Champagne was a region long before it was a sparkling wine. The region lies at a crossroads of northern Europe – the river valleys leading south to the Mediterranean and north to Paris, the English Channel and Western Germany.
   Until the latter half of the seventeenth century, the still wines of Champagne were rivaled only by those of Burgundy, the other proponent of the Pinot Noir grape.
   Rather than imitating the wines of Burgundy, the Champenois sought to create a new style of wines and discovered how to vinify light-colored wines ‘vin gris’ from the Pinot Noir grape.
   Although the red wines of Champagne had been known in England for some time, the new ‘vin gris’ was only introduced there in the early 1660s. A M. de Saint-Evremond, a former Courtier to Louis XIV moved to London and quickly established himself as an English society arbiter of fashion. Saint-Evremond loved the wines of Champagne above all others, and procured modest shipments of the wines, which became instantly popular. It is from this period that the first accounts of sparkling Champagne wines are found.
   These early sparkling wines were the result of an accident. Most ‘vin gris’ in France was drunk young; but when shipped abroad in cask, the warm spring weather frequently set off a secondary fermentation, still underway when the wines arrived. Through trade with Spain and Portugal, the cork stopper was already in common use in England for ales, an advantage the landlocked provinces of France did not yet enjoy. These delicate new wines were bottled immediately upon their arrival, and retained a lively sparkle.
   The first successful, deliberate methods of capturing the ‘mousse’ in the bottle were due to the combined efforts of the monastic orders of Pierry and Epernay. Under the direction of cellar masters, Frère Jean Oudart and Dom Pierre Pérignon, the abbeys of Saint-Pierre aux Monts de Châlons and Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers became the birthplaces of naturally sparkling wine in its purest and most perfect form. The abbeys were barely two miles apart and it is likely that these contemporaries consulted each other.
   Although sparkling Champagne was only about 10% of the region's output in the 18th century, it was enjoyed increasingly as the wine of English and French royalty and the lubricant of preference at aristocratic gatherings. Its popularity continued to grow until, in the 1800s, the sparkling wine industry was well established.
   Champagne has developed even further since those days with many refinements and improvements in quality. But the first true Champagnes were created in the late 1600s.