47 Fun Facts About Champagne

Which three grapes are used to make almost all champagne?

Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay make up nearly all plantings; Pinot blanc, Pinot gris, Arbane and Petit Meslier are also permitted but together cover under 1% of the vineyard.

Roughly what pressure builds up inside a bottle of champagne?

Around six bar, about 90 psi, roughly three times the pressure in a car tyre, which is why champagne bottles are made of thick, heavy glass.

The name 'Champagne' has been legally protected under an international treaty signed in which year?

The Madrid Agreement of 1891 first reserved the name for wine from the region, reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919; EU law reserves it for sparkling wine made there.

What is the oldest recorded sparkling wine, predating Dom Pérignon?

Blanquette de Limoux: monks at the abbey of Saint-Hilaire near Limoux recorded it in 1531, bottling wine before its first fermentation had finished so that it kept its fizz.

Which English scientist's 1662 paper explained that adding sugar before bottling makes wine sparkle?

Christopher Merret told the Royal Society in 1662 that adding sugar to finished wine made it sparkle, decades before the method was documented in Champagne; English coal-fired glass could withstand the pressure.

Dom Pérignon was a monk of which religious order?

Dom Pierre Pérignon was a Benedictine monk and cellar master at the Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668 until his death in 1715; ironically he worked to keep bubbles out of the wine.

In which year was Dom Pérignon's first vintage finally put on sale?

First sold in 1936: the 1921 vintage was shipped to New York that year aboard the liner Normandie; Mercier had given Moët the Dom Pérignon name in 1927 as a wedding present.

Which is the oldest established champagne house, making champagne exclusively since 1729?

Nicolas Ruinart started giving 'wine with bubbles' to his cloth customers and gave up cloth six years later.

Moët & Chandon was founded in 1743 by whom?

Claude Moët, a wine trader, founded the house in 1743; his grandson Jean-Remy made it famous, and the Chandon name was added in 1833 when son-in-law Pierre-Gabriel Chandon joined the firm.

Madame Clicquot is credited with inventing the riddling table, to clarify champagne, in which year?

In 1816 Madame Clicquot and her cellar master Antoine de Müller devised the riddling table, a board drilled with angled holes that let the sediment gather in the neck for removal.

Veuve Clicquot's label has been which distinctive colour since the late 19th century?

The yellow label dates from 1877, when the house registered its distinctive orange-yellow as a trademark; the firm had been founded in Reims in 1772 by Philippe Clicquot.

What is the French name for riddling, turning bottles so the sediment collects in the neck?

Remuage is the riddling: bottles in a pupitre are turned and tilted a little each day over several weeks until they stand neck-down with the sediment gathered on the cap.

Under the appellation rules, champagne must spend at least how long developing in the bottle?

The rules require at least fifteen months in the bottle, twelve of them on the lees, for non-vintage champagne; vintage wine, from a single year's grapes, must spend three years.

The dry style labelled 'Brut' was created for the British market by which house in 1876?

Pommery released the first brut champagne for the London market in 1876; Perrier-Jouët had tested the water by shipping an unsweetened 1846 vintage, at a time when champagne was usually very sweet.

The wire cage that keeps a champagne cork in, the muselet, was invented in 1844 by whom?

Adolphe Jaquesson patented the muselet in 1844; the wire cage replaced string and wax seals, and its twist of wire is loosened with six half-turns.

Which champagne house has used the James Bond films as marketing since Live and Let Die in 1973?

Bollinger has marketed through Bond since Live and Let Die (1973), when 007 first ordered it on screen, and issued a Special Cuvée 007 edition for No Time to Die; the house was founded in Aÿ in 1829.

Cristal, considered the first prestige cuvée, was created in 1876 for which ruler?

Cristal was created in 1876 for Tsar Alexander II of Russia, the house's most important customer, who had survived several assassination attempts and was killed by a bomb in 1881.

Which champagne house makes a prestige cuvée named for Sir Winston Churchill, its most famous devotee?

Pol Roger launched the Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill with the 1975 vintage, released in 1984; Churchill drank the house's wine for decades, and it put a black border on its labels when he died in 1965.

Which house makes the all-Chardonnay Comtes de Champagne and planted vines in Kent in 2017?

Taittinger makes Comtes de Champagne, its prestige cuvée first produced from the 1952 vintage, and in 2017 planted its first English vines near Chilham in Kent.

Which actress was rumoured to keep a month's supply of Piper-Heidsieck in her kitchen?

Marilyn Monroe reportedly kept some 350 bottles of Piper-Heidsieck at home and said she woke each morning with a glass of it; the house was founded in Reims in 1785.

Perrier-Jouët's flower-painted Belle Epoque bottle was designed by which Art Nouveau artist?

Emile Gallé, the Nancy glass artist, painted the Japanese anemones for Perrier-Jouët in 1902; the design lay forgotten until the 1960s and was launched as Belle Epoque in 1969.

The Champagne riots of 1911 saw growers dump grapes and wine from which region into the Marne?

Growers intercepted shipments of Loire grapes and wine that merchants were passing off as Champagne and tipped them into the Marne; in April 1911 houses in Aÿ were sacked.

Dan Gurney started the podium champagne spray tradition after winning which race in 1967?

At the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, Dan Gurney and A. J. Foyt beat the Ferraris in a Ford Mk IV; on the podium Gurney shook the bottle and sprayed the crowd, and the tradition stuck.

Which biblical king's name goes on a 15-litre champagne bottle, twenty bottles' worth?

Nebuchadnezzar: 15 litres, or twenty standard bottles; sizes above the 3-litre jeroboam are not fermented in their own bottle but filled by transfer from smaller ones.

A magnum holds how much champagne?

A magnum holds 1.5 litres, two standard bottles; it is thought to age more gracefully because the same cork and headspace serve twice the wine, giving less oxygen per litre.

The champagne coupe, first made around 1663 in Greenwich, was originally called what?

It was called a tazza, a shallow stemmed bowl made at the Duke of Buckingham's Greenwich glassworks; the tale that the coupe was moulded on Marie Antoinette is a myth, as the glass predates her by a century.

Which town's Avenue de Champagne is lined with the leading houses, their cellars cut into the chalk below?

Épernay's Avenue de Champagne is home to Moët & Chandon and Perrier-Jouët among others, above an estimated 110 km of chalk cellars.

The cathedral of Reims, the region's largest city, was the traditional site of what?

Reims cathedral was the coronation church of French kings for eight centuries, ending with Charles X in 1825, using the Holy Ampulla of oil said to have been brought by a dove at Clovis's baptism.

The 'Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars' joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in which year?

Inscribed in July 2015, in the same session as Burgundy's Climats, the listing covers the historic hillsides around Hautvillers and Aÿ, the Saint-Nicaise hill in Reims and the houses' chalk cellars.

Sabrage, opening a bottle with a sabre, is traditionally linked to the light cavalry of which leader?

Napoleon's light cavalry, the hussars, are said to have opened bottles with their sabres while riding; one tale has his officers doing so to impress the young widow Clicquot.

Which champagne style is made from Chardonnay alone?

Blanc de blancs is made only from white grapes, in practice Chardonnay; blanc de noirs is the reverse, a white wine pressed from the dark-skinned grapes.

What feature was left off the tsar's Cristal bottle to foil hidden explosives?

The punt in the base: the tsar feared a bomb could be hidden in the usual hollow, so Cristal was given a flat bottom as well as clear glass, a shape it kept.

The Champagne wine region lies roughly how far east of Paris?

Reims lies about 160 km, around 100 miles, east of Paris; that closeness made the wine trade rich but put its villages in the path of every army marching on the capital.

Who were the first to plant vineyards in the Champagne region?

The Romans planted the first vines here; Domitian ordered colonial vineyards uprooted in 92 AD, and Probus, a gardener's son, rescinded the edict almost two centuries later, after which a temple to Bacchus went up.

Which exiled French courtier made champagne fashionable at Charles II's court?

Saint-Évremond, exiled in 1661, made the wines of Champagne fashionable in London, though he himself preferred them without bubbles; it was the English who took to the sparkling version.

Which champagne house, founded in 1776 and renamed by an heir in 1833, supplied the Russian imperial court?

Louis Roederer inherited the house from his uncle in 1833 and gave it his name; by the 1870s Russia took a large share of its sales, and the tsar's court was its prize customer.

How old was Madame Clicquot when she was widowed and took over the house in 1805?

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin was 27 when her husband François died in 1805; she ran the house for six decades until her death in 1866.

What is the 1735 painting by Jean François de Troy that is the first known depiction of champagne in art?

The Oyster Luncheon (Le Déjeuner d'huîtres), painted in 1735 for Louis XV's dining room at Versailles, shows a cork flying above a table of feasting aristocrats.

Which term replaced 'champenoise' for bottle-fermented sparkling wine made outside Champagne after a 1994 EU ruling?

Méthode traditionnelle (or classique) is the permitted term; the European Court of Justice upheld the ban on 'méthode champenoise' in 1994, and South Africa uses Cap Classique.

How many bottles does Moët & Chandon produce in a typical year?

About 28 million bottles a year, by far the largest output of any champagne house; Moët & Chandon owns around 1,200 hectares of vineyard and belongs to LVMH.

What is it called when a champagne bottle's neck is frozen and the plug of lees ejected?

Disgorgement (dégorgement): the neck is dipped in freezing brine, the crown cap is removed and the pressure shoots out the frozen plug of lees before the dosage tops up the bottle.

Roughly how many hectares of vineyard do Champagne's houses and growers manage?

Roughly 32,000 to 34,000 hectares, shared among some 16,000 growers and more than 300 houses, with the big houses owning only about a tenth of the vines themselves.

On a champagne label, what does the producer code 'RM' stand for?

RM is récoltant manipulant, a grower who makes champagne from his own grapes with at most 5% bought in, the 'grower champagne' of the label; NM marks a négociant house.

What did 18th-century cellar workers wear to guard against spontaneously bursting bottles?

A heavy iron mask, like a baseball catcher's, protected against flying glass; one burst could set off a chain reaction, and cellars routinely lost 20 to 90 percent of their bottles.

Because bottles exploded and corks popped, early sparkling champagne earned what nickname in France?

'The devil's wine' (le vin du diable): bursting bottles and flying corks seemed diabolical at a time when bubbles were considered a fault, and Dom Pérignon worked to prevent them.

Which 1939 film had Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne bond over pink champagne?

In Love Affair (1939) Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne bond over pink champagne, and sales of the then-unfashionable drink reportedly rose after the release; the 1957 remake An Affair to Remember kept the motif.

Caroline Latrive became cellar master in 2011 of which house, a drier-champagne pioneer?

Ayala, founded in Aÿ in 1860, appointed Caroline Latrive chef de cave in 2011, one of the few women then in charge of a champagne house's cellars.