 It is thought that vineyards were planted in the Champagne region during Roman times, and that grape growing was kept alive in the area by the Church throughout the successive waves of conquerors that included the Franks, the Goths, the Burgunders, the Vandals, the Huns, and the Germans.
 During the middle ages, monks continued to improve winemaking methods. The tendency of wines to stop fermenting in northerly climates because of cold winter temperatures and then restart their fermentation in the spring was long considered a serious fault of the Champagne region, and many church winemakers were hard at work trying to solve this problem.
 One important figure in the history of winemaking of the Champagne region was Dom Pierre Pérignon, who was instrumental in creating Champagne as we know it. His innovations wine were the product of a long career of perfecting many aspects of winemaking in Champagne, including lower yields, cooler picking temperatures, delicate pressing of the grapes, and blending wine from different communes. He also championed the use of both heavier glass bottles and cork stoppers, both of which helped conserve the bubbles.
Dom Pérignon and his colleagues at the abbey of Hautvillers sold their wine to appreciative customers from royal circles and the aristocracy, even to the king. The oldest commecial company to sell the new sparkling wine, however, was established by Nicolas Ruinart in 1729.
 Through the reign of Louis XV and Louis XVI, sparkling Champagne wine was very fashionable with the French nobility, although it was far from the wine we know today. In fact, the wine of the time was cloudy. It was Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot and her cellarman Antoine Müller who perfected the process, called remuage or riddling, which removes the yeast of the secondary fermentation from the bottle.
She used holes cut in her kitchen table to perfect the method of slowly tilting and turning the bottles to gather the spent yeast in the neck of the bottle. This was an advance on the old tradition in Champagne of storing their wines upside down in sand. Remuage helped turn Champagne from a curiosity into a huge commercial success.
From these beginnings, Champagne began to grow in popularity. The work of La Veuve Clicquot and others, such as Claude Ruinart was instrumental in this growth. One important early market was Russia, where Mme. Clicquot had sent a secret shipment of her Champagne to Russia in 1814 in defiance of Napoleon's blockade. She attached special importance to Russia because their court was the most prestigious of Europe and the Russians were reputed to be great lovers of Champagne.
The region and its wines continued to develop through their first heyday in the 19th century, through the difficult times of the phylloxera epidemic, two world wars and the great depression.
The second half of the 20th century, however, saw steady and continued growth in the sales of Champagne. Sales doubled from 25 million bottles to 50 million bottles between 1940 and 1960. They increased by more than a factor of three between 1960 and 1980 to 176 million bottles. Between 1980 and 2000, sales increased to over 300 million bottles. This figure is close to the absolute ceiling created by the number of available acres multiplied by the maximum production per acre.
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Wine Regions of the World
