By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica.Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.

Between 1914 and 1918, heavy shelling uprooted row upon row of chardonnay and pinot noir vines, pruned short per the instructions of a 17th-century Benedictine monk named Dom Pérignon.

During World War I the trenches of the Western Front ran right through the vineyards of Champagne, the historic French winemaking region 90 miles north of

Cliquot’s innovation was to turn the bottles neck-down and let the yeast settle in the neck in a process known as “remuage” or riddling. All Rights Reserved. Champagne (/ ʃ æ m ˈ p eɪ n /, French: ) is a French sparkling wine.Many people use the term Champagne as a generic term for sparkling wine, but in the EU and some countries, it is illegal to label any product Champagne unless it came from the Champagne wine region of France and is produced under the rules of the appellation.

Some, like cava from Spanish Catalonia or prosecco from northeastern Italy, have created their own regional definitions and gained their own followings.

More than a century later, pioneering French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (who named oxygen and hydrogen) showed that during fermentation sugars broke down into alcohol and carbon dioxide—the stuff of bubbles. Le mot champagne est une variante de campagne.Ces termes sont dérivés du latin campus qui a donné en français camp et champ.

De 898 à 1825, c’est à Reims, au cœur de la région de Champagne, que les rois de France seront sacrés.

Wines from Champagne had a tendancy to fizz because early frosts often led to incomplete fermentation during the manufacturing process.

Le vin le plus connu de cette grande région viticole est le renommé vin de Champagne (ou tout …

No other wine is so associated with joy and festivity. All this for a local drink whose signature feature—its fizz—is the very thing old Dom Pérignon spent much of his life trying to eliminate.When wine has bubbles, it’s a sign that it has continued to ferment inside the bottle. Barrels of the stuff were shipped across the channel and bottled there. ).

Novelists such as Goethe, Zola and Pushkin wove it into their stories.

During the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the 20th century, an ill-advised producer even bottled a “Champagne Antijuif” marketed to anti-Semites.

Production skyrocketed: 30 million bottles were shipped in 1900.All that bubbly, and all that money, caused conflict as the traditional producers of the Champagne region sought to keep their brand undiluted by winemakers making bubbly with grapes from other parts of France or other countries entirely.

Although the first attempts to ban the use of “champagne” as a generic label date to the mid-1800s, it took until 1919 (and riots by various vintners) to settle on the official boundary lines of Champagne’s grape-growing area, outside of which true Champagne could not be made.

Histoire France, Patrimoine.

Le Champagne est un vin effervescent qui porte le nom de son appellation. In 1662 English physician Christopher Merret published a paper noting that if you added sugar to wine it would continue to ferment in the bottle, yielding bubbles. Champagne bottlers issued commemorative labels expressing all manner of public sentiments: liberalism, conservatism, nationalism.

Champagne boasts six cities listed as "Villes d'Art et Histoire" (Cities of Art and History), as well as five UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The region is coextensive with the former province of Champagne, which was bounded on the north by the bishopric of Liège and by Luxembourg, on the east by Lorraine, on the south by Burgundy, and on the west by Île-de-France and by Picardy. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. La Champagne, un lieu d’art et d’histoire.

Its meaning and appeal are universal.

Old traditions of pouring out wine when launching a new ship were modernized, with a bottle of Champagne shattered against the side to christen new steamships and airplanes.

History at your fingertips