US National Champagne Day
<p>For much of the seventeenth century, the bubbles in Champagne were regarded not as a triumph but as a defect. The winemakers of the chalky hills north-east of Paris fought against the unwanted second fermentation that made their bottles fizz, because the pressure it generated had an alarming habit of making the glass explode. In some cellars the chain-reaction breakages were so violent that workers wore heavy iron masks to protect their faces, and a year of poor luck could shatter a large share of the stock. That the wine the cellar masters were trying to tame became, three centuries later, the planet’s pre-eminent symbol of celebration is one of history’s better jokes. US National Champagne Day, falling on 31 December, could hardly be more shrewdly placed, landing on the one evening when more corks fly than on any other, and inviting a closer look at the craft, accident and sheer stubbornness behind the wine in the flute.</p>
<h2 id="where-champagne-comes-from">Where Champagne comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Champagne is, in the strictest sense, a place before it is a drink: the Champagne region of north-eastern France, centred on the cities of Reims and Épernay, where a cool northerly climate, deep chalk subsoil and three permitted grape varieties, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, combine to produce a sparkling wine that, by French and European law, no one else may legally call Champagne. The chalk matters more than it might sound: it drains well, reflects light and warmth in a marginal climate, and stores wine at a steady cool temperature in the vast cellars carved into it, some of them following tunnels first dug by the Romans to quarry stone.</p>
<p>The single name most attached to Champagne is Dom Pierre Pérignon, the Benedictine monk who served as cellar master at the Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668 until his death in 1715. Popular legend credits him with inventing sparkling Champagne and even with the cry, on first tasting it, that he was “drinking the stars” — an appealing story with no contemporary evidence behind it. The truth is both less romantic and more impressive. Far from trying to create bubbles, Dom Pérignon spent much of his career trying to prevent them. His genuine and lasting contributions lay elsewhere: in the art of blending grapes from different vineyards to make a wine better than any single plot could yield, in handling the delicate red grapes to produce a clear, pale juice, and in improving the quality of cork and bottle. The fizz emerged gradually, through the work of many hands across the region, not from a single inspired monk.</p>
<h2 id="a-history-written-in-clever-solutions">A history written in clever solutions</h2>
<p>If the bubbles were an accident, the modern Champagne we recognise is the product of deliberate invention, and much of the credit belongs to people whose names are less famous than the monk’s. The defining problem was twofold: how to capture the sparkle reliably, and how to remove the cloudy sediment of dead yeast that the bottle fermentation left behind without losing the wine or its pressure.</p>
<p>The great breakthrough on the second problem came from a woman. Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, widowed young and left in charge of her late husband’s house, became one of the most formidable figures in the trade and is remembered as the Veuve, or Widow, Clicquot. Around 1816 her cellar developed the technique of remuage, or riddling: bottles were stored at an angle in a slanted rack, the pupitre, and given a daily twist and tilt over weeks so that the sediment slid down into the neck. The neck could then be frozen, the plug of frozen sediment ejected by the bottle’s own pressure in a process called dégorgement, and the wine topped up and sealed clear and brilliant. It was an elegant industrial solution dreamed up two centuries ago, and a version of it is still in use today. The science behind the strength of the bubbles owed a debt to the chemist Jean-Baptiste François, who in the 1830s worked out how to calculate the precise amount of sugar to add for the second fermentation, dramatically reducing the rate of exploding bottles. Champagne, in other words, became safe and consistent through chemistry as much as through art.</p>
<h2 id="why-a-day-for-it-makes-sense">Why a day for it makes sense</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Beneath the festivity, the day carries a genuinely useful idea: that “Champagne” is a protected name with a meaning worth defending. The European Union and many other jurisdictions reserve the term for sparkling wine made in the Champagne region by the traditional method, which is why a sparkling wine from elsewhere, however excellent, is properly called something else. Spain makes cava, Italy makes prosecco and Franciacorta, and producers from California to England make “sparkling wine”, increasingly by the same painstaking method without being entitled to the name. A day devoted to Champagne is partly a day for appreciating that the word stands for a specific place, a specific method and a specific, hard-won standard, rather than a generic synonym for anything with bubbles.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>Falling on New Year’s Eve, the day is observed in the most obvious way imaginable: by raising a glass at midnight as one year gives way to the next. The pop of the cork and the rise of bubbles in a tall flute have become so bound up with the turning of the year that it is hard to picture the moment without them. Beyond the midnight toast, enthusiasts use the occasion to taste more deliberately, comparing a bracing brut against a softer demi-sec, sampling a rosé or splashing out on a vintage cuvée. Others explore the wine’s surprising versatility at the table, since its high acidity and scrubbing bubbles make it a famously good partner not only for oysters and caviar but for salty, fried and even fast food. A flute of good Champagne with a plate of hot chips is one of the small luxuries the day quietly encourages.</p>
<h2 id="variations-and-the-wider-family">Variations and the wider family</h2>
<p>Champagne sits at the head of a large and varied family of sparkling wines, and the world’s celebrations draw on all of them. Italy’s prosecco, made by a quicker tank method, is lighter, fruitier and far cheaper, which is why it pours so freely at brunches and parties; Spain’s cava is made by the traditional bottle method and offers a closer, more affordable cousin to Champagne itself. England’s cool south, geologically a continuation of the same chalk that runs under Champagne, has in recent decades produced sparkling wines that win blind tastings against the French originals. Each country toasts in its own idiom, but the gesture is shared, and the day’s spirit of marking a threshold with something bright and effervescent runs through other celebratory entries on the calendar, from the spirits-focused <a href="/specialdate/us-national-vodka-day/">National Vodka Day</a> to the convivial <a href="/specialdate/us-national-beer-lover-s-day/">National Beer Lover’s Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-traditions">Symbols and traditions</h2>
<p>Champagne has woven itself into ceremony far beyond the dinner table. It christens ships, smashed against the bow at launch; it sprays in jubilant fountains over the winners of Grand Prix races, a tradition popularised in Formula One in the 1960s; it crowns weddings, treaties and triumphs. The flute glass, tall and narrow, became a symbol in its own right because its shape preserves the bubbles and channels the aromas upward, though many tasters now prefer a slightly wider tulip that lets the wine breathe. Then there is sabrage, the theatrical opening of a bottle by sliding a sabre along the seam to strike off the entire top, cork and collar together, a flourish associated with cavalry officers of the Napoleonic era and reserved today for moments that want a little drama. The high pressure inside the bottle, several times that of the surrounding air, is what makes both the celebratory pop and the swordsman’s trick possible.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The “Dom Pérignon drinking the stars” story is almost certainly a nineteenth-century invention; the monk it credits spent much of his career trying to stop his wine from sparkling at all.</li>
<li>The riddling technique that gives Champagne its brilliant clarity was developed in the cellars of a young widow, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, around 1816, and a version of her method is still used today.</li>
<li>Early Champagne makers sometimes wore iron masks in the cellars because so many bottles exploded under their own pressure that flying glass was a real hazard.</li>
<li>The pressure inside a sealed bottle of Champagne is roughly three times that of a car tyre, which is why the cork can leave with such force.</li>
<li>The chalk hills of southern England are the same geological seam that surfaces in Champagne, which is one reason English sparkling wine has begun beating the French in blind tastings.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is a lesson hiding in the cellar, behind the iron masks and the exploding glass. For generations the people of Champagne regarded the very quality that would one day make their fortune as a flaw to be eliminated, and only slowly, through invention and accident, did they learn to keep the fault and sell it as a marvel. It is worth remembering that on the night the wine is most poured, when a glass is raised to the year ahead. The bubbles in the flute are not a sign that everything went to plan; they are the residue of a problem nobody could solve, kept on purpose until it became the point. Perhaps that is a fitting thing to toast at the turn of the year, when most of us are quietly aware that the parts of our lives we once counted as setbacks have a way, given enough time, of turning into the things we would not give up.</p>
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