How an English Energy Crisis Helped Create Champagne
There’s lots of great champagne content floating around due to the dawning of the new year and new decade. Not that we’re complaining! We love champagne in any form 🙂
In the early 17th Century, the kingdom of England was in the grip of the world’s first energy crisis. Decades of population growth, rapid urbanization, countless foreign wars, and myriad voyages of discovery to the New World under the capricious Tudors decimated the country’s forests and its timber supply.
King James I was terrified. No trees for timber meant no ships for the navy, and no navy meant leaving the country wide open and undefended against England’s enemies—which, at this time, was pretty much all of the rest of Europe. This lack of timber was nothing short of an existential threat to England itself.
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