When Wine Attacks
On August 2nd, 2015, Ashrita Furman of Queens, New York, set the sabrage world record of 66 in one minute. Perhaps that requires some explanation. We are about to take a mental journey through the world of the Devil’s wine.
Dom Perignon, the French Benedictine monk who was cellar master of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers in the mid-1600’s, is often credited with the “discovery” of champagne in 1697. As the story goes, he opened a bottle of wine which had developed some carbonation, and exclaimed “come quickly, I am tasting the stars!”. And today we all can enjoy the delights of this accidental discovery. Unfortunately, as in most of popular wine history, there is very little truth in this romantic story.
Effervescence in wine had been noted even in ancient times. Wine is the result of fermentation, which is yeast feeding on the sugar in the grape juice. The yeast produce alcohol and carbonic acid – carbonation – as they consume the sugar. In a vat or barrel, the carbonation is lost into the atmosphere. If the wine is bottled tightly before the fermentation is complete, then the carbon dioxide is trapped in the bottle, and forms into tiny bubbles when the pressure is released.
It seems the credit of Dom Perignon discovering sparkling wine was invented by a later cellar master, Dom Groussard, who wrote the history of the Abbey in 1821. This story was then used in the promotion of the wines of the region in a pamphlet titled Le Vin de Champagne in 1896.
Actually, history records that the British had been intentionally creating fizz in their wine, by the addition of sugar, since the mid-1600’s. In 1662, Christopher Merret presented a paper on wine to the Royal Society, in London that included a demonstration of adding sugar to wine in a bottle, and then sealing it, to produce bubbles when the wine was opened. Rod Phillips, professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa provided this quote from Fynes Moryson’s “Itinerary” written in 1617: “Gentlemen carouse only with wine, with which many mix sugar... And because the taste of the English is thus delighted with sweetness, the wines in taverns (for I speak not of merchants’ or gentlemen’s cellars) are commonly mixed at the filling thereof, to make them pleasant.” Phillips speculates “instead of putting a teaspoon of sugar in each glass, as with tea and coffee, some gentlemen added it to the bottles they brought home from their wine merchants, then sealed them for drinking a week, a month, or several months later. They might have found, when they opened the bottles, that their wine was dry and sparkling, rather than sweet and still.”
It is believed that Dom Perignon’s original objective was to eliminate the problem of carbonation in the wine. The glass bottles of the day were thin and fragile. When pressure built up in the wine, it was not uncommon for a bottle to explode in the cellar. The fragments from one exploding bottle could strike the other bottles and set off a chain reaction, which could destroy the cellar inventory and injure workers. In Dom Perignon’s time, the process of fermentation was not understood, and the random risk of exploding bottles led to the term "le vin du diable" -- the wine of the devil. It was risky business working in a sparkling wine cellar. According to Becky Sue Epstein, author of “Champagne: A Global History”, workers wore wire masks when they handled the bottles to protect against the projectiles. “I know one cellar in which there are three men who have each lost an eye,” wrote Thomas George Shaw, a 19th-century wine trader.
So, while he didn’t “discover” sparkling wine, Dom Perignon still deserves his reputation of “the father of champagne”. In 1718 a set of wine-making rules were published that were the result of his life’s work. Those rules include using Pinot Noir grapes for quality wines, pruning vineyards to maintain small plants with low yields, blending grapes from multiple vineyards to promote consistency in the wine, and using mechanical presses rather than pressing the grapes under-foot - standards which are still used in the production of Champagne.
Maybe it is because it is something so dangerous and mysterious that champagne has become a symbol of romance? Or as Dr. Max Lake, founder of Lake's Folly, a winery in New South Wales Australia observed, the scents of dry Champagne can replicate the delicate aromas of female pheromones. Or perhaps it is because, as Christopher Walkey co-founder of Glass of Bubbly suggests, in the 18th century Madame de Pompadour, the favorite mistress to Louis XV, said that ‘Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it’.
Ah yes, and sabrage - the true “sport of kings” – is the use of a saber to open a champagne bottle.
