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A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH WINE AND THE
TRUE ORIGINS OF CHAMPAGNE |
A
Brief History
In this part
of the world the Romans started it all, introducing vines presumably somewhere
before the first century - 55 BC, the Roman Invasion, was one of those dates
everyone knew (maybe they still do - ask around!). We don't know much about
what the Vikings, Saxons, and other invading hordes did for British viticulture
but the Normans were keener on writing everything down. So we do know that by
about 1086 there were around fifty vineyards worthy of note, three of them in
Somerset. That takes care of the first millennium AD (with a bit of historic
licence).
For three
hundred years the industry flourished, until about 1350 when the Gulf Stream
changed course and with it the weather. According to Gillian Pearkes (Wine
Growing in Britain) production then started to dwindle, aided by various
plagues which depopulated the countryside. Then Henry II married Eleanor of
Aquitaine and gave the British access to the fine full-bodied wines of
Bordeaux, sounding the death knell for the struggling national product. Finally
Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, many of which had their own
vineyards, hammered the nail in the coffin of large-scale English wine
production.
Isolated
enthusiasts, however, kept some of the art and science of vine-growing alive,
in gardens both grand and humble in the south of the country, and in
greenhouses too. Samuel Pepys records his consumption of wines from several
vineyards around London.
Between the
two wars there is little evidence of commercial wine growing. However in 1945
two pioneers, Edward Hyams and Ray Barrington-Brock, laid the foundation for
the English wine industry when they began trials in their own gardens of
different grape varieties, published their results, and inspired others to
follow. The first vineyard in the `English Wine Revival' was established in the
1950s in Hampshire.
On the
threshold of the third millennium Jancis Robinson (Oxford Companion to Wine)
contrasts the early vineyards run by ‘retired gentlefolk with little experience
of viticulture’ with an industry which since the eighties had become
‘increasingly professional in its methods’.
The
Night we Invented Champagne!
Well we
didn't coin the word Champagne of course since this is the name of a region in
France, but recently published research by the acclaimed Champagne expert Tom
Stevenson proves the English did invent the process which turns a still wine,
made from grapes grown in that region, into the most famous sparkling wine in
the world, and the first mention of Sparkling Champagne was in English,
not French. This was in 1676 by Sir George Etherege in The Man of the Mode:
"...To the Mall and the Park where we
love till 'tis dark,
Then sparkling Champaign puts an end to
their reign;
It quickly recovers poor languishing
lovers..."
This was two
decades before even the French claim to have made their first sparkling
Champagne, which was in a document produced in 1718, referring to the emergence
of this type of wine some 20 years earlier (around 1695).
So how did
this come about? Many of you will know
will know that the essential difference between a still wine and either
Champagne or our own Special Reserve or Pink Sparklers, is that the bubbles
arise from a second fermentation taking place in the bottle – for a description
of the process see Sparkling Wine. The
carbon dioxide produced by this second fermentation cannot escape and dissolves
in the wine, to be released when the wine is drunk. The bottle is under high a
pressure of 6 bar (90 lbs/sq.in.) and 16th century bottles and wooden bungs
were inadequate to contain this pressure. This did not matter to the French who
kept their wine in casks, but the English liked their wine in bottles, and any
accidental second fermentation normally caused the bottle to fail. Still wines
from Champagne were particularly prone to this problem because the wine was
made in a cool climate and the initial fermentation often stopped prematurely,
only to re-start in the warm taverns and houses where it ended up. However it
was recognised that the sparkling effect much improved the otherwise mediocre
wine from that region. The problem facing the English wine coopers was how to
control the process.
It was the
improvement in bottle technology that gave the English their lead, though it
came about in a strange way. In 1615 Admiral Sir Robert Mansell, concerned by
the diversion of wood to charcoal production rather than ship-building,
persuaded King James I to issue a Royal Proclamation banning the use of
wood-fired furnaces, thereby forcing the use of coal. The much higher
temperatures achieved in coal-fired furnaces produced a stronger glass and
this, coupled with the re-discovery of cork for making stoppers, provided the
English with a wine bottle capable of withstanding the gas pressures produced
by making the wine sparkling. It is of interest to note that Mansell later
retired from the navy, built a glassworks, obtained a Royal Patent for the use
of coal, and hence a monopoly on making the new glass. He also developed
further improvements to strengthen it.
The English
wine coopers now had what they needed for the sparkling method, and the first
reference to it appears in a paper to the Royal Society by Christopher Merritt
entitled ‘The Ordering of Wines’ which refers to making sparkling wine by
English wine coopers as an established practice. This was over 30 years before
the French made their first Sparkling Champagne, and 70 years before the first
Champagne House was established. The French generally attribute the process to
Dom Perignon, but there is no evidence he actually produced even a single
bottle, indeed the only records of his work indicate that he spent his life
trying to stop the wine fermenting in the bottle. So that is the
historical record - the French perfected the process, and made Champagne
famous, but they did not invent it - we did.
All that
however relates to the history of sparkling wine and the making of that wine by
the French in Champagne – the actual growing of grapes and making sparkling
wine in England is a modern story which only goes back 20-30 years. Indeed
Moorlynch was one of the early vineyards to make such wine – starting back in
1988. It is worth noting that Tom Stevenson in his recently published
Encyclopaedia of Champagne and Sparkling Wines actually has a section headed
‘Great Britain’ and says ‘Britain is one of the few places on earth naturally
suited to growing grapes for sparkling wine’. This is why we believe sparkling
wine has a great future un England and Wales, so in producing such wines we are
truly entitled to be ‘Reclaiming the Sparkle’!