HAVING FAITH Chapter One - Drowning Aimee Semple McPherson

I believe the watch made the lady a liar. She vanished into the surf of a California beach attired only in a modest one piece green bathing suit and cap.  She miraculously  reappeared five hundred miles away, dry as a bone. She said she had been kidnapped. But in the intervening five weeks the lady had somehow acquired shoes, a dress and a corset...and a wrist watch. Now, why would a kidnapper provide their hostage with a wrist watch? The miraculous time piece is proof to me that the popular evangelical radio minister Aimee Semple McPherson (above) had not been kidnapped. But that remains just my personal opinion, because the Los Angeles County Prosecutor in 1926 was a major league sleaze ball.

“Through green-white breakers swift I leap,

Sun-sparkled seas by body keep;
Bearer of Gospel-Glory I
With singing angels in my sky...”

At just about 3:30 in the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 May, 1926, Miss Emma Shaffer (below) walked up to the front desk of the Ocean View Hotel, at Rose Avenue and across Ocean Front Walk from Venice Beach, California. The young woman was the private secretary to the popular evangelical preacher Aimee Semple Mcpherson, and the pair had rented a room earlier in the afternoon, where they changed into their swim suits. Aimee carefully left her wrist watch on the dresser in the hotel room. And after reaching the sand, she had immediately gone into the ocean for a swim, while Miss Shaffer remained under their rented beach umbrella. When Aimee returned, she dried herself, sat on the sand next to Miss Shaffer, and began making notes for her next sermon. She teased her secretary about Shaffer's refusal to brave the 50 degree water. Then, just before three she sent Miss Shaffer into the hotel to phone her church and check in. When the secretary returned, Aimee was gone. Assuming her employer was taking another swim, Emma waited perhaps twenty minutes, before running into hotel, looking for help.

“The cripples to my temple crowd,

I heal them, and they shout aloud.
A thousand miles my raptures go
Upon my magic radio.”

Hotel staff searched the beach and the surf, but there was no sign of Aimee. The police were called. A police dog had no trouble finding the missing evangelist’s towel, but only Aimee's scent remained on the sand.  It was too late to make the evening editions of the battling daily newspapers. But overnight  The Los Angeles Times, and William Randolph Hearst's  Herald American assigned dozens of reporters to the story. Adding in the national press, within 24 hours 500 reporters would be pushing this story. This was big news. Ran the morning headlines back east, “Evangelist Feared Drown.”

“What's this? A terror-spasm grips

My heart-strings, and my reason slips.
Oh, God, it cannot be that I,
The bearer of Thy Word, should die!...”

It is hard to overstate Aimee Semple's influence in 1926. One in ten of Los Angeles' one million citizens claimed to be a member of her evangelical Pentecostal Church of the Four Square Gospel (above), with perhaps three quarters of a million adherents nationwide, thanks to her radio broadcasts. That Tuesday evening Aimee's mother, Mrs Mildred Kennedy (known as Sister Minnie), preached in Aimee's stead at the Temple on Glendale Avenue, delivering the same muscular vibrant faith healing fundamentalist theology, and presented with all the theatrical flair you would expect from Hollywood.. The first public acknowledgment of Sister Aimee's absence came at the end of the service, when Sister Minnie told the congregation that “'Sister went swimming this afternoon at 20 minutes to three, and she has not come back. Sister is gone. We know she is with Jesus.”

“My daughter's voice, my mother's kiss!

My pulpit-notes on Genesis!
Oh, count the souls I saved for Thee,
My Savior-wilt Thou not save me?”

The next morning, two air planes crisscrossed the stretch of sand (above), a half dozen life boats scoured the waters. A Coast Guard Cutter even sent down divers. By noon the crowd was reported at fifty thousand.  The Los Angeles Times reported in its Wednesday evening edition, “To the hundreds of men and women who wait in a huddled and silent mass beneath the open sky...Through the fog-bound, chilling night and then through the weary scorching hours of the day, the followers of the evangelist have kept their places on the sand..."She can't be dead. She can't be dead....God wouldn't let her die. She was too noble. Her work was too great. Her mission was not ended. She can't be dead."...

“Ten thousand to my aid would run,

Bring me my magic microphone!
Send me an angel, or a boat…

The senseless waters fill her throat.”

“In some manner word was spread about,” reported the Times, “that promptly at 2:30 p.m. Mrs. McPherson (above) would arise from the sea and speak to her followers. The appointed time came and many arose to look further out to sea. But it passed without the miracle... At noon, search of the sea was halted as hopeless. The long seine nets stretched from boat to boat which had dragged the ocean floor since Tuesday night were taken in. A boat containing life guards continued the search alone for a little while longer and then also gave up. The tide was left to do its own work....Only an occasional swimmer ventured into the water near the spot where Mrs. McPherson is supposed to have been drowned during the day. The place seemed to be shunned by bathers...”

“Ten million tons of waters hide

A woman's form, her Faith deride;
While thousands weep upon the shore,
And searchlights seek…and breakers roar…”

That Wednesday, a teenage girl saw Sister Aimee struggling in the waves, and raced into the surf to her rescue. But there was no Aimee, and the girl drown. After that the desperate amateurs were replaced by professional hard hat divers, who walked the sea bed from the Santa Monica Pier to the north, to Ballona Creek, three miles to the south. One of the hard hats, a diver named Ed Harrison, succumbed to exhaustion and died, but still the search continued and no body was found. By the first of June, the desperate Minnie (above) was defying the Fish and Game Commission, and set off four dynamite charges, hoping to free Sister Aimee's remains from the bottom sands. But nothing floated to the surface except a few sacrificial fish. The faithful lined the bay for weeks, spaced a hundred yards apart, walking back and forth, waiting for the sea to give up her dead. And then, 33 days later, Aimee's body appeared five hundred miles away, in the middle of the Sonora desert. And almost as miraculously, she was alive.

“Oh, gallant souls that grope for light

Through matter's blind and lonely night!
Oh, pity our minds that seek to know
That which is so—
And piteously have forgot
That which is not! “

Upton Sinclair, “An Evangelist Drowns”

The New Republic, June 30, 1926

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BRAND NEW UNDER THE SUN

I celebrate the fourth of July, every year. But I also be celebrate the fifth of July, because on the fifth of July in 1883 the U.S. government granted patent #278967 for a formula of something that had never existed under the sun before. The patent was granted for an invention that every one reading this has probably used at least once in the past year, and if you haven’t used it in the past year, you have cheated yourself. It was the brainchild of an energetic young marketing genius with some help from his brother, and the invention made them both rich – even though their original idea was pretty much a bust.

The story begins with a pharmacist in London named Gustave Mellin. Like many other pharmacists of his day, Gustave was looking for a magic elixir that might make people healthy and which would surely make him rich. In the second half of the nineteenth century, all over Europe and America, ambitious young men were throwing chemicals into pots and kettles and selling the resultant concoctions to unsuspecting guinea pigs (aka customers). Some of these latter day alchemists just made people ill. A few killed people. And a very few got very rich.

It was an Atlanta pharmacist, Dr. John Pemberton, who cooked up Coke-a-Cola in his back yard in 1886. And Caleb Bradham of New Bern, North Carolina invented Pepsi Cola in his pharmacy during the summer of 1893. In Cincinnati in 1886 Robert Johnson, who had worked as a pharmacists’ apprentice, joined with his brothers James and Mead in forming Johnson and Johnson, to sell their inventions of band aids and first aid kits. But the guiding light for Gustave Mellin was Henri Nestle, a Swiss citizen who in 1867, made his reputation and his fortune by saving a premature infant with a recipe of powdered milk and ground up wheat. Nestle's formula released the proteins trapped in wheat by grinding it into a powder, and thus making them easier for the baby to digest. And, though Nestle and Mellin did not realize it yet, this also made it possible to transport the wheat proteins over vast distances and store them for long periods.

Nestle sold his product by warning first time mothers that “impure milk is one of the chief causes of sickness among babies.” Which was absurd. Babies get sick because their immune systems aren't fully functional, yet. But we're talking marketing, here, not science. And in London that other Swiss citizen, Gustav Mellin began selling his own version of Nestle's formula, which he inventively called “Mellin’s Food”.  Mellin marketed his product with free samples, and a pseudo-scientific booklet convincing new mothers his formula was better for their babies than breast milk. God only knows how humans survived for the previous 2 million years without the powder.  Anyway, within a few years Mellin became Nestle’s principle competitor. And the success of Mellin attracted the attention of a young, dashing, handsome, ambitious and driven Englishman from the tiny village of Ruardean, in Gloucestershire.

James Horlick (above) began as an apprentice at the feet of the master, and what he learned from Mellin was that marketing was at least as important as the invention itself.  Probably more. But working for somebody else was no way to get rich, and in 1873 James quit his job and immigrated to America, to join his younger brother William (below) in Chicago. And James took with him a little something he had been working on.

In 1860, for the last time in history, the value of American agricultural goods was greater than the products from her factories. And amazingly this shift happened at same time that American farms were becoming the breadbasket of the world. Chief among this new bounty which was flooding the world markets was American wheat and rye. And that is why James and William Horlick had emigrated to America. See,  most of the world's capital for investment was still in England, but most of the world's plant protein was now in America. And within weeks after James arrived in Chicago the brothers set up J and W Horlicks to market their new wonder baby food, “Diastroid”.  Okay, the name needed a little work.

First, what William and James needed to make their wonder food was a community with cheap property values, a ready supply of clean water, an already industrialized work force, and easy access to their raw materials (wheat and rye) and to shipping routes, to get their product to their customers. They found just what they were looking 60 miles north of Chicago, where the Root River enters Lake Michigan, in Racine, Wisconsin.

The city had been incorporated in 1848 with a population of 3,000, and by 1870 was approaching 30,000, filling up with English, Danes, Czechs, Swedes and Norwegians. The foundation of the economy was the town’s harbor and rail connections.  Early on, Fanning Mills built heavy farm equipment here, including machines to separate the wheat and barley from its chaff, the slurry of which is called a malt. That created a pool of trained factory workers and the machines they used, which attracted Jerome Case who built his heavy equipment factory there, and S.C. Johnson who established his cleaning products factory in Racine.

So, in 1877 the Horlick brothers opened their single story factory in Racine, making "Horlick's Infant and  Invalids Food" and got ready to greet success. Okay, it was a little slow in coming. Oh, the baby formula business was doing okay, but it was by now a very competitive market and not the rocket to success that James had dreamed of along the banks of the River Wye, back in England. Still, in 1883, James’ preeminence in the field of baby food had been confirmed with a new patent, thus effectively limiting their competition in America.

In 1890 James returned to England to be closer to the money, and to handle the European marketing of their slowly growing infant cuisine empire. In 1908 Horlick’s opened a new, much larger plant in Racine (above). And they just kept plugging away, searching for that marketing angle that would make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

They thought they had hit the mark in 1909 when explorers Robert Peary (above), Amundsen and Scott all three pick Horlick’s product to supply protein for their assaults on the North and South Poles. Overnight Horlick's was in the forefront of the "health food" craze. And it remains a popular health food item to this day. That same year, 1909, the brothers opened a new plant in New Zealand, to supply mothers and explorers down under with portable protein. But that was not the advancement that changed human life, and made the brothers filthy. filthy rich.

That revolutionary event happened a few years later, It’s unclear who did it first, but my bet is that it was the new player on the stage. They were called "soda jerks" because in the early years they were required to jerk on the levers to dispense the carbonated water that was the main ingredient of their trade - soft drinks, as opposed to hard liquor.

But some conservative Christians even objected to young men and women spending their Sunday afternoons consuming "soft drinks" and frowned on the consumption of carbonation and caffeine on "the lords day", which is why the Ice Cream Sundae was invented, and the Malted Milk Shake - shaken not carbonated.  I doubt that it was an employee of Horlick who first made the discovery of the latter, else their name would have been enshrined in company legend. Besides, after all, it was a small step and may have been taken in several places at about about the same time.

Remember the Horlick formula was a concoction of dried ground wheat,  just-sprouted barley malt and powdered milk, which was then mixed in water or liquid fresh milk at the point of use.

So let us just accept that some unknown genius added ice cream. After all, everything tastes better with ice cream, doesn't it? Except maybe green beans. And thus was born the malted milk shake.

I doubt that most people today realize that everything “malted” can only be made under license from Horlick’s, including malted milk, malted milk balls, malted tablets or disks and malted “shakes”. Malted is a flavor that is owned. It was invented. It does not appear naturally anywhere in nature.

It started out as baby food, then became a health food before it became an unhealthy treat of magical proportions. And it gave all those soda jerks something to serve with the ice cream Sundaes they had invented, because in the conservative core of middle America carbonated water was considered too racy a drink to be served on a Sunday.

But surely, before the judgment of God, the invention of the cold, frothy and thick Malted Milk Shake will count on the plus side for humanity come the judgment day.  I refuse to believe in a God who does not love malted milk shakes.

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FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN Pledging Allegiance

I hate to disappoint you, but Betsy Ross did not create the American flag. The creator was the lawyer, songwriter and New Jersey author Frances Hopkinson, who, a year earlier, had signed the Declaration of Independence. We know it was Hopkinson because he actually submitted two bills for his design work – the first one for about $18. But the stingy Continental Congress balked at paying that. So he lowered his price to “A quarter cask of Public Wine”; meaning, the cheap stuff. I think he was trying to make a point but even then he didn’t get paid. The bureaucrats argued that Frances was already on salary, which meant they had already paid him for the design. He failed to pursue his case because he died in early May of 1791, during an epileptic seizure. But then, I don’t want to write a treatise on the vexillology of the American flag. I want to talk about the pledge of allegiance to it.

You see, the pledge was written as a sales gimmick to sell flags. This is pretty big business today, considering about 100 million American flags are currently sold every year. That’s enough profit to justify the formation of the “Flag Makers Association of America”, a lobby group required because American-made American flags are 30% more expensive than Chinese-made American flags. But I digress again because my point is that faith in capitalism requires a certain amount of rationalization , and profiting from the symbol of our nation is just another raison d'être.  But it was that particular
apologia was part of the job description for another Frances.

In 1892 Frances Bellamy (above), who was a fired Baptist minister, was working as the publicity director for a Boston magazine called “The Youth’s Companion”, He was also responsible for planning the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America,  for the National Education Association. And since the magazine had a nice side business going,  selling American flags to schools (their goal was to have one in every classroom),  Frances thought that a pledge for this special occasion would be an inexpensive way to increase the sale of flags. After all, you can’t pledge allegiance to the flag unless you have a flag.

His pledge, published in the 8 September, 1892 issue of the magazine (above), was just 23 words long and could be recited in less than 15 seconds - about the attention span of the average eight year old child. And it originally went like this -  “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  On 29 October that pledge was first recited in American classrooms,  and at the opening of the Chicago Columbia Exposition. Like the Gettysburg address, Bellamy’s pledge was eloquent in its simplicity. But even Frances could not resist tampering with perfection. He added an unfortunate salute.

Well, it was called the Bellamy Salute, but he did not invent it. It was the brainstorm of  James Upham, junior editor of "The Youth’s Companion".  But it was Frances who laid out instructions for what I would call "a salute too far".  They read. “…At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation.” Forty years later the extended arm salute would be preempted by Adolf Hitler, and thereafter tactfully dropped from the American pledge.

Not that people ever stopped trying to improve upon the pledge. In 1923 the America Legion, then made up mostly of veterans of World War One, the Spanish American War, and the Philippines Insurrection, decided that the phrase “my flag” was too open to interpretation. So they added an entire phrase, so there would be no confusion about what country we were talking about. The pledge now began, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” I guess calling it "my country" was too ambiguous.  In 1940, with a World War once again looming, the Supreme Court ruled that even Jehovah’s Witnesses could be required to stand at attention and recite the pledge in school, which the Witnesses had argued violated their faith.  On 22 June, 1943 Congress made the pledge the official pledge of allegiance to America - by law.  Because of the new law, the Supreme Court reversed itself, and the "official" pledge could no longer be compulsory for Jehovah Witnesses.

Then in 1951 the Knights of Columbus decided the words “Under God” were desperately needed in the pledge, and on “Flag Day”, 14  June, 1954, Congress made that addition official, as well.  The oath now officially reads “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. The pledge was now 31 words long. And to be honest with you, I don’t think the longer version is any clearer. As a kid I always thought it was God that was indivisible, not the country. The pledge became something closer to the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee.

Consider the oath, just as a piece of language. If the oath were to stop after the word “stands” we would have a simple sentence (“I pledge allegiance to the flag) with two modifying phrases (“of the United States of America”, and, “and to the Republic for which it stands”.) In this case the Republic is the modifier of the flag, which makes sense because the original intent was to sell flags; remember? Not the republic.

But that was not good enough for all those who honestly wanted to improve on the oath, to make it clearer, and avoid confusion and misunderstandings. I'm not sure how many misunderstandings there were, but you know what they say about cooks and broths - the more the better. Right? And this  kind of thinking produced four modifying prepositional phrases on top of the two we already had – making six in all.  How do six modifying phrases make anything clearer?

Besides, is love of country really that complicated? Does more detail actually make things clearer, or more confusing? It sounds as if those seeking more detail, are looking for an iron clad contract they can sue somebody over. Isn’t it enough if your lover says “I love you”?  Does adding a pre-nup increase or decrease your odds of ending up in divorce court?

I guess the basic question is, are you looking for an affirmation of love, or an affirmation of suspicion, giving your heart, or getting protection against having your heart broken? Because, you can’t have both, particularly when you are talking about love of a democracy.  You can't force people into heaven. And you can't force them to love the same country you do. Not just the same trees and rivers and ideals. Nobody else is going to love your memories of what those trees, rivers and ideals mean to you.  Somethings you just have to a love that you share, on faith. Sometimes that's the whole point.

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TINY BUBBLES The Invention of Champaign and Capitalism

I guess it all goes back to the bubbles. They are what attracted that feckless paranoid lunatic Philip IV, King of France.  He was responsible for the economic collapse of medieval France. And the recovery, which finally came after 700 years of poverty and travails, can be traced directly to the Blanc de noirs stained front door of the Abby of Hauntvillers, bottlers of the monastic barfly’s inebriate of choice, the cheap bubbly booze of the pre-bubonic Benedictine generation, champagne.

You see, the Champagne plateau (about 100 miles Northwest of Paris) was so far north that the grapes ripened very late in the year. Now, in standard fermentation, the yeast eats the sugar in the grape juice. The sugar is converted into alcohol and the yeast farts carbon dioxide, until all the sugar is consumed and then the yeast dies. But the wine produced in Champagne was different in two ways. First, the grapes were very sweet to begin with, so sweet that the yeast farted so much CO2 that the wine was filled with bubbles. And second, the wine was bottled so late in the year that there was always yeast still surviving when temperatures dropped low enough to stop the fermentation in each bottle.

Usually the monks drank the juice while it was still saccharine, and what a sad bunch of alcoholics they must have been. But in the bottles and the casks the monks could not consume over the winter (and they tried to drink it all), the spring temperatures re-started the fermentation. Occasionally so much more CO2 built up in the bottles that come summer, they exploded.

Also, the stuff just did not taste very good. And other than the few souls who would have drunk aftershave if aftershave had been invented yet, the residents of Champagne mostly drank Burgundy, from the south. The local stuff was so bad, they took to dumping it all into large vats, trying to kill the taste of the worst of it. Even the vino impaired English resisted consuming the “weird and foaming” wine which the Counts of Champagne tried to unload on them. I suspect, if the locals could have drunk the water without dying, they would have ripped up the champagne grape vines by the roots. But they couldn't, so the vines themselves only survived because of lack of an alternative beverage
not certain to give you a disease.

There was really only one reason they kept bottling the stuff. Once every generation a new French King was crowned in Reims, 37 Kings in all between 816 A.D. and 1825 A.D. They used the local effervescence to anoint their new monarch, and to drink a toast in his honor, a real test of their gag reflex, no doubt. But beyond that passing tribute, “dry and beggarly” Champagne remained a stagnant social backwater –until the importation of capitalism.

Did you know that the Muslims invented capitalism? The original dollar was the dinar. Muslims formed the first stock companies, the first banks and offered the first lines of credit. Very astute, these Muslims; because they were promoted based on talent rather than on blood lines. So the hereditary kings of Christendom were behind the eight ball on this one. Which is why it wasn’t until after the Northern Italians profited from the capitalist tricks they picked up from their Islamic trading partners that Northern Europe was finally opened for business.

The Champagne Fairs really got running smoothly about 1270, and they resembled the NASCAR season. Every January the season opened at Lagny. This was followed by the Fair at Bar-sur-Aube, the May Fair in Provins, the “hot air” Fair at Troyes, then back to Provins for a second fair, a fair at Reims, and the “cold air” Fair at Troyes in November. Six towns and about a five weeks for each fair - a week for the set up; stocking the warehouses (the Fairs were strictly wholesale), establishing bank credit (everything was financed by the Italians), partnership contracts were signed, rates of exchange were agreed upon and stalls set up, where the actual business would be conducted. Then there would be a week concentrating on cloth sales (60 European towns sold their wool only at the Fairs), followed by a week of leather sales, a week for spices, and a closing week of hard commodities, grains, salt and metals. Then there would be a week taking delivery and paying debts and sharing profits, before moving on. It was a huge clockwork enterprise that developed over a century. But what made it all possible was that evil, evil, evil horror of all horrors -  BIG GOVERNMENT!

As is noted in Wikipedia, the Counts of Champagne guaranteed “security and property rights of merchants…ensuring that contracts signed at the fairs would be honored throughout (Europe). The Counts provided the fairs with 140 Guards who heard complaints and enforced contracts…weights and measures were strictly regulated.…” The French King even granted free and safe conduct to merchants traveling with their products to and from the fairs, for a cut of the profits, of course. It all functioned because the Counts of Champagne established the fundamental structure and regulations without which capitalism cannot exist.

It seems, having grown up in a capitalistic system, we assume a free market is the natural state of affairs. It is not. Regulations create the market. Regulations define the market. Regulations maintain the market. And when the regulations are not maintained and enforced, the market collapses. Pretty quickly, too.  When one group of individuals, such as nobility, or bankers, can exclude competitors from profit, that is the death of capitalism. And the dinars hit the fan when control of Champagne passed from the reliable Counts to the King of France, Philip IV; the Donald Trump, of medieval Europe.

You see Philip was drunk on his own hot air. To finance his dependency he spent his entire life looking for the next bank account to plunder. He gained control of Champagne province when he married 13 year old Joan I, the Countess of Champagne, in 1284. The Fairs supplied him with enough money for wars against the English and two wars in Flanders, one of which he won. The Fair's Guards became political appointees, who bought their offices from the King, and who became addicted to bribes as the King was. Tariff’s were now levied on every wagon load of goods bound to and from The Fairs. And internal border crossings, each exacting a tariff, began to multiply across France as Philip’s lost wars increased. Philip destroyed the Fairs by removing the regulations that defined the market, and piling on taxes not tied to their profits. And just as the profits from the Fairs began to drop off, about 1306, Joan died. There is some mystery as to why she died. . Some say it was while giving birth; some say that Philip had her poisoned. I’ll bet it was both.

A year later, Philip expelled the Jews from France - after seizing their property of course. A year after that, on Friday, 13 October, 1307, Philip wiped out his debts to the Knights Templar by arresting all of them – and seizing their property. And when the Grand Master of the Knights refused to admit to even more hidden wealth, Philip had him slowly barbecued, Texas style.

And then, because there wasn’t anybody left still doing business in France to steal from, Philip began seizing Church property. The church objected but that only slowed Philip down, it did not stop him. And when a French Cardinal was elected Pope, Philip had him placed under house arrest in Avignon, thus ensuring Philip could now plunder all the church accounts in Europe that he could reach.

By the time Philip died of a stroke in 1314, he had reduced France and Champagne to a disaster area. The Fairs were history, France and the Champagne were flat broke. A bright, brief shinning light had been snuffed out by greed and stupidity wearing a crown.

Things did not begin to improve again for the backwater province of Champaign until 1688, when the Abby of Hautvillers received a new treasurer and cellar master, Dom Pierre Perignon. Pierre did not invent champagne. He did not discover it. In fact he saw it as his personal obligation to turn the bubbly into a dull flat dark wine. In this attempt at chemistry he failed miserably – Thank God. Because it was Perignon who by accident made champagne drinkable.

I should point out here the obvious, which is that until the 20th century far more people died drinking water than from drinking booze. Every drop of water was filled with pathogens, bacteria and assorted filth. ‘Passing water’ was not an idle description. You were safer drinking your own urine than from a clear rushing mountain stream. You still are. Without the addition of alcohol or chlorine, quenching your thirst with water is playing Russian roulette with bullets in four of the chambers.

Farmers, working the best soil available, grew wheat and hops to brew beer. Even the low alcohol content of beer or mead made water potable. And monks, who usually established their monasteries on poor soil, grew grapes and fermented wine. Without a source of a safely drinkable fluid, a village could not survive. Without a decent tasting wine to consume and sell, a monastery could not thrive.

After 47 years of – dare I say it? – religious attention to detail, Pierre turned the haphazard blending of wines in the Champagne region into an art. By accident or ineptitude  he perfected the making of a white wine from the best of dark grapes, the Pinot Noir mixed with the Chardonnay. Under Father Perignon the cuvee, or the vat, in which each blend was made, became the measure of champagne, the equivalent of its vintage. He mixed the juice from various fields and vinters to produced the perfect blend. And then, to top things off, he added an English bottle, stronger than the French ones, to restrain the 90 pounds of pressure per square inch generated by all that carbon dioxide farted out by the yeast. And by the time he died in 1715 Dom Perignon had created something close to the champagne we drink today.

Today, just down the road from the Abby of Hauntvillers, lies the village of Epernay, on the banks of the river Marne. Within a few square miles of L’Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, in some 200 million bottles yeast is happily farting away. Those bottles of that “weird and foaming” wine, make Epernay in “dry and beggarly” Champagne, the richest little village in France.

And they might have made it there sooner if Philip IV had just stuck to the rules, and gotten drunk on the vino, instead of the bubbles.

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