Vintage Champagne

Champagne made from a single year’s harvest. Aged a minimum of three years and often four or five. Called MILLÉSIME in French.

Based on current anthropological data, the first evidence of grapevine domestication was about 1,000 years ago.

Answer: False.

The first hard evidence of grapevine domestication occurred 8,000 to 6,000 years ago in a triangular area extending from eastern Turkey to western Iran to Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The geneticist José Vouillamoz calls this area the “Grape’s Fertile Triangle.” This area overlaps with what archeologists call the Fertile Crescent, the ancient cradle of agriculture where wheat, rye, and legumes were first cultivated.

“Nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin.”

—Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769 – 1821)

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