But, should one feel otherwise inclined, this might be a useful subject with which to begin: -
https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=399fc0402f1b154b67965632e&id=319dbe9163&e=853bbb09da
Except an american site that makes it hard to reject tracking, personalised ads and so on. So can you summarise the interesting bit?
vos voisins
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Iâm using Adblock Plus and canât see any personalised ads on this page. However,
IN THE EARLY 17TH CENTURY, the kingdom of England was in the grip of the worldâs first energy crisis. Decades of population growth, rapid urbanization, countless foreign wars, and myriad voyages of discovery to the New World under the capricious Tudors decimated the countryâs forests and its timber supply.
King James I was terrified. No trees for timber meant no ships for the navy, and no navy meant leaving the country wide open and undefended against Englandâs enemiesâwhich, at this time, was pretty much all of the rest of Europe. This lack of timber was nothing short of an existential threat to England itself.
A panicked Royal proclamation was swiftly issued in 1615 to stem the tide. It bemoaned the increasing dearth of good old English wood, âgreat and large in height and bulkâ with âtoughness and heart,â which is âof excellent use for shipping,â and it set out a series of drastic restrictions for its use for anything but absolutely essential purposes. In particular, the proclamation explicitly forbade that anyone should be so wasteful as to âmelt, make or causeth to be melted or made, any kind, form or fashion of Glass or Glasses whatsoever, with Timber, or wood, or any Fewell made of Timber of wood.â
In this 18th-century print, English workers make bottles in âA Glass House.â HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
No timber as fuel to make glass? The countryâs glass-makers were outraged. They had been burning timber for centuries to make their product: an almost alchemical process of using fearsome heat to melt a mixture of potash and sand. What on earth were they to do now?
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While craftsmen around the country were up in arms about this new prohibition, the attentions of the London upper class were engrossed with a decadent new product.
English wine has long been maligned. The ancient historian Tacitus wrote that Britain was âhostile and unsuitable for the growing of grapes,â but it was his fellow Romans who brought their vines to Britain two millennia ago to sustain them in their drafty villas. A thousand years later, the Domesday Book listed 45 working vineyards in the country. And, in the 1600s, a new type of wine was being produced on the shores of England: refined and unique in character, to cater to the tastes of the affluent and upwardly mobile individuals who had flocked to the capital. And, for that, we turn to Christopher Merrett.
Champagneâs sweet taste and bubbles quickly made it a go-to for festive occasions, even for this group in the countryside. UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Sir Christopher Merrett was possessed by an insatiable curiosity. A librarian, gentleman scholar, physician, and, in the terminology of the time, a ânatural philosopher,â Merrett was one of the founding members of the Royal Society: the âinvisible collegeâ where the greatest minds of the age investigated the minutiae of the known world. His output was extraordinary. He even produced an exhaustively comprehensive book attempting to list all the fauna, flora, and minerals of England.
But itâs his 1662 paper, Some Observations Concerning the Ordering of Wines , that has had the longest legacy. âOur Wine-coopers of latter times use vast quantities of Sugar and Melosses to all sorts of Wines,â he wrote, âto make them drink brisk and sparkling and to give them Spirits.â
What Merrett was describing was the mĂ©thode champenoise, the act of secondary fermentation where still table wines are loaded up with sugar and molasses to get the yeast going again, then sealed in a bottle to produce an effervescent, bubbling concoction. It is a method made famous, as the name suggests, by the French in the Champagne region. But here is the first known description of making âsparklingâ wineâ âand Merrett writing that British vintners had been doing this for years.
The problem with this new liquid, âbrisk with spirits,â was that it generated an incredible amount of pressure. In a standard bottle of sparkling wine today, the internal pressure is at around six times that of atmospheric pressureâthree times that of a car tire. Thatâs the equivalent to more than five kilograms of weight pushing hard against every square centimeter of glass. Only an especially strong bottle could withstand this sort of pressure. Thankfully, Englandâs glass-makers were prepared.
âCome quickly, I am tasting the stars!â
After the royal proclamation a few years before, English glass-makers had reluctantly turned to coal. While wood was thought of as a noble fuel, across Europe coal was historically considered undesirable and dirty, and the act itself of mining it had been likened to vandalism or burglary from the earth ever since Roman times. Even though it was well known that rich seams of coal ran across England, these were left largely untouched for centuries.
Nonetheless, once laborers started begrudgingly using this coal to heat their furnaces, they overcame their reservations. Sure, coal gave off fumes and toxins, but it also reached a much higher temperature than timber, creating stronger, more durable, and thicker glass. Over time, artisans honed new industrial methods to take advantage of this discovery. While European counterparts were still using wood, the Champagne bottle as we know it was born in the furnaces of England.
Not only did these new bottles help spawn an embryonic wine industry, but they became status objects themselves. Samuel Pepys, in his Diaries, writes excitedly about visiting his local vintner to see âsome of my new bottles made, with my crest upon them, filled with wine, about five or six dozen.â The introduction of lead oxide later in the century made the bottles even stronger, and catapulted Englandâs craftsman to the pinnacle of European glass-makers.
Often, the discovery of Champagne is attributed to the monk Dom PĂ©rignon, depicted here with a bubbling bottle. CORBIS HISTORICAL/GETTY IMAGES
But what of Dom PĂ©rignonâ âthe French Benedictine monk who, as the story goes, first created this beverage that would become known around the world as Champagne? âCome quickly, I am tasting the stars!â he is said to have cried out. One can imagine the other monks rushing over to make merry with this novel and effervescent liquid that had just burst from its bottle.
But that thick, stout bottleâ âthe one memorialized in a grand statue of Dom PĂ©rignon that now stands on the lawn at the House of Moet & Chandon on the Avenue de Champagneâ âcould not have existed anywhere but Britain at the time. And, whatâs more, Merrettâs paper on the secondary fermentation of wine was submitted to the Royal Academy in 1663, five years before Dom PĂ©rignon even arrived at the abbey in which his famous invention was said to have been born. And decades before the famous saying could have been uttered.
The founding myth of Dom PĂ©rignon has played a vital part in transforming Champagne into one of the richest and most fiercely protected global food and drink regions. It is a convenient, if apocryphal, first-to-market story that has successfully given authority to the Champagne region over every other wine producing area. It was actually the infamous English sweet-tooth and the Londonerâs predilection for bubbles that first gave the wine-makers of Champagne inspiration; they just needed to work out how to create the right sort of bottle, like that of their cross-Channel cousins, in order to capitalize on the new potential market.
A statue on the Avenue de Champagne lauds Dom PĂ©rignon (and the humble bottle). VICTOR GRIGAS/CC BY-SA 4.0
This, however, took some time. Replacing wood with coal in the bottle-making process was not adopted in France until after 1700, to imitate and reproduce bottles Ă la façon dâAngleterre (âin the English fashionâ). But change was so gradual that, as late as 1784, French entrepreneurs were after the industrial âsecretâ of English bottle-making. And still, in 1833, when Cyrus Redding published his A History and Description of Modern Wines , anywhere between four to 40 percent of the Champagne regionâs wine was lost to exploding bottles every year. The bodily danger was so great, Redding wrote, that âworkmen [were] obliged to enter the cellars with wire masks, to guard against the fragments of glass when the breakage is frequent.â
It was not until the Industrial Revolution reached France that bottles could be produced with enough precision and standardization to withstand the pressure. By then, Champagneâs reputation was assured. For that, we have to thank both the English bottle and the worldâs first energy crisis.
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Thanks - thatâs the one I often forget - yet donât have that prob with nos and leursâŠ
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With the climate change itâs forcast that they wonât be able to make champagne in France , thatâs why there is a lot of buyers of land to create vinyards in Britain. We have already won awards but it canât be called Champagne of course.
Why would they want to call it champagne?
Champagne is a sparkling white wine made in a specific way in a specific region. There is also crémant, mousseux etc, all sparkling white wines but produced with slightly different characteristics.
Wanting to call it champagne just because itâs a sparkling white wine, is like wanting to call every hard cheese Cheddar.
EDIT - before someone jumps on me - ok, champagne can also be pinkâŠ
Given the popularity of Cava and Prosecco in the UK I would have thought not being Champagne would be a selling point
That will be one of the interesting facets of the âtrade dealâ to be negotiated by July 2020 - Boris had better get his skates on, or else âplain old fizzy wineâ it will be 
Should anyone doubt the power of trademarks, and the interplay between them and geographical indications of provenance, I could suggest a little light readingâŠ
Yes, but they would still have to call it something unique, distinguished, and instantly recognisable, and in that regard as yet, the British producers have been particularly uninspiredâŠ
It can also be still, and red, even though there is only one - Bouzy 
is a vin de Champagne (even though the appellation now is coteaux champenois.)