an invention. The bubbles caused bottles to explode, killing people with flying shards of glass inside the cellars. Winemakers wore iron masks to protect their faces whenever they descended underground. Napoleon never began a military campaign without a supply of champagne and never celebrated a victory without it. A 27-year-old widow took control of a company in a world where women were not expected to run businesses, went on to build the largest champagne house in the world and developed the technique without which modern champagne would not exist. Today, the global champagne market is worth around six billion euros a year. 300 million bottles are produced annually, and not one of them can legally be called champagne unless it is made in one specific region of France, covering just 34,000 hectares. How did a defective wine that exploded in underground cellars become the ultimate symbol of victory, power and luxury? And why are countries still fighting in court over the right to call it champagne? At the end of the 17th century, at the Abbey of Hautvilliers in the Champagne region, a monk named Pierre Perignon was in charge of the wine cellar, and he had a serious problem. The wine he produced was behaving the wrong way. After being bottled, it began fermenting a second time, releasing carbon dioxide with nowhere to escape. The pressure inside the bottles kept rising. The bottles exploded. Sometimes one exploding bottle would trigger a chain reaction, turning an entire row into flying shards of glass. Winemakers working in the cellars suffered severe injuries. Iron masks to protect the face became essential equipment whenever workers entered the cellar during the season when the wine might explode. Perignon considered the bubbles a defect. His goal was to eliminate them, to produce a still, quiet wine like the Burgundians. He spent years experimenting. He changed grape varieties, harvest dates and pressing methods. The famous story that he exclaimed, I am drinking the stars, when he first tasted sparkling wine, is a beautiful myth invented more than 200 years after his death for advertising purposes. In reality, Perignon was trying to destroy the very thing that would one day make him immortal. Yet in the process, Perignon truly made several revolutionary discoveries that laid the foundations of modern champagne. He was the first to systematically blend grapes from different vineyards to create a more consistent and complex wine, a practice now known as assemblage, which remains the foundation of most major champagne houses. He adopted stronger Spanish glass bottles that were better able to withstand internal pressure. And he replaced wooden plugs wrapped in oiled cloth with cork stoppers made from the bark of the cork oak, which retained the gas far more effectively. Perignon did not invent champagne, but he created the tools without which champagne would have been impossible. And when he died in 1715, after 47 years at the Abbey, almost blind, yet according to his fellow monks, still possessing an extraordinary sense of taste until his final days, the bubbles in champagne wine were still regarded as a problem that had not yet been solved. It would take another country to turn that problem into a product, and that country was the last one anyone would have expected to play a decisive role in the creation of French champagne. Here is one detail the French generally prefer not to emphasize. Champagne in its modern form, sparkling, stable, and no longer exploding in the cellar, became possible thanks to English glassmaking technology, the English taste for sparkling wines, and an English scientist who was the first to describe the method of secondary fermentation in the bottle. In the middle of the 17th century, England learned how to produce glass that was far stronger than the glass made in France. By firing furnaces with coal instead of wood, English glassmakers achieved higher temperatures and produced denser, more durable bottles. English bottles could withstand the pressure that shattered French ones. English aristocrats, who imported still wine from champagne, began noticing that it sometimes became sparkling during transport. Instead of treating this as a defect, they decided it was delightful. Sparkling wine from champagne became fashionable in London before it did in Paris. In 1662, the English scientist Christopher Merritt, almost 30 years before Perignon began his experiments, presented a paper to the Royal Society describing the practice of adding sugar to finished wine in order to trigger a second fermentation inside the bottle and create bubbles. This is the very principle behind the traditional champagne method, méthode champagnoise, that is still used to produce authentic champagne today, and Englishmen was the first to describe it. The French know this. They simply prefer not to talk about it. But all of this would have been nothing more than an interesting story about a drink if French politics had not intervened. More specifically, the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, the man who turned the display of luxury into an instrument of state policy. Versailles, under Louis XIV, was not merely a palace. It was a machine for manufacturing status. Aristocrats from across France were expected to live at court partly so the king could keep them under his control and partly because being absent from court meant political irrelevance. To be noticed by the king, to receive his smile, or even a single word, carried real economic value. Everything at court was a signal of status. Your clothes, your carriage, your place at the table, even the glass you held in your hand. And this was where champagne found its place. Louis began drinking champagne, the sparkling wine from the Champagne region, and the court immediately followed his example. It was not a matter of taste, it was a political act. To drink champagne meant being close to the king. Not to drink it meant remaining outside the inner circle. Demand at court soared almost overnight. The producers of champagne immediately understood what had happened. They began competing for the right to supply wine to the royal court with the same intensity that modern companies compete for government contracts. Some went even further. They hired people to spread rumors about their wines through the corridors of Versailles and paid courtiers to mention their labels in the right conversations. It was the first marketing war in the history of luxury alcohol, and it created the tradition of using champagne as a social status symbol, a tradition that survives to this day. You do not open a bottle of champagne at a celebration because it tastes better than every other wine. You open it because, for two centuries, the French aristocracy used it to mark life's most important moments, and that meaning became so deeply absorbed into the product that it can no longer be separated from it. But while the aristocracy competed for the privilege of drinking the right champagne at court, something was happening inside one of champagne's great houses that would transform the entire industry, and the central figure in that story was a woman who, under the laws of her time, was never supposed to run a business at all. In 1805, Bob-Nicole Clicquot was 27 years old. Her husband, François Clicquot, had just died, leaving her with a young daughter, mounting debts, and a small champagne house that was barely surviving. Under the laws of Napoleonic France, a widow had the legal right to continue her husband's business, one of the very few circumstances in which a woman could run a company in her own name. Most women in her position would have sold everything and returned to their families. Bob-Nicole did not sell. She took complete control of the business and told her father-in-law, who had offered to appoint a manager, that she would run it herself. He agreed, though with obvious skepticism. Within a few years, he had stopped smiling skeptically. Madame Clicquot began by hiring the best vineyard manager she could find, restructuring the company's debts, and shifting its focus from still wines to sparkling wines, which sold for higher prices and were enjoying growing demand at the court of Napoleon. Napoleon, the greatest champagne customer of his era, famously said that, in victory, one deserves champagne, and in defeat, one needs it even more. The army that had just conquered half of Europe drank a great deal of champagne and paid well for it. But Madame Clicquot's greatest achievement was a technical one. The biggest problem facing champagne at the time was sediment. During the secondary fermentation inside the bottle, yeast deposits formed, leaving the wine cloudy. Removing the sediment required opening the bottle, which meant losing both pressure and part of the wine. The results were unpredictable. Madame Clicquot solved the problem with an invention known as remouage, the riddling rack or pupitra, a wooden rack in which bottles are placed upside down at an angle. A specially trained worker then rotates and tilts each bottle a little every day. Over the course of several weeks, the sediment slowly slides down into the neck of the bottle. The neck is then immersed in ice, freezing the sediment into a small plug. The bottle is opened, the frozen plug is expelled by the internal pressure, and the bottle is immediately sealed again. The wine remains perfectly clear, the pressure is preserved, and the sediment is gone. This process, dégorgement, is still used today in the production of authentic champagne. In essence, it is performed exactly as it was when a 27-year-old widow devised it in 1816. Veuve Clicquot is now one of the world's largest champagne houses, generating annual revenues measured in billions of euros. The word veuve on the label means widow. They kept it there deliberately. It may be the best piece of branding ever created, and every part of it is true. In August 1914, the First World War began. The front line ran directly through the vineyards of Champagne. Some of the most famous vineyards in the world found themselves literally in the middle of the battlefield, between German and French trenches. Winemakers harvested grapes under artillery fire. Some buried the dead between the rows of vines. Champagne production did not stop. That is an important detail. While shells flew overhead, deep inside the chalk cellars carved 30 meters beneath the ground, secondary fermentation continued. Riddling continued. Disgorgement continued. The chalk tunnels that generations of winemakers had excavated to store bottles became bomb shelters for civilians. Children were born in those tunnels. Schools operated in those tunnels. And beside them, millions of bottles of Champagne waited patiently in the darkness. 25 years later, history repeated itself, but in a different form. In 1940, the Germans returned. This time, they came not with a front line, but with bureaucracy. Weinführer Otto Klebisch arrived in rhymes with official authority and began systematically demanding Champagne for the Third Reich. Monthly quotas, official receipts. Everything was perfectly legal according to the laws of the occupation administration. He was polite, punctual, and deadly dangerous to the industry he had come to exploit. The Champagne producers responded in the way they knew best, with quiet resistance and ingenuity. They gave the Germans what they demanded while at the same time hiding their finest wines. Bottles were sealed behind false walls, buried beneath cellar floors, and relabeled so that the greatest vintages appeared to be ordinary ones. Workers entered one set of figures into the official ledgers while the real inventories disappeared into hidden tunnels. One Champagne house, Moet & Chandon, supplied the Germans with wine at the official prices and issued the required receipts while secretly moving its finest stock into underground tunnels that the occupying forces failed to discover throughout four years of occupation. After the liberation in 1944, hundreds of thousands of bottles were found hidden in those cellars. Some families did not recover their concealed Champagne until years after the war when they finally remembered every hiding place. Today, the chalk cellars beneath Reims and Epernay, the two great cities of Champagne, are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At any given time, they hold around 250 million bottles of Champagne. That is more than the entire world's annual production. 250 million bottles resting in the darkness and silence of the chalk beneath the earth. And some of the bottles hidden there during the war in 1941 have never been found. There is one story about Champagne and Napoleon that explains why this drink became so closely associated with victory and why that association has endured for so long. Napoleon Bonaparte was perhaps the most famous Champagne drinker of his time. During many of his military campaigns, he passed through Epernay, the heart of the Champagne region, and the House of Moet was expected to provide him with a supply for the journey. Jean-Rémy Moet personally welcomed the emperor and saw him off with several cases of Champagne. Napoleon paid for them. Sometimes. But Napoleon's greatest contribution to Champagne was not his personal consumption. It was diplomacy. After every victory, Champagne was served during negotiations and at the signing of treaties. European monarchs who came to Paris, whether as allies or as defeated rulers, were offered Champagne. It was present at every official occasion of real importance. Napoleon instinctively understood something that marketers would not fully appreciate until the 20th century. A drink that becomes associated with the most significant moments in people's lives becomes part of those moments forever, passing that meaning from one generation to the next without the need for advertising. When Napoleon fell and the victorious powers, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain entered Paris in 1814, they drank Champagne too. By then, it had already become a reflex, an important occasion called for Champagne, regardless of who had won and who had lost. Tsar Alexander I of Russia spent several days in Epernay and drank through nearly the entire stock of the House of Moet. Jean-Rémy Moet did not complain. He understood perfectly well that publicity on such a scale was beyond any price. A few years later, he would name one of his cuvées after his most famous customer. Today, Cuvée Napoleon remains one of the names associated with the House of Moet. It was during this period that the ritual we now consider natural and timeless took shape. Champagne is opened at weddings, when ships are launched, after victories on the racetrack, on New Year's Eve, and at any occasion important enough to celebrate. This is not an ancient tradition stretching back into the distant past. It is the product of two centuries of deliberate positioning, begun by a king who wanted to control his aristocracy and cemented by an emperor who understood the power of symbolism better than any 21st century marketer. Between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, during the period the French call the Belle Epoque, Champagne experienced its true golden age. Paris had become the world's capital of art, fashion, and glamour. Cabarets, opera houses, fashionable salons, the first automobiles, the first airplanes, every symbol of modernity seemed to demand the perfect drink. Champagne stepped into that role with such precision that it seemed as though it had always been destined for it. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters advertised cabarets where Champagne flowed freely. Artists and writers drank it in the cafes of Montparnasse. The Russian aristocracy, who spent entire seasons in Paris, consumed it in such enormous quantities that Russia became one of Champagne's largest export markets. Veuve Clicquot became so closely associated with the Russian market that it earned the unofficial nickname La Grande Dame de la Russie, the Grand Lady of Russia. It was during this period that the great Champagne houses began investing in marketing in a systematic way. Moet and Chandon released its first advertising poster. Omery created the first Brut Champagne specifically for the British market after discovering that British consumers preferred a much drier style than the sweet Champagnes that were popular at the time. Today, Brut is the most widely consumed style of Champagne in the world. It was created to satisfy the tastes of one particular nation, and it went on to conquer the rest of the world. The First World War brought the Belle Epoque to a sudden and brutal end. The vineyards of Champagne became a battlefield. Villages were destroyed. Production collapsed. But when the war ended and the world was finally ready to celebrate again, Champagne returned to the table because that is what it does better than anything else. It is there whenever something important deserves to be marked. After the war, the Champagne industry recovered quickly, but its greatest weapon against competitors was not taste and it was not history. It was the law. The name Champagne may be used only for sparkling wine produced in the Champagne region from specific grape varieties using specific production methods. That protection is enshrined in French law, European law, and international trade agreements that France spent much of the 20th century negotiating with remarkable determination. A producer in California cannot label a bottle as Champagne. Neither can one in Spain, nor one in Australia. When a small American company in Ohio attempted to register a trademark containing the word Champagne, it was met with legal action. When a Russian producer of sparkling wine began labeling its bottles Shemspanskoye, the issue became the subject of diplomatic negotiations at the governmental level. In 2021, Russia passed a law requiring French Champagne to be labeled on the Russian market as sparkling wine. Several French Champagne houses temporarily suspended shipments. They later resumed them, but the sediment, as they might say in Champagne, remained. A name is worth money, a great deal of money, and French lawyers who specialize in protecting the Champagne designation are among the busiest legal professionals in the global food and beverage industry. There is one final twist to this story that I find the most fascinating of all. The monk Pierre Pérignon, who spent his entire life trying to get rid of bubbles and regarded them as a production flaw, is today the face of one of the most expensive Champagnes in the world. Dom Pérignon, the prestige cuvee of Moet and Chandon, sells for around 150 euros a bottle and upward, while rare vintage releases can command thousands. The man who hated the very thing that made him famous became the symbol of a luxury he never set out to create. If Pérignon had known, he probably would have been disappointed, though he likely would have had a glass anyway. This is not irony. It is simply how history works. Pérignon laid the technical foundations. English glass makers created bottles that no longer exploded. Madame Clicquot solved the problem of sediment. Louis XIV created the cultural language of luxury. Napoleon turned the drink into a diplomatic instrument. The German occupiers unintentionally confirmed its value through their determination to seize it, and the French lawyers of the 21st century now defend the result of all that work in courts around the world. Each of them added another layer. Today, the Champagne market is worth around six billion euros a year. 300 million bottles are produced annually. 40,000 hectares of vineyards stretch across the region. 250 million bottles lie beneath the earth, waiting in the darkness and silence of the chalk cellars. And somewhere in those tunnels, there are still bottles hidden from the Germans in 1940 that have never been found. The chalk beneath Champagne keeps its secrets patiently. It has had 800 years of practice. A monk who wanted still wine, a widow who was never supposed to run a business, a German official with impeccable paperwork and terrible intentions, a Russian czar who drank through Moet's entire stock in just a few days, French lawyers patrolling the world's markets in search of anyone bold enough to misuse a single word. All of that is Champagne. All of that is in every glass. The bubbles that one monk considered a catastrophe, the technique invented by a woman who was never expected to own a business, the tradition of celebrating shaped by an absolute monarch who wanted to control his aristocracy, the ritual of opening a bottle, which became second nature after two centuries of repetition and the chalk beneath Champagne, preserving bottles and secrets with the same quiet indifference. The next time you open a bottle of Champagne, remember that you are holding the work of a monk who wanted still wine, a widow who refused to give up, an emperor who turned a drink into a diplomatic instrument, a German official who tried to seize it, French families who hid bottles inside their walls and lawyers who are still taking people to court for daring to use the word without the legal right to do so. Not bad for a wine that began as a production defect no one could figure out how to fix.