Reviving the Ancient Monastery Where Dom Pérignon was Born

A couple weeks ago, grape pickers in Champagne, France, began the monthlong harvest, or les vendanges, as the locals say. The winemakers will then do a single press of the three grape varieties used to make Champagne —Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier—bottle it, and wait until the carbon dioxide builds into a delicate fizz through a two-step fermentation process known as the méthode champenoise. It takes three years to make a nonvintage bottle. (Vintage Champagnes—meaning those of a particular year, such as the famed Dom Pérignon, the grand homme of them all—can take much longer, often at least a decade.)

As it happens, it has also taken three years to restore the magisterial abbey, cloisters, and gardens of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers, the hillside monastery where a Benedictine monk named Pierre Pérignon came upon the méthode champenoise in 1670. The monks prayed at Saint-Sindulphe, an austere yet elegant stone church built on the monastery grounds in 1698, which has carvings of grapevines on the oak pulpit. It is here that Dom Pérignon is buried.

The Abbey d’Hautvillers, built in 650, was sacked and burned many times over the centuries. All that remains of the original structure today is a main building featuring a beautiful cloister gallery and an entrance built in 1692, known as the Porte Saint-Hélène. To restore the portal, Dom Pérignon hired master woodworkers to carve three cubic meters of oak from the Ardennes Forest. For the cloister gallery, local stonemasons who specialized in 17th-century techniques were brought in. The abbey itself is a long, two-story building of white stone built in the clean, regal style of Louis XIV. Upstairs in the light-filled library—sadly most of its books were pillaged during the many wars in the region—craftsmen restored the oak parquet, shutters, and window frames.

The abbey is now owned by Moët & Chandon, part of the LVMH Group, which produces Dom Pérignon Champagne. When Pérignon lived there in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a maze of 20 buildings, courtyards, and gardens where the monks contemplated, tilled the soil, and worked on illuminated manuscripts. “It was a place of peace, tranquility, and knowledge,” says Richard Geoffroy, the chef de cave for Dom Pérignon Champagne today. It is Geoffroy who decides whether a harvest is good enough to create a Dom Pérignon vintage, along with overseeing the blending and deciding when a vintage is ready to be released to the market.

Geoffroy, a trim, distinguished gentleman and seventh-generation Champagne maker, also hosts private tastings at the long oak refectory table in the library. Guests are offered the Dom Pérignon vintages currently available on the market—at the moment that includes 2003, the year of a blistering heat wave that made the grapes difficult to blend but created a rich, sumptuous wine, and 2002, a crisp, drier blend—and asked to compare them to other splendid years, such as 1992, 1985, 1975, and 1969, that are occasionally rereleased in small quantities for sale. (Today, 2003 retails for about $155 a bottle, and 2002 for about $170.) “Dom Pérignon was the entrepreneur of Champagne,” says Geoffroy. “He made it happen.”

Indeed, he did. During his time at the abbey, Pérignon increased the vineyard land from 10 hectares to 25—some of which still yields grapes today. The monk was rightly proud of his bubbly, which was served at the court of Versailles. “I am sending you 26 bottles of the best wine in the world,” he wrote to the mayor of Epernay, now the headquarters for many Champagne houses. Aptly, Mr. Geoffroy adds, “It was the most expensive, too.”