How the English invented champagne

Is champagne a wine region or a state of mind? The small bubbles have a way of getting into the bloodstream and the imagination, creating a slightly euphoric sensation which encourages pleasant chatter. But who put the sparkling genie in the bottle? Who pioneered the intricate process of secondary fermentation in a bottle strong enough to withstand six atmospheres of pressure and contains all those wonderful bubbles of CO2, about 20 million per bottle? 

In France, it is claimed that it was Dom Perignon (1638-1715), ‘Come quickly. I am tasting the stars,’ he is supposed to have said. Very romantic, a convenient sales pitch. The only problem is that the story is cobblers. Even eminent French wine historians now agree that there is no written evidence for it. 

Events in Hereford, Oxford, Somerset and London suggest a very different origin story. In the 1620s, strong dark green bottle glass, known as Verre Anglais, was invented by Huguenot glassmakers who had fled France. The onion shaped bottles had necks with a string lip for tying down the cork and a punt or kick in the bottom to make them stronger. In a legal judgment of 1662 given by the attorney general, four Huguenot glass makers made a sworn affidavit that Sir Kenelm Digby had invented this type of bottle while they were in his employ ‘neere thirty years earlier’.  

One cidermaker well-known to Sir Kenelm was a Hereford man, Lord Scudamore. In his 1631 to 1632 household accounts, he bought six dozen bottles from glass merchants in London and Gloucester and six dozen corks. He even has a ‘new lock for ye Sydar house door’ where he carried out his experiments in fermentation. After four years as Charles I’s ambassador in Paris, Scudamore returned and in 1639 he took six bottles of cider up to London. He also had a 14-inch-high cristallo glass flute made for drinking sparkling cider, engraved with the royal coat of arms on one side and his own on the other. This glass is now in the Museum of London.   

The glass looks very much like a champagne flute and yet, in 1639, Dom Perignon was only a one-year-old. So all the pioneering work – learning how to control the effervescence and the naughty little dregs was done in England by these cider makers with new-fangled tough dark bottles. Scudamore also had ‘rare contrived cellars’ with running water and he is credited with turning cider from ‘an unreguarded windy drinke fit only for Clownes and day labourers into a drink fit for Kings, Princes and Lords’. Sadly the civil war intervened and Scudamore’s lands in Herefordshire were sequestered.  

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Another cider maker, Ralph Austen, an ardent parliamentarian from Leek, had a large walled garden on Queen Street in Oxford which contained the world’s first cider bottling factory. In 1653 he wrote:  

Cider maybe kept perfect a good many years, if being settled it be drawn into bottles and well stopt with corkes and hard wax melted thereon, and bound down with pack thread, and then sunke down into a well or poole, or buried in the ground, or sand laid in a cellar.

Crucially, a note was printed in the margin of a book he published in 1657: ‘Put into each bottle a lump or two of hard sugar or sugar bruised’ – a crucial part of the champagne-making process. He was also on the right track. 

Next John Beale, fellow of the Royal Society and Vicar of Yeovil wrote many aphorisms on cider published in Pomona in John Evelyn’s Sylva. In a paper of 10 December 1662, John Beale mentions ‘A walnut of Sugar’ being added to every bottle of cider, something around 18g sugar per bottle which is spot on. The astronomer Sir Paul Neile uses a ‘nutmeg of Sugar’ playing on the safe side. Here you will find ‘Potgun Cider’ which flies around the house from the addition of too much sugar. Sir Paul also advises that bottling in the manner of cider ‘may doe good to French Wines also’. A crucial step forward. The first time that bottling with the addition of sugar has been articulated for French wine. This is 1663. Wine buffs take note: it is all about technique and méthode. Dom Perignon only enters Hautvillers Abbey in 1668.    

But did this cider fully sparkle? The key is in the word mantle, forming a vigorous head or froth. To mantle or not to mantle, that was the real question. In 1657, a letter from John Beale to Samuel Hartlib illustrates the point: ‘We will rather drinke pure water, than the water of rotteness, as we call all drinke that does not mantle vigorously.’

So mantling cider was de rigueur by 1657 or as the French would say, mousse. Royalist youth wanted to put a bit of sparkle back into life under Puritan rule. John Beale’s letter continues: ‘Our Cider, if it bee brisky, will dance in the cup some good while after it is powred out. They will not drinke cider, if it be no soe busy, as thoroughly to wash their eyes whilst they drinke it.’  

Now enter Silas Taylor, a parliamentarian captain of horse, with a family estate near Hereford and one of Pepys’s spies in Harwich and a composer to boot. It is Silas Taylor’s 1663 descriptions of cider in a letter to the Royal Society which gives real colour to the sparkling debate.  

I have tasted of it, three years old, very pleasant, though dangerously strong. The colour of it, when fine, is of sparkling yellow, like Canary, of a good full body and oyly: the taste of it like the flavour or perfume of excellent peaches, very grateful to the palate and stomach.

Excellent. But does it really sparkle? Silas Taylor then gives advice on how to bottle cider and the great care needed to get the timing right.  

This makes it drink, quick and lively; it comes into the glass not pale or troubled, but bright yellow, with a speedy vanishing nittiness (as the vinters call it) which evaporates with a Sparkling and whizzing noise.

The Oz Clarke of his day… So sparkling cider was not only on par with wine at this time, it was streaks ahead. They even had wooden racks for storing bottles with the necks pointing downwards. My hypothesis is that the cidermakers passed their knowledge onto the London wine merchants who perked up their flat champagne wine. That knowledge slowly filtered back to France. Viva Lord Scudamore. Ruinart, the first French champagne house was not founded till 1729. Voila!