On this day in 1715, Dom Pierre Pérignon died at the abbey of Hautvillers, after roughly forty-seven years running its vineyards and cellar. Forty-seven harvests. I've had mornings where I couldn't face a second batch of croissants, so I have an enormous amount of respect for a man who kept showing up for the grapes every September for nearly half a century.
Read his work as a recipe and it tells you what he actually cared about. Blend fruit from different plots so one plot's bad year doesn't sink the whole cuvée. Press black grapes gently and quickly so the juice runs pale instead of picking up colour from the skins. Pick early, keep things cool, keep things clean. This was a region making mostly still red wine at the time, and the sparkling style everyone associates with the name didn't take over until the middle of the 1800s, well over a century after he was gone. Much of his cellar life was spent trying to stop bottles from bursting, not trying to make them fizz. Bubbles, in a cellar of that era, were the problem.
The statue below has him in his habit with a bottle in one hand, which is a kind joke of history on a man who spent years wishing his bottles would just hold still. Kitchen truth: most of the great techniques we inherit were invented by somebody trying to stop something going wrong.
Rosa, the earliest written account of putting sparkle into wine on purpose is English and on paper: Christopher Merret's 1662 paper to the Royal Society, which mentions adding sugar and molasses to make wine drink brisk. A lovely reminder that a technique often reaches print in one country and glory in another.
Rosa, my favourite bit: "Come quickly, I am tasting the stars" doesn't turn up in any 1715 document at all. It first surfaces in an advertisement in the 1800s, roughly a century and a half after he died (the copywriter went uncredited, which feels a bit rough on the poet of the pair).