DOM PIERRE PÉRIGNON

From a photo of the statue of Dom Pierre Pérignon at the headquarters of Champagne Moët et Chandon, by Dan Dickinson on flickr

It is unkind merely to the myth to say this, but I am guessing that Dom Pierre Pérignon—who, we claim, one night invented Champagne—died a sad man, an abject failure at his life’s great quest.



In the 1600s, as the cellar master at the abbey where he lived in Hautvillers, in the Champagne district of France, northeast of Paris, he sought most of all to prevent the abbey’s wines from re-fermenting and becoming fizzy when springtime temperatures warmed the cellars.

In his day and how winemaking then was, each winter’s severe cold disallowed that year’s wines to complete their fermentations (that is, their transformations of grape sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide). Come ‘round March and April, the wines in bottle reverted to re-fermenting and just—boom! kablam! crack!—blew out all their glass.

Bad form.



Dom Pérignon never was interested in putting bubbles into wine; he wanted to keep them out. Alas, he failed, over and again, vintage after vintage. I suspect that, in a twist raw on a life, a special wine’s lightness became Dom Pierre Pérignon’s burden most heavy.

But he both accepted and sidestepped this overarching failure. Clever cleric that he was, he contributed hugely to the development of Champagne as we know it. (It was not he who determined to keep the bubbles in it.)

Dom Pérignon was alone or among the first to make white wine from red grapes; to mandate lower vineyard yields; to pick grapes early in the day to preserve freshness; to place presses directly in the vineyards; and his greatest achievement: to conclude that blending different wines ends up making a better Champagne.

So, we toast this wonderful man, this marvelous monk, for what he truly did for those of us who appreciate sparkling wine, and just the best of it in its long, sparkling history—Champagne!—rather than conjure up an image of him saying, as only our story goes, on that night he invented Champagne, “Come quickly, I am tasting stars!” 



Which, to call out a final absurdity, was a phrase invented for him in the late 1800s, so very long after his time, by an advertising campaign. Please.

Let the dude go. He was the greatest for just what he did, not for all the bubbles with which we, I say mistakenly, sparkle him.