Oh no! MONDAY!

Today is the traditional date for the invention of champagne by Dom Perignon in 1693. He was a French Benedictine monk who made important contributions to the production and quality of Champagne wine in an era when the region’s wines were predominantly still red. Popular myths frequently, but erroneously, credit him with the invention of sparkling Champagne, which did not become the dominant style of Champagne until the mid-19th century.

The famous Champagne Dom Pérignon, the prestige cuvée of winery Moët & Chandon, is named after him. The remains of the monastery where he spent his adult life is now the property of that winery.

n Pérignon’s era, the in-bottle refermentation (now used to give sparkling wine its sparkle) was an enormous problem for winemakers. When the weather cooled off in the autumn, fermentation would sometimes stop before all the fermentable sugars had been converted to alcohol. If the wine was bottled in this state, it became a literal time bomb. When the weather warmed in the spring, dormant yeast roused themselves and began generating carbon dioxide that would at best push the cork out of the bottle, and at worst explode, starting a chain reaction.

In 1718, the Canon Godinot published a set of wine-making rules that were said to be established by Dom Pérignon. Among these rules was the detail that fine wine should only be made from Pinot noir. Pérignon was not fond of white grapes because of their tendency to enter re-fermentation. Prior to blending he would taste the grapes without knowing the source vineyard to avoid influencing his perceptions. References to his “blind tasting of wine” have led to the common misconception that Dom Pérignon was blind. Contrary to popular belief, Dom Pérignon did not introduce blending to Champagne wines but rather the method of blending the grapes prior to sending them to press.

The quote attributed to Pérignon—”Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!”—is supposedly what he said when tasting the first sparkling champagne. However, the first appearance of that quote appears to have been in a print advertisement in the late 19th century.

A major proponent of the misconceptions surrounding Dom Pérignon came from one of his successors at the Abbey of Hautvillers, Dom Groussard, who in 1821 gave an account of Dom Pérignon “inventing” Champagne among other exaggerated tales about the Abbey in order to garner historical importance and prestige for the church.

Groussard’s myth achieved more than prestige for the church, it helped commercialize champagne at the turn of the twentieth century. The Syndicat du Commerce used the myth to promote Champagne and the Champagne region, producing a pamphlet called Le Vin de Champagne in 1896 that celebrated Perignon as the inventor of Champagne by following “ancient traditions”. The myth served to protect Champagne made in Marne as the original sparkling wine and dismiss other wines as imitators.