Hautvillers - Dom Pérignon's Abbey

Hautvillers - Dom Pérignon's Abbey

'Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!' — Dom Pérignon never said it. An ad man invented the quote in the 1800s. The real Dom Pérignon spent 47 years at this hillside abbey trying to PREVENT bubbles, which he considered a winemaking defect. What the Benedictine monk actually perfected was blending — assembling grapes from different villages into something no single vineyard could achieve alone. That technique is what makes Champagne Champagne. He's buried under a plain stone slab in the abbey church. Visitors leave corks on his grave. Moët named their most expensive bottle after the monk who hated bubbles.