The search for who “invented” Champagne is beginning to look like a viticultural version of Who Wrote Shakespeare, a saga that could go on and on. It is now generally accepted, even among knowledgeable French people, that the “methode champenoise” (ie allowing still white wine to have a secondary fermentation in the bottle) happened in England decades before the French got around to it. But who was responsible?
A new book by leading wine expert Stephen Skelton is in no doubt. The title of the book “ The Knight Who Invented Champagne” gives the accolade to Sir Kenelm Digby on the grounds that his furnaces – now fuelled by coal which achieved much higher temperatures than wood – were able to make glass bottles strong enough to withstand the enormous pressures of secondary fermentation. At this stage French champagne was a still white wine. France didn’t achieve secondary fermentation in the bottle until much later when they switched to coal. The proposition that the monk Dom Perignon was the inventor was fake news.
Does Kenelm Digby have a better claim? Stephen Skelton’s book is a fascinating tour d’horizon of winemaking, glass manufacture, politics and the astonishing life of the buccaneering Digby himself who killed several people in close combat. Well worth a read. But on the substantive issue there is a problem. Even if his factories did pioneer robust bottles – which is still debatable – that is only a sine qua non (without which, not) of the invention of “champagne” not a cause. You can’t have secondary fermentation without robust bottles but robust bottles alone don’t make or cause Champagne because you have to have something to put in the bottles.
Digby, curiously, has no known connection with wine. The word is not even mentioned in his magnum opus :The Closet Opened” which Skelton described as “an amazing treasure trove of domesticity” in which (apart from being the first place to mention eggs and bacon for breakfast) the word “bottle” is mentioned 98 times but never a hint of his involvement with it – and no mention of wine at all or indeed of glass-making. As the author admits, that is somewhat curious.
The main “proof” of Digby’s involvement is not anything he said but the sworn testimony in 1662 of four men before a court investigating a patent dispute. They claimed that Digby had invented glass bottles 30 years earlier.
For mentions of wine have to turn to champagne guru Tom Stevenson’s discovery in 1998 of a paper presented to the Royal Society In 1662 by Christopher Merret recording how coopers added vast quantities of sugar and molasses to “make them drink brisk & sparkling”. I was so amazed when I read this at the time that I wrote an editorial about it in The Guardian. However, this did not mean that Merret invented the methode champenoise” (except in the old Latin sense of “invenio” – to come across something) he merely recorded what he had seen among the coopers of London. He was a reporter.
While Digby may have been a sine qua non he was not the only one. There were others, not least Sir Robert Mansell who in 1615 – when Digby was only 12 years old – persuaded James l to ban wood in furnaces because forests were needed to reconstruct England’s navy. It could take thousands of trees to make a single ship. That certainly accelerated the trend to make strong bottles from coal-fired furnaces
Until documents are found linking individual coopers with a purposeful desire to exploit the new “discovery” it is tempting to say that although strong bottles were a sine qua non the whole movement towards sparkling wine wasn’t caused by anyone. It just happened. But without question it happened in England not France even though our geographic neighbours have yet to fully admit it.
The Knight Who Invented Champagne (Published by the Author £25)
Victor Keegan 
A corker!