The Myth of Dom Perignon
Thursday, December 21st, 2006According to Kolleen Guy, author of When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, the bubbly that we know and love today can be credited to bad storage techniques of English consumers and not the ingenuity of French wine makers.
Once shunned as a trick by producers to cover the harsh tastes of bad wines, sparkling wine became fashionable with the trend-setting grande monde. Historians now generally agree that “sparkling wine first appeared among the consumers rather than the producers because it was a by-product of conservation techniques rather than the deliberate outcome of winemaking practice.” The bubbles occurred naturally when wine was made late in the year and the winter cold paralyzed the yeasts that normally turn grape sugars into alchohol. Warm spring weather reactivated the yeast, and the fermentation began again, producing a carbonic gas that created a slight “sparkle” in ordinarily still wine.
While reading When Champagne Became French, I was surprised to learn that the syndicate of champagne producers (the ominous sounding Syndicate was a group composed of the vignerons — the peasant wine growers — and the négociants — merchant-manufacturers) were using public relations tactics in the late nineteenth century that seem more twentieth century to “sell the story” (if you will) of champagne.
As part of a new range of social symbols for the aspiring elite, champagne could readily be exploited by those who supplied it. Yet this symbol of the French nation was a regional wine…Being a regional product but promoted as a national good in advertising and marketing spectacles, champagne gave the community that controlled its production a singular importance within the nation.
The Syndicate published pamphlets and articles that reinforced the notion that champagne was a symbol of the glory of France.
[They popularized] the unique genius of both the regional wines and the community by means of a number of myths about the industry and its “founders.” Probably the most infliential and most enduring concerned the “discovery” of sparkling wine. The largely forgotten monk Dom Pierre Pérignon was resurrected as the inventor of sparkling wine and the founder of the champagne industry. The creation of this myth is generally attributed to Dom Grossard, a former Benedictine monk…determined to memorialize the great “achievements” of the abbey.
Grossard began a letter writing campaign in 1821 based entirely on fiction (though Pérignon was a wine-maker, he did not invent champagne) and by the 1860s, authors writing about the region
unquestioningly attributed the discovery of the “secret” of sparkling wine to Dom Pérignon, who by now had been tranformed into a blind monk who used his highly developed senses of smell and taste to create the finest blend of wines. But Dom Pérignon’s “resurrection” did not have widespread recognition until the Syndicat du commerce began to use it for commercial purposes. At the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris, the Syndicat provided the public with an illustrated pamphlet that reproduced the Dom Pérignon story, declaring him to have been the “father” of sparkling wine. After tasting the wines of Champagne, the visitors could carry away this souvenir, sharing the Dom Pérignon story with friends and family in France and abroad. In 1896, the Syndicat produced a pamphlet entitled *Le Vin de Champagne* that unequivocally stated that Dom Pérignon had “discovered” champagne by following “ancient traditions.”
…in June 1914, the bicentennial of Dom Pérignon’s “discovery” was commermorated with a special color-illustrated issue. Under a drawing of Dom Pérignon, looking strikingly like St. Francis of Assisi opening a bottle of champagne, was the caption: “It was exactly two hundred years ago that Dom Pérignon, a Benedictine monk, discovered the art of making the wines of Champagne sparkle.”
While Grossard’s efforts were intended to promote the prestige of the Catholic Church, the myth of Dom Pérignon “served the more secular purpose of seducing the champagne-drinking public.”
Despite the almost industrial techniques used in sparkling wine production, the Dom Pérignon myth distanced champagne from any association with assembly lines, technology, and backbreaking labor. The monk’s “simple” invention was cultivated in public relations campaigns to create an image of champagne as being as effortless to create as it was to drink, a symbol of a balance between old-world traditions and the “good life” of the modern period.
As intriguing as these insights are into the creation of champagne, I found the thoroughness of When Champagne Became French a burden — this book, according to the foreward, began as a doctoral dissertation and unfortunately it reads as such…I didn’t make it beyond the second chapter. I would recommend this book to you strictly if you’re a dedicated oenologist or a hardcore Francophile.