IT’S ONE OF THE big “what ifs” of drink history. What would have happened if English cider-makers who experimented with bottle fermentation in the seventeenth century had perfected the technique of making fizz and marketed it around the world?
Would Shepton Mallet look a bit like Epernay, and the Champagne region be a rural backwater rather than the place with the most expensive vineyard land in the world? Instead, the work of learned men like Lord Scudamore, John Beale and Sir Kenelm Digby was capitalised on by the French, not by English cider-makers.