The newborn belongs to a family of judicial officers about whom we have precise information. It states that 'this fifth was baptized Pierre Pérignon, son of Master Pierre Pérignon, clerk of the provostry, and Marguerite Le Roy godfather and godmother Pierre Joseph, Jeanne Pérignon'. He was baptized on January 5, 1639, as the register of his parish church attests. Pierre Pérignon was born at the end of December 1638 or in the first days of January 1639 in Sainte-Menehould in Argonne, a stronghold on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine facing the Empire. Nevertheless, with 'secrecy', even if it is only the discretion of a Benedictine religious who left the world to devote himself to Opus Dei, there is mystery, and mystery leads to legend. Did he have the 'secret of making sparkling and non-sparkling white wine and the means of clarifying it without having to unpack the bottles' as Dom Jean-Baptiste Grossard wrote more than a century after his death: no text proves it. More judicious in his praise, an anonymous author wrote in 1718 in a treatise on the way to cultivate the vine and to make wine in Champagne and what can be imitated in the other provinces, to improve the wines: ' Dom Pérignon Never man has been more skilful in making wine it is he who has put the wine of this abbey in great reputation '. As early as 1716, the man's name was so closely associated with his wine that a hasty author, Claude Brossette, Boileau's commentator, listing the great growths, made it the name of one of 'the most famous hillsides in the vicinity of Rheims which produce the Champagne wine Pérignon, Sillery, Hautvillers, Aÿ, Taissy, Verzenay and Saint-Thierry'. We are, however, not only certain of his existence but also of his exceptional talent as a manager and negotiator, which served his heavily indebted monastery well, and of his rare qualities as an oenologist before his time, at a time when everything was still left to empiricism. Some voices are raised to contest the exact role of Dom Pierre Pérignon in the 'invention' of Champagne, because very few documents remain and the legend is more recent than its hero. Almost three centuries ago, and we are not sure of anything.

Life flashing before your eyes vine