Interesting Facts About Champagne

Everyone knows Champagne is a sparkling wine made in France right? Well, maybe not everyone knows that the French were not the first one to drink it though. Champagne is the name of a French wine region in the North of the country, the two predominant grapes there are Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and that was actually the part of France where inexpensive, dry, white table wine was produced.
It was produced mostly for export to the neighbor England, where it was shipped still in barrels.

During that time, the technology that the wine maker had at his disposal was his own taste buds, so to detect if the wine in the barrel was fermented, all they did was to open the barrel, and taste the wine.
Today, for the majority of wines, fermentation is set off artificially, and maintained active by controlling its temperature monitoring the entire process.
If done naturally and without control of its temperature, it can take from a few hours, to several months, and it can be active in parts of the barrel and inactive in others.

At the beginning of the 1600s, this problem was unknown, until the English complained to their French wine suppliers about barrels of "foamy and funny tasting wine" that had been delivered to them from Champagne.
For wile French wine producers tried to prevent the wine to create bubbles, it took a wile before they decided to turn this lemon into lemonade.
Pierre Perignon, a Benedictine monk, was between the first, and maybe the most successful in Champagne making, he managed to capture the bubbles in the bottle, inventing a method called "Method Champenoise", which involve a process of double fermentation.