Wine making grapes were probably first being cultivated in northeastern province of France during Roman Gaul about 50 years after birth of Christ.
Yet everything stalled in AD 79, when Domitian, protectionist Roman emperor, decreed that the vineyard of Gaul be uprooted.
Probus, a gardener’s son, lifted the ban 200 years later, and the hedonistic Romans soon came to love the wines from Champagne.
Though wine had been produced in the Champagne region of France since Roman times, it was not until the end of the 17th century that the product known as champagne was first created. It was the time when the first highly sparkling wines appeared and not until the early 19th century that champagne became synonymous with sparkling wine.
During 5th century, a pagan Frankish warlord called Clovis defeated the Romans and declared himself king of land around Reims.
According to history, Champagne has been present at momentous occasions since the year AD 496, when Clovis, the King of the Franks, was converted to Christianity and was anointed with champagne.
French kings were crowned in Reims, a city in the middle of the Champagne region, between 898 and 1825, and these celebrations included copious amounts of the sparkling champagne wine.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Catholic religious institutions, particularly the monasteries, became the repositories of the brewing and wine-making techniques developed in the ancient world.
French monks perfected the art of sparkling champagne, were probably the first to fortify sherry, and brought distillation into widespread use on the European continent.
Ancient history of champagne
