Pink champagne has always been a rare and refined treat. It oozes sophistication, opulence and a just, well, glamour. But who was the first to invent it and why?
One legend claims it was created for Marie Antoinette to match her bridesmaids’ dresses (which feels peak Antoinette). Another that it was a happy accident after leaving the skins of red grapes in for too long…
But whatever the story, the earliest historical evidence we have of pink champagne being made and enjoyed is from 14th March 1764. Sales ledgers found deep in the archives at Ruinart, the oldest established champagne house in the world, recorded: “a basket of 120 bottles, 60 of which were Oeil de Perdrix”.
Oeil de Perdrix is a wonderfully evocative French description, still occasionally used today by some traditional producers, and means ‘eye of the partridge’. The term refers to the very pale pink or delicate amber colour of the wine, which supposedly resembles the eye of a partridge that’s just been shot. The champagne would almost certainly have been made by leaving macerated dark grape skins in contact with the wine for a longer period – and yes, perhaps even by accident originally. The wine would have been paler than the styles of today and labelled as rozet, a term used in the late 18th century, predating rosé which was popularised in the 19th century and beyond.
There’s an interesting story about how Ruinart established its “wine with bubbles” business (as it was genuinely called) on 1st September 1729. At the time, the Ruinart family were wealthy cloth merchants in Reims, a major city in northeast France. Nicolas, the champagne visionary, founded the company essentially as a side hustle – giving bottles to customers who bought cloth as a ‘free gift’. It wasn’t long, of course, before those same customers were coming back solely for the wine – and Nicolas had the foresight to close the cloth business for good in 1735 to focus on his champagne making.
It is known that Nicolas’s ‘first’ shipment of Ruinart pink champagne in 1764 went to Germany, ordered for Charles II, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Interestingly, Charles’ sister was married to King George III of the United Kingdom, a royal court where champagne was very much enjoyed and admired, so the popularity of pink was almost guaranteed in the highest social circles.
Although around the same era, it's not true that pink champagne was invented for Marie Antionette. She was married to Louis, the French dauphin, in 1770 (aged 14) and became queen on 10th May 1774, so the dates don’t quite match up. Marie was definitely known to have played a significant role in popularizing champagne as a luxury essential – not least the shape of the coupe glass – but clearly didn’t inspire the invention of the pink variety.
Over the years, pink champagne has certainly grown in popularity – but it was still surprisingly hard to make and find. Its fastest rise to prominence came in 1818 when Madame Barbe-Nicole Clicquot of Veuve Clicquot invented an easier technique to turn champagne pink. But to give an example of its comparative scarcity, of the 300-350 million bottles of champagne sold around the world every year today, only about 20 million are pink.
So how do you actually make pink champagne? It’s here we stray onto the sexy subject of fermentation. All champagne is made using two fermentations, while ‘flat’ wine is made from just one. Champagne’s first is simply pure pressed grape juice that’s fermented, creating the foundational fruit flavours and alcohol. The second is a little more complex and unique to sparkling wines, taking place within the bottle.
Each champagne house blends a special combination of their own fermented wines together to create a cuvée – to their recipe, style and profile. Just as this cuvée is bottled, a liqueur de tirage (a mix of yeast and cane or beet sugar dissolved in the base wine) is added to kick-start the secondary fermentation.
The idea is that unlike in the primary fermentation, where the effervescence escapes, the yeast will eat the sugar, creating CO2 bubbles that then dissolve into the wine, making it fizzy. But this of course also causes an increase in pressure within the bottle (the reason the cork ‘pops’ when you open it).
(In the early days of champagne making, this pressure used to be hard to get right and would often cause catastrophic explosions during maturation, forcing many craftsmen to wear face masks in the cellars! Even as late as the 19th century, champagne houses were sometimes said to lose 80% of all their bottles).
This secondary fermentation takes place over six to eight weeks in a cool chalk cellar, known as a crayère, which has a constant temperature of around 11°C and humidity levels close to 100%. This is a really important time for the development of the bubbles – the conditions must be perfect. If the fermentation is too fast, the bubbles will be large and go instantly flat after pouring. But done slowly and carefully, the wine will have finer, more delicate bubbles. After they’ve been fermented, the bottles are kept in the cellars for a minimum of 15 months before they can be released out into the world.
Pink champagne is essentially just a normal ‘white’ champagne with a bit of added colour (sorry to burst the bubble) – which can be added in two main ways. The first is literally to add still red wine to the assemblage (about 15% of the total) just before the second fermentation – which is what Madame Clicquot invented. The second is to leave the macerated red grape skins in contact with the wine for a few hours before pressing – like Nicolas Ruinart almost certainly did – to create the desired colour, a traditional method called saignée. Both are pretty risky – even the smallest miscalculation can make perfectly good champagne unsellable.
These days, most pink champagnes are made the first way, by adding red wine, usually a Pinot Noir or a Pinot Meunier. This wine is specifically made to make pink champagne pink – never sold separately – with about three million bottles produced annually for exactly this purpose.
As you can imagine, pink champagne has had its fair share of scandals over the years. It was particularly popular with courtesans in 19th century Paris, the most famous of which was Countess Henkel von Donnersmarck, known as La Païva, who moved in very high cultural and aristocratic circles. She was known for her indulgent and excessive behaviour during her trysts, often demanding magnums of pink champagne while she ‘entertained’ wealthy guests in her luxurious Champs-Elysée mansion.
Another over-the-top Paris-based courtesan of the time was Eliza Crouch, who went under the pseudonym of Cora Pearl. Born in the UK, she was even more outrageous and extravagant, often drinking pink champagne out of her shoes (at one of her dinners, she ‘served’ herself naked on a silver platter, carried by four men, asking guests to “cut into the next dish”!).
Later, in the 20th century, pink champagne was regularly turning up in Hollywood, most memorably in An Affair to Remember, a Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr blockbuster in 1959 that had them drinking pink champagne throughout their burgeoning love affair on an ocean liner. Naturally, sales spiked that year in the USA! In the 1980s, President Reagan was said to enjoy pink champagne while munching on jellybeans.
Pink champagne, of course, is now an established luxury item, respectable but still with a whiff of opulence and affluence about it. As we’ve seen, it has always piqued the public imagination, often seen as the naughty, romantic and slightly scandalous sister to the more traditional ‘white’ champagne. Well, as Cora Pearl might say, if the shoe fits…
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