Wine has been humanity's drink of record for about eight thousand years, which is plenty of time to accumulate myths — and almost everything people confidently repeat about it over dinner is slightly wrong. Three rounds follow. Commit to each answer out loud before the reveal, keep score, and pour something appropriate for the occasion.
Round One: The Bubble Round
Start with the biggest name on the label. Who invented champagne — was it the monk Dom Pérignon? Lock it in. No — and the truth is better. Pérignon was a real and talented cellar master, but he spent much of his career trying to get the bubbles out. In his day fizz was a defect that burst bottles in the cellar, and sparkling wine carried the nickname “the devil's wine.” The first person known to describe deliberately making wine sparkle was an Englishman: the scientist Christopher Merret, who told the Royal Society in 1662 that adding sugar to finished wine set off a second fermentation. England also happened to have the coal-fired glass strong enough to survive the experiment.
Follow-up: did Pérignon at least say the famous line, “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars”? Also no. The quote appears to originate in advertising from the late 19th century — roughly two hundred years after his death. History's most romantic wine moment is ad copy.
One more before the round closes: how much pressure is inside a bottle of champagne? Roughly three times what's in your car tires — which is why a carelessly loosed cork can top 30 miles an hour, and why you point the bottle away from anything you love.
Round Two: Skins, Corks, and Wine Diamonds
Where does red wine get its color? Not from the juice — squeeze nearly any wine grape, dark or pale, and the juice runs clear. The color leaches from the skins as they steep in the fermenting wine. That's how champagne houses conjure a white wine out of black pinot noir grapes: press gently, pull the juice off the skins fast, and you get a blanc de noirs — literally a “white of blacks.”
Cork question. Where does natural cork come from, and does harvesting it kill the tree? It's the bark of the cork oak, stripped by hand roughly every nine years — and the tree shrugs it off. A cork oak can live around two centuries and be harvested more than a dozen times, and about half the world's supply comes from Portugal.
Two quick ones for the detail-oriented. What are the little crystals sometimes clinging to a cork or settled in your glass? “Wine diamonds” — harmless tartrate crystals, a sign of a lightly processed wine rather than a flaw. And what is the dimple in the bottom of a wine bottle for? Trick question: nobody fully agrees. The punt has been credited with adding strength, stability, and somewhere to put your thumb, but the honest answer is that it's largely a holdover from hand-blown glassmaking that simply never left.
Last one this round: why is raising a glass called a toast? Because of actual toast. For centuries, spiced or scorched bread was floated in wine to mellow its flavor, and the custom of drinking to someone's honor took its name from the bread in the bowl.
Round Three: History in a Glass
How far back does winemaking go? The earliest chemical traces found so far come from pottery jars in the country of Georgia, dating back about 8,000 years. And the oldest bottle that's still liquid? The Speyer wine bottle, sealed in a Roman tomb in Germany around the 4th century AD and unearthed in 1867 — roughly 1,700 years old, on display in a museum, and still unopened because no one is quite brave enough.
Now the catastrophe question. In the late 1800s, a tiny American insect called phylloxera annihilated vast stretches of Europe's vineyards. What saved French wine? American roots. European vines were grafted onto resistant American rootstock, and to this day most of the great châteaux grow their grapes on American roots. France has largely made peace with this.
Prohibition next: how did California grape growers survive the 1920s? With “wine bricks” — blocks of grape concentrate sold with a solemn warning not to dissolve one in water and leave it in a cool cupboard for 21 days, because it would turn into wine. California's vineyard acreage actually grew during Prohibition.
Two closers. At a 1976 blind tasting now called the Judgment of Paris, French judges rated California wines above France's best in both red and white — and only one journalist bothered to show up to watch history happen. And the most expensive standard bottle ever sold at auction? A 1945 Romanée-Conti, which went for over half a million dollars in 2018. That's roughly $100,000 a glass, before tip.
Tally your score. If you caught the Englishman behind the bubbles, the bread in the toast, and the bricks that broke Prohibition, you've earned the good bottle tonight — American roots and all.
