What Makes Champagne Champagne?

Champagne is a type of sparkling wine made under a particular set of rules to protect it from imitators -- but it wasn't always so prized. Learn the history and science of what goes into a bottle of bubbles in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogo bomb here. Champagne is a celebratory drink, e
pervescent drink to toast with. But sparkling wine was once
the scourge of winemakers. The famous Domperignon was actually hired
by a French wine maker to prevent wine from bubbling.

(00:22):
So how did we get here? And what makes champagne champagne?
Champagne is a type of sparkling wine produced in the
Champagne region of France under particular circumstances. But okay, hold up,
what's the sparkling wine? Does it contain glitter? Uh? No,
It's a wine that's carbonated, meaning it contains dissolved carbon

(00:43):
dioxide gas, which bubbles out of the liquid unless it's
kept under pressure. That's why you might burp when you
drink bubbly or beer or soda. Your stomach is pressurized,
but not pressurized enough to keep the carbon dioxide dissolved,
so it escapes as a gas. Other sparkling wines shouldn't
technically be called champagne, and in some countries legally they

(01:04):
cannot be called champagne, though that's really for labeling and
marketing folks not for dinner conversations, and the Champagne region
takes this seriously because it's their livelihood. So what makes
a real Champagne A lot of things. Actually, it's all
laid out in the Appalachion delgen controlle regulations and apologies
from my French. It's it's a set of rules created

(01:26):
by the French National Institute of Origin in Quality, which
is a regulatory group in France meant to control the
quality and branding of agricultural products like cheeses and wines.
For champagne to be labeled Champagne, it must be produced
from the growing of the grapes to the processing of
the wine in the Champagne region, and from one or

(01:46):
a blend of three main grape varieties Chatona, Peino noir
and Pinomonier. There are all kinds of rules about how
you handle the grapes, how they can be planted and pruned,
how much fruit can be produced per hector, how much
can be obtained from the fruit by weight, and how
it can be fermented and stored. The process of making
the wine is called the bold ChimpanA or traditional or classic. First,

(02:10):
you produce bottles of still wine that have undergone a
primary fermentation. That means that you take grape juice called
must in the industry and add sugar and yeast to it. Yeast,
of course, is a microscopic organism that, among other things,
eats glucose and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol. The carbon
dioxide is released from the liquid as a gas, and
the ethanol is the alcohol in the finished wine. When

(02:34):
the pH level hits a certain point on the acid
end of the scale, you strain out the yeast and
bottle the wine. So how do you get the bubbles.
That's done by creating a secondary fermentation inside each bottle
by adding in a bit more yeast and sugar. Whereas
the carbon dioxide was a byproduct in the primary fermentation,
it's the whole point of the secondary fermentation. To keep

(02:56):
it in the bottles, you seal them tightly with crown caps,
the kind that beer is sealed with. When the winemaker
thinks it's good and sparkly. After a couple of months
at least, the caps are removed and spent yeast, called
the lea's is taken out in a process called riddling.
Each bottle is then topped off with a bit more
still wine and usually a bit more sugar to taste.

(03:16):
This edition is called the dossage. Then hefty corks are
inserted and backed up by a wire cage cap to
hold in the now highly pressurized contents. Champagne's run about
five to seven atmospheres inside the bottle a k a.
Five to seven times the pressure that we experience just
hanging out around sea level, so being inside the bottle
would be like diving fifty to seventy under water about

(03:38):
a hundred and sixty two thirty feet, which is deep.
It's also about the same pressure as is in a
semitruck tire. The final product must then be aged for
at least fifteen months for a typical blended champagne, or
at least three years for a single vintage champagne, and
it must have a minimum alcohol content. But the very
first sparkling wines probably didn't have and in the Champagne

(04:00):
region and were very probably accidents of unintentional secondary fermentation.
The first historical record of sparkling wines being made on
purpose was in sixteen sixty two, when an English scientist
named Christopher Merritt presented a paper to the Royal Society
about how some wine humans of the time were adding
sugar or molasses to finished wine barrels to create a

(04:20):
second fermentation. And thus bubbles ciders were very popular in
England at the time, and that's how they were made.
But this wine thing was a curiosity before then. Sparkling
wine was an accident and a dangerous accident. Legend and
or history has it that the monk Dampaignon was assigned
to stop this levin du Jab the Devil's Wine. The

(04:42):
temperatures in the Champagne region get cold enough early enough
that cellared bottled wine would stop fermenting in winter before
the yeast was done doing its thing, and then when
the weather warmed up again in the spring, the bottles
would undergo a second fermentation, dramatically raising the pressure inside
the bottles and making them go fizzy and then making
them explode. And this was actually a weird and huge

(05:06):
and scary problem. It was common to lose four to
ten of a seller due to bursting, and bad warm
fronts could lead to thirty of your bottles breaking, or
entire sellers could be lost. A single bottle going off
could start a chain reaction around the cellar. The workers
had to wear heavy iron masks and padding for protection
when they go down. A couple of technological innovations sorted

(05:29):
this problem out a glass quality and corkage. Let's talk
glass quality. The British worked out how to make glass
was super hot whole fueled furnaces by six twenty three. Traditionally,
charcoal had been the safer and cooler fuel of choice,
but it was commonly produced from oak trees at the time,
and King James the First Navy, needed oak for its ships.

(05:51):
The higher temperatures and cosmetic but useful additions of iron
and manganese to the glass made the bottles much stronger.
This led to that boot in the popularity of sparkling
ciders and Merrit's observance of on purpose sparkling wines by
sixteen sixty two. The wire cap that hooks under the
bottle's lipped and secures the cork wouldn't come along until
eighteen forty four. Until then, corks were held in with

(06:13):
tied string to varying effect. The invention of the riddling
process in the early eighteen hundreds by the Vu Clicko
Champagne house also made sparkling wines quicker, easier, and thus
less expensive to produce. As for why we toast with it,
that's a little trickier, but it has to do with war.
Because of the Champagne region's location, it's seen a lot

(06:35):
of battles in its time. The tradition of French kings
being coornated in the Champagne region started after a battle
there in the fifth century CE, and the tradition of
celebrating the Champagne's wines grew from there, alongside the science
that made the drink possible. Today's episode was written by
me and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a

(06:57):
production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
in this a lots of other effervescent topics, visit our
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