As English as Champagne, by Morrie Sinclaire

Imagine you're making a cake (stay with me on this), and you want to bake the best cake in the world. However you find that when you take the cake out of the oven the mixture hasn't baked through and the middle is still 'gooey' (technical term). You see the cake as a failure, and improper, and a shame on your baking skills.

But also imagine you have inadvertently served this cake to guests and they love it! To them the sticky cake mix centre and the slightly crusty spongy cake perimeter is a great new taste.

Ok? So this sets the scene for you to imagine that the cake is Champagne wine of the 1600s, and the guests loving this imperfect item are the people of England.

You see wine from Champagne was never intended to have bubbles! The Champenois wanted to emulate the red wines made in Burgundy, so when they heard of, and saw, these bubbles the winemakers of the Champagne region were mighty embarrassed, and they spent a jolly long time trying to figure out how to stop the bubbles from happening. These bubbles were a sign of a faulty wine. The people of Champagne were making a mistake and they didn't know why!

Study has shown that the reason for the 'annoying' bubbles in the 1600s Champagne wine was the temperature of the fermentation.

You see, in winemaking a key part of the job is to encourage yeast to eat the grape sugar (fermentation). The by-product of this yeast eating is alcohol and carbon dioxide...

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This artcile appears courtesy of Morrie Sinclaire.