Global Champagne Day – October 23, 2026

History of Global Champagne Day

The oldest recorded sparkling wine is Blanquette de Limoux, which was supposedly invented in 1531 by Benedictine monks in the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire, near Carcassonne. The process was achieved by bottling the wine before the initial fermentation had ended. A hundred years later, an English scientist named Christopher Merret documented the addition of sugar to a finished wine to create a second fermentation. He detailed to the Royal Society what is now called ‘méthode traditionnelle,’ in 1662, but it would not be used for champagne until the 19th century, about 200 years later.

In France, the creation of the first sparkling champagne was accidental. It was called the “Devil’s Wine” because bottles exploded or corks popped as a result of the pressure in the bottle. At the time, the bubbles were considered a fault. The invention of the muselet by Adolphe Jaquesson in 1844 helped prevent the corks from blowing out. Even when it began to be deliberately produced as a sparkling wine, for a very long time champagne was made using the ‘méthode rurale,’ in which the wine was bottled before the initial fermentation had finished.

The production of champagne saw massive growth in the 19th century, from a more regional production of 300,000 bottles a year in 1800 to 20 million bottles by 1850. In that century, champagne was noticeably sweeter than the ones from today. A taste for drier champagnes began when Perrier-Jouët decided not to sweeten his 1846 vintage before exporting it to London. Thus, in 1876, the designation of ‘brut’ champagne was created for the British, to identify the driest champagne, made with less than 0.4 ounces of added sugar per liter.