Dom Pérignon Was Trying to Stop the Bubbles, and the English Were Already Adding Sugar

The popular history says that the Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Pérignon, while serving as cellarmaster at the Abbey of Hautvillers, invented sparkling wine and exclaimed, on first taste, that he was "drinking stars." The actual archive is less obliging.

The English physician and natural philosopher Christopher Merret presented a paper to the Royal Society on December 17, 1662, six years before Pérignon arrived at Hautvillers, describing the deliberate addition of sugar and molasses to wines to provoke a second fermentation in bottle and produce "brisk and sparkling" results. Pérignon's actual job, when he eventually took it on, was the opposite. The wines from the Champagne region were already accidentally sparkling — the cold winters stopped fermentation early, and warming bottles in spring restarted it explosively. Pérignon was hired to make this stop. Bottles were rupturing across the cellars; loss rates of 20 to 90 percent were typical. A worker entering a cellar in the early eighteenth century wore an iron face mask. Pérignon's contributions to viniculture were significant — the precise art of blending base wines, the use of corks rather than rags — but he died trying to remove the bubbles, not put them in.

The trade reorganized itself around what was happening anyway. Veuve Clicquot's cellarmaster Antoine de Müller refined the remuage technique around 1816, riddling bottles upside-down so sediment settled into the neck for disgorging. Adolphe Jaquesson invented the wire muselet cage in 1844, finally containing the cork. And Perrier-Jouët released the first non-sweetened champagne in 1846 for the dryer English market, beginning the long shift from the very sweet champagne the nineteenth century preferred to the brut most modern drinkers expect.