Sparkling

The history of sparkling wine is, at its core, a story about a happy accident. In the cool cellars beneath the chalk hills of Champagne, France, Benedictine monks in the seventeenth century noticed something strange happening to their wines. Bottles that had been sealed during autumn, when cold temperatures prematurely halted fermentation, would begin to referment in the spring as the cellars warmed. Carbon dioxide, trapped inside the sealed bottles, dissolved into the wine and created pressure. Some bottles exploded. Others survived and produced something entirely new: a wine with bubbles, with life, with an energy that still wine could never replicate.

For a long time, this was considered a flaw. Winemakers in Champagne wanted to make great still wines, not fizzy ones that blew corks across the cellar. But tastes changed, particularly in the English market, where merchants and drinkers began to seek out these effervescent oddities. Dom Pérignon, the Benedictine monk whose name is now synonymous with luxury Champagne, did not invent sparkling wine, despite what popular mythology suggests. What he did was pioneer the art of blending, combining grapes from different vineyards and vintages to create a base wine of greater complexity than any single vineyard could produce on its own.

From Champagne, the idea of sparkling wine spread across Europe. In the Veneto region of northeastern Italy, producers began working with the Glera grape to create Prosecco. In Lombardia, winemakers in the Franciacorta appellation developed their own tradition of bottle-fermented sparkling wines. In Trentino-Alto Adige, the mountain vineyards of Trento DOC began producing sparkling wines with the precision and freshness that come from high altitude and cold nights.