Ep 609: The Greats -A History of Champagne (How Champagne Became Champagne) - Part 1

Wine for Normal People

Arts, Food

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2026

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

This is part of a two-part series on the history of Champagne, which tells the story of how Champagne became Champagne!

Photo: Champagne vineyards before mechanization. Source: Union des Maisons de Champagne

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole when I discovered an entire encyclopedia of the history of Champagne on the Union des Maisons de Champagne site. It was the equivalent of 200 pages of information on Champagne from its origins up until the 1980s and was detailed and fascinating.

I tried to cull it down, but the information was just too vast and too interesting not to share! So this will be a two-parter. In this show I cover:

The origins of the Champagne vineyard with the Romans in the late 400s through the Middle Ages
The 13^th Century when Champagne was used in the coronation of the French kings and began its life as a wine for royalty
The changes from feudalism to sharecropping through the 1500s, with all the ups and downs in the fortunes of the region
The grapes of the time and the first major innovation for Champagne – Vin gris – making white(ish) wine from red grapes
The contributions of Dom Perignon to Champagne

Photo: Statue of Dom Perignon Source: Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The role of the English in making a market for sparkling wine, and making the necessary accoutrements to hold a sparkling wine, as well
The effects of the French Revolution on Champagne that still exist today
The grapes and how they evolved over the centuries in Champagne

I take you up to the 1800s, when the real Champagne innovations start to happen. That will be in Part 2, along with details on how Champagne took over the world in the 19th and 20th centuries!

Enjoy and Part 2 will be here before you know it!

Source of all this fascinating info is...

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it.
0:15.8	I'm your host Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book and Certified Wine Doork.
0:21.3	Before we get started, a quick thanks to our sponsor, Wine Access, for supporting this show.
0:25.9	If you love discovering great wine but don't want to waste money guessing what to order,
0:30.0	Wine Access makes it easy.
0:31.9	They work with top winemakers and sommeliers to find exceptional bottles you normally wouldn't discover on your own.
0:38.0	All shipped directly to your door. Visit wineaccess.com slash WFMP. That's wine access.com slash WFMP, and use code
0:46.1	WFMP 26 for 10% off your first order. Well, I thought this show was just going to be one big show,
0:57.9	but it turned out that there's so much content that it's two shows. The first takes you from the genesis of champagne with the Romans all the way through to the beginning of sparkling wine.
1:04.7	The confusion over how it got sparkling, some of the innovations around sparkling.
1:09.4	And then we wrap up with some of the very interesting
1:12.1	grapes and the idea that maybe Pino-Mune almost didn't make it into the blend, but it's
1:17.5	stuck around. It's still here today. You'll hear all about that in this part. Part two will cover
1:22.4	the mid to late 1800s and all of the very important innovations that have happened in Champaign
1:28.7	that we still use today. Then I'll go through the Phylloxer era, World War I, the Depression,
1:35.4	the Roaring 20s, World War II, and then the post-war era up until today. Lots of interesting
1:41.9	things in both shows. They're kind of different, even though I
1:44.7	recorded it all at once. I do need to break it up so it's not completely boring and you can
1:49.6	process some of this information. So enjoy it. And here's the show. I have posted that there
1:55.6	wasn't going to be a podcast. I'm sure not everybody got wind of that last week, but I got so involved in the research for
2:03.7	this show. And it is on the history of champagne. Now, many years ago, I did a show that was on
2:10.5	Champagne the region, not the winemaking. This is a much more involved look. I went on the
	...

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