SAINT HILAIRE, France — Everyone knows Dom Perignon “invented” Champagne, but the larger question is whether or not the famous Benedictine monk “invented” or “discovered” the first sparkling wine.
L’Abbaye de Hautvilliers near Epernay, in the Champagne region of France, is a living shrine to the Dom Perignon legend, which has it that Perignon noticed bottles bursting in the cellars at Hautvilliers. It is said he deduced the cold weather had stopped the primary fermentation, but the wines had been bottled anyway.
When spring arrived with warmer weather, the unfinished ferments started up again inside the bottle, creating bubbles and gas and eventually little explosions all over the Abbey’s cellar.
Dom Pergignon figured out how to replicate this natural phenomenon by adding yeast and sugar to still table wine and creating a second fermentation in the bottle by design, thus producing Champagne.
Not so fast, say the vignerons of Limoux, who have been producing the sparkling Blanuqette de Limoux for hundreds of years. It was at the l’Abbaye de Saint Hilaire, about six miles from Carcassonne in the Languedoc region of southwestern France, that history records the first mention of bubbly wine.
“This is the center of the earth; this is where it all started,” says Francoise Antech-Gazeau, whose family has been producing sparkling wine in Limoux for six generations. “The story of the bubbles began here in 1531 — 150 years before Dom Perignon! This is the story of Limoux. It wasn’t methode champenoise, but it was sparkling wine.”
Though she concedes Dom Perignon should be credited with figuring out how to make Champagne by adding yeast and sugar to generate a second fermentation in the bottle — methode champenoise — she can’t resist adding this little twist.
“The history is the history and we have the documentation, the paper, to prove that there was sparkling wine here first. This is the historic part of it. Then comes the legend. It makes the people of Champagne crazy. I love to make the people of Champagne crazy!
“The story — and we don’t really know if it is true, but it is the story — is that Dom Perignon was making a pilgrimage to the city of Saint James, Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Limoux is along the route, and Dom Perignon, who was a Benedictine monk, rested for some time at the Abbey of Saint Hilaire, which is also Benedictine.
“The story is that he stopped at the Abbey and found this wine with bubbles, and he took the recipe back to Champagne. We were very clever, but Dom Perignon apparently was better at marketing!”
Of course, we’ll never know. The secrets of Dom Perignon and the monks of the Abbey of Saint Hillaire are buried forever. But their legends live on.
PHOTOS: Francoise Antech-Gazeau telling the story of sparkling wine in Limoux, top; the courtyard of the Abbey of Saint Hilaire.
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