France, Champagne

Madame Clicquot's innovation still influences the making of champagne today. Traditionally the champagne process was based on the addition of yeast at the end of fermentation to make the wine sparkle. However the by-product of this caused the wine to become naturally cloudy. Madame Clicquot - a formidable and creative woman – realised she needed to come up with a better solution for her elite clientele. In 1816 a revolutionary idea came to her: to make holes in her kitchen table and to put full bottles upside down and shake them carefully and regularly to make the cloudy deposit descend to the neck of the bottle. This sediment was then removed by a skilful operation called disgorging.