Dom Pérignon did not invent Champagne.

This is inconvenient, given how beautifully the story fits on a label.

When Pierre Pérignon arrived at the Abbey of Hautvillers in 1668, Champagne was still principally a region of still wine. Bottled wines could begin fermenting again when temperatures rose, trapping carbon dioxide inside.

The result was bubbles. Sometimes charming. Sometimes an extremely expensive way of discovering the limitations of seventeenth-century glass.

Pérignon’s real contribution was less cinematic and considerably more important.

He improved the quality of the wines, became particularly associated with systematic blending, and helped refine the production of pale wines from black grapes.

Not quite “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.” Considerably more useful.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, an English physician and scientist called Christopher Merret had already described something rather interesting.

In 1662 — six years before Pérignon arrived at Hautvillers — Merret presented a paper to the Royal Society recording that English wine coopers were adding sugar or molasses to wines to make them sparkling.

The document still exists.

History can be annoyingly well organised when it wants to ruin a good legend.

So Pérignon gave Champagne enormously important advances in viticulture, blending and winemaking.

He did not invent the bubbles. And there is no contemporary evidence that he summoned his fellow monks to come and taste the stars.

That part arrived later.

Merret got the manuscript.

Pérignon got the marketing department.