In January 1911 nothing stopped them.
Her anger spread, first in the villages of Damery and Hautvilliers.
When trucks full of grapes from the Loire arrived in the small towns of Champagne, the winegrowers there had definitely had enough.
They intercepted the trucks, pulled the drivers out, and dumped the whole load into the Marne River.
The entourage moved on to the cellars of large champagne cellars, where thousands of bottles were smashed and barrels ended up in the Marne.
The owner managed to escape from the encircled champagne house Achille Perrier and hid in his caretaker's apartment.
"Down with the swindlers!" Yelled the protesters.
The protests soon hit the village of Ay, where the traditional Bollinger company is also based.
An angry, pillaging and looting crowd marched through the streets, kicking in doors and devastating houses.
First some warehouses went up in flames, then almost the entire city was on fire.
"We are in a kind of civil war!" The prefect of the region telegraphed to Paris.
The central government sent more than 40,000 soldiers to Champagne, and a post was made in every small village.
But it would take a long time for peace to reign, as the author Dominique Fradet writes in his chronicle of 1911 and the "champagne revolution".
The phylloxera came as a stowaway
The anger in Champagne, the wine-growing region in northeastern France, had been fermenting for almost 20 years.
The biggest problem was initially phylloxera: it had attacked the vines, gnawed at the roots, fed on the sap and left wounds that could cause many diseases.
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Voracious enemy of winemakers: phylloxera destroyed millions of hectares of cultivated land
Photo: Imagno / ullstein bild
The phylloxera came as a stowaway, as unwanted cargo to seedlings on steamers.
What is certain is that it was introduced from the US east coast around 1862.
This year a friend north of Avignon had given a friend to a winemaker and planted them a few vines - a fatal decision.
After two years he discovered that the leaves had become strangely discolored and that his vines were stunted.
The disease quickly spread to all the vineyards.
The desperate winemakers tried everything to be able to continue to earn money.
For example, they introduced carbon disulfide into the soil - a nerve poison to put an end to phylloxera.
But that only worked for a short time.
Brass music should frighten the greedy lice
The government promised a reward of 20,000 francs for an antidote, and the strangest ideas were tried.
A brass band marched into a vineyard and tried to drive away phylloxera with marching music;
someone buried a live toad among the vines.
But the lice just kept on gnawing, unimpressed.
The catastrophe took its course;
In 1900, all the vines on 2.5 million hectares of cultivated land had to be destroyed.
The winemakers had no choice, they had to rebuild their vineyards.
Few had savings, the government gave no aid.
The winegrowers had to wait three to five years for the next harvest in Champagne.
With phylloxera came doom across the Atlantic - but also came to the rescue: robust American vines whose roots could not harm the nasty lice.
Varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay could be grafted onto these imported wild vines as a base;
resilient hybrids let grapes grow for noble wines.
This is how it is practiced worldwide today.
From the 1860s onwards, large parts of European wine were destroyed by phylloxera, an immense threat.
Without the varieties from the USA, says British wine expert Rebecca Gibb, there would be no French wine industry today.
And maybe none worldwide, because the phylloxera traveled everywhere.
"The poverty became terrible"
To this day, the structure of Champagne is special: With their mostly very small plots, it is not worthwhile for the winegrowers to purchase the equipment and technical equipment to press wine themselves.
That is why they sell their wine to large houses such as Moet & Chandon or Louis Roederer and have to haggle with their (sometimes hated) representatives about the price of the harvest.
The harvests in 1907, 1908 and 1909 were already bad, due to too much rain, hail and powdery mildew.
In September 1910, the winegrowers faced a catastrophe.
They only harvested about four percent of the usual amount.
At the same time, bread prices rose massively.
Nobody could sell grapes to the big champagne houses.
"Poverty became terrible," wrote Jean Nollevalle, former secretary of the winegrowers' union, in 1961.
In his memoirs, he primarily blamed fraud, economic hardship and rampant hunger for the outbreak of violence in 1911.
In the early 19th century, only 300,000 bottles were produced annually.
Champagne was originally a still wine, often red rather than white.
It was not until the champagne method, in which a second fermentation takes place in the bottle and sugar and yeast turn into alcohol and carbonic acid, that champagne became a luxury drink that was sold at high prices and was reserved for the nobility.
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The Prussian King Frederick the Great had his coffee made with champagne, seasoned with a little pepper.
Prince Albert Edward, from 1901 the British King Edward VII, allegedly liked to bathe in champagne.
He was also called "Dirty Bertie".
Rumor had it that he often visited the Paris brothel Le Chabanais, where he preferred to have a copper bathtub filled with champagne in a room reserved for him and then climb into it with several women.
Bottled dizziness - rhubarb juice to champagne
The thirst for champagne rose unstoppably worldwide.
Between 1890 and 1910 sales doubled, and in 1909 41 million bottles of champagne were decapitated worldwide.
There were hardly any grapes in Champagne.
To the annoyance of the winemakers, the champagne houses knew what to do: although the harvest failed, there was enough champagne for export.
What seemed like a miracle was dizziness in bottles.
The French railway network could transport large quantities of grapes from the Loire or Languedoc to the Champagne region at half the price paid by farmers there.
The big houses also bought wines from Spain and Germany.
Newspapers published rumors that some even imported rhubarb from England to make wine.
A law intended to restrict fraud failed.
The champagne houses argued that they could not be forbidden to trade in wines outside of Champagne.
The purchased grapes disappeared in the cellars and came out again as sparkling champagne.
The winemakers were beside themselves.
By April 1911, their violent protests caused millions in damage.
The champagne riots made headlines around the world.
A correspondent for the New York Times wrote on April 16 about an incident in Trépail, where barricades were erected on the streets:
“The army that was supposed to contain the unrest was greeted with a shower of broken bottles.
The soldiers, swinging their sabers through the air, managed to drive away the protesters.
In the vicinity of Reims, groups marched into the vineyards, destroyed 20 hectares of vineyards and burned the vines. "
"The Black Book of Murderers"
The residents also organized protest marches through the Champagne region and painted the slogan "Champagne or death" on their posters.
The anonymously written book "The Black Book of Murderers" lists producers who allegedly worked fraudulently - only the champagne houses named there were the target of the attacks.
The government eventually gave in to pressure from the street.
"The riots had a clear impact," wrote the wine expert Rebecca Gibb in an extensive research paper on the champagne riots.
Champagne was allowed to be produced only in the cultivation zones that were now defined.
The Marne department remained the most famous area;
the department of Aube wanted to be there too and was given permission to produce a second-class champagne there.
This eased tensions between the two areas.
In May 1911, buds again bloomed on the vines.
The harvest was plentiful, many grapes could be sold and the need decreased.
But the unrest did not really end until the First World War broke out.
The tensions between the winemakers and the houses persist to this day: every year the houses try to lower prices and the producers get as much out of it as possible.
In 2008 there was a new record for champagne sales.
A new appraisal of the cultivation area aims to increase the cultivation area by 1000 hectares.
With major consequences: Anyone who becomes a champagne winemaker as an owner can earn one million euros per hectare for their land.
However, if you stay on the wrong side of the champagne border, your land is often only worth 5,000 euros per hectare.
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