What Makes Champagne Champagne?

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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

production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this a lots of other effervescent topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.