Blanquette de Limoux Superior To Champagne
Yes, you read that correctly, it was 150 years before champagne was born that the monks of St. Hilaire created their masterpeice and with that Blanquette de Limoux was born.
Blanquette de Limoux is considered to be the first sparkling white wine produced in France, created long before the Champagne region became world renowned for the sparkling wine Champagne. The first textual mention of blanquette, from the Occitan word for "white", appeared in 1531 in papers written by Benedictine monks at an abbey in Saint-Hilaire. They detail the production and distribution of Saint-Hilaire's blanquette in cork-stoppered flasks. The region's location, north of the Cork Oak forest of Cataluña, gave Limoux producers easy access to the material needed to produce secondary fermentation in the flask, which produces the bubbles commonly associated with sparkling wine.
Local lore suggests that Dom Pérignon invented sparkling white wine while serving in this Abbey before moving to the Champagne region and popularizing the drink.
Records show that Livy traded in non-sparkling white wines from Limoux as far back as the Roman occupation of the region. In 1938, Blanquette de Limoux became the first AOC established in the Languedoc region. While the classification is still young, the drink itself is a long-standing traditional apéritif or dessert accompaniment in the area.