Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogo bomb here. Champagne is a celebratory drink, e
Speaker 1: pervescent drink to toast with. But sparkling wine was once
Speaker 1: the scourge of winemakers. The famous Domperignon was actually hired
Speaker 1: by a French wine maker to prevent wine from bubbling.
Speaker 1: So how did we get here? And what makes champagne champagne?
Speaker 1: Champagne is a type of sparkling wine produced in the
Speaker 1: Champagne region of France under particular circumstances. But okay, hold up,
Speaker 1: what's the sparkling wine? Does it contain glitter? Uh? No,
Speaker 1: It's a wine that's carbonated, meaning it contains dissolved carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide gas, which bubbles out of the liquid unless it's
Speaker 1: kept under pressure. That's why you might burp when you
Speaker 1: drink bubbly or beer or soda. Your stomach is pressurized,
Speaker 1: but not pressurized enough to keep the carbon dioxide dissolved,
Speaker 1: so it escapes as a gas. Other sparkling wines shouldn't
Speaker 1: technically be called champagne, and in some countries legally they
Speaker 1: cannot be called champagne, though that's really for labeling and
Speaker 1: marketing folks not for dinner conversations, and the Champagne region
Speaker 1: takes this seriously because it's their livelihood. So what makes
Speaker 1: a real Champagne A lot of things. Actually, it's all
Speaker 1: laid out in the Appalachion delgen controlle regulations and apologies
Speaker 1: from my French. It's it's a set of rules created
Speaker 1: by the French National Institute of Origin in Quality, which
Speaker 1: is a regulatory group in France meant to control the
Speaker 1: quality and branding of agricultural products like cheeses and wines.
Speaker 1: For champagne to be labeled Champagne, it must be produced
Speaker 1: from the growing of the grapes to the processing of
Speaker 1: the wine in the Champagne region, and from one or
Speaker 1: a blend of three main grape varieties Chatona, Peino noir
Speaker 1: and Pinomonier. There are all kinds of rules about how
Speaker 1: you handle the grapes, how they can be planted and pruned,
Speaker 1: how much fruit can be produced per hector, how much
Speaker 1: can be obtained from the fruit by weight, and how
Speaker 1: it can be fermented and stored. The process of making
Speaker 1: the wine is called the bold ChimpanA or traditional or classic. First,
Speaker 1: you produce bottles of still wine that have undergone a
Speaker 1: primary fermentation. That means that you take grape juice called
Speaker 1: must in the industry and add sugar and yeast to it. Yeast,
Speaker 1: of course, is a microscopic organism that, among other things,
Speaker 1: eats glucose and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol. The carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide is released from the liquid as a gas, and
Speaker 1: the ethanol is the alcohol in the finished wine. When
Speaker 1: the pH level hits a certain point on the acid
Speaker 1: end of the scale, you strain out the yeast and
Speaker 1: bottle the wine. So how do you get the bubbles.
Speaker 1: That's done by creating a secondary fermentation inside each bottle
Speaker 1: by adding in a bit more yeast and sugar. Whereas
Speaker 1: the carbon dioxide was a byproduct in the primary fermentation,
Speaker 1: it's the whole point of the secondary fermentation. To keep
Speaker 1: it in the bottles, you seal them tightly with crown caps,
Speaker 1: the kind that beer is sealed with. When the winemaker
Speaker 1: thinks it's good and sparkly. After a couple of months
Speaker 1: at least, the caps are removed and spent yeast, called
Speaker 1: the lea's is taken out in a process called riddling.
Speaker 1: Each bottle is then topped off with a bit more
Speaker 1: still wine and usually a bit more sugar to taste.
Speaker 1: This edition is called the dossage. Then hefty corks are
Speaker 1: inserted and backed up by a wire cage cap to
Speaker 1: hold in the now highly pressurized contents. Champagne's run about
Speaker 1: five to seven atmospheres inside the bottle a k a.
Speaker 1: Five to seven times the pressure that we experience just
Speaker 1: hanging out around sea level, so being inside the bottle
Speaker 1: would be like diving fifty to seventy under water about
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty two thirty feet, which is deep.
Speaker 1: It's also about the same pressure as is in a
Speaker 1: semitruck tire. The final product must then be aged for
Speaker 1: at least fifteen months for a typical blended champagne, or
Speaker 1: at least three years for a single vintage champagne, and
Speaker 1: it must have a minimum alcohol content. But the very
Speaker 1: first sparkling wines probably didn't have and in the Champagne
Speaker 1: region and were very probably accidents of unintentional secondary fermentation.
Speaker 1: The first historical record of sparkling wines being made on
Speaker 1: purpose was in sixteen sixty two, when an English scientist
Speaker 1: named Christopher Merritt presented a paper to the Royal Society
Speaker 1: about how some wine humans of the time were adding
Speaker 1: sugar or molasses to finished wine barrels to create a
Speaker 1: second fermentation. And thus bubbles ciders were very popular in
Speaker 1: England at the time, and that's how they were made.
Speaker 1: But this wine thing was a curiosity before then. Sparkling
Speaker 1: wine was an accident and a dangerous accident. Legend and
Speaker 1: or history has it that the monk Dampaignon was assigned
Speaker 1: to stop this levin du Jab the Devil's Wine. The
Speaker 1: temperatures in the Champagne region get cold enough early enough
Speaker 1: that cellared bottled wine would stop fermenting in winter before
Speaker 1: the yeast was done doing its thing, and then when
Speaker 1: the weather warmed up again in the spring, the bottles
Speaker 1: would undergo a second fermentation, dramatically raising the pressure inside
Speaker 1: the bottles and making them go fizzy and then making
Speaker 1: them explode. And this was actually a weird and huge
Speaker 1: and scary problem. It was common to lose four to
Speaker 1: ten of a seller due to bursting, and bad warm
Speaker 1: fronts could lead to thirty of your bottles breaking, or
Speaker 1: entire sellers could be lost. A single bottle going off
Speaker 1: could start a chain reaction around the cellar. The workers
Speaker 1: had to wear heavy iron masks and padding for protection
Speaker 1: when they go down. A couple of technological innovations sorted
Speaker 1: this problem out a glass quality and corkage. Let's talk
Speaker 1: glass quality. The British worked out how to make glass
Speaker 1: was super hot whole fueled furnaces by six twenty three. Traditionally,
Speaker 1: charcoal had been the safer and cooler fuel of choice,
Speaker 1: but it was commonly produced from oak trees at the time,
Speaker 1: and King James the First Navy, needed oak for its ships.
Speaker 1: The higher temperatures and cosmetic but useful additions of iron
Speaker 1: and manganese to the glass made the bottles much stronger.
Speaker 1: This led to that boot in the popularity of sparkling
Speaker 1: ciders and Merrit's observance of on purpose sparkling wines by
Speaker 1: sixteen sixty two. The wire cap that hooks under the
Speaker 1: bottle's lipped and secures the cork wouldn't come along until
Speaker 1: eighteen forty four. Until then, corks were held in with
Speaker 1: tied string to varying effect. The invention of the riddling
Speaker 1: process in the early eighteen hundreds by the Vu Clicko
Speaker 1: Champagne house also made sparkling wines quicker, easier, and thus
Speaker 1: less expensive to produce. As for why we toast with it,
Speaker 1: that's a little trickier, but it has to do with war.
Speaker 1: Because of the Champagne region's location, it's seen a lot
Speaker 1: of battles in its time. The tradition of French kings
Speaker 1: being coornated in the Champagne region started after a battle
Speaker 1: there in the fifth century CE, and the tradition of
Speaker 1: celebrating the Champagne's wines grew from there, alongside the science
Speaker 1: that made the drink possible. Today's episode was written by
Speaker 1: me and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
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