WINE: LET IT POP! By Mark Criden Okay, holiday quiz time. Here goes. No cheating. Question 1. You have just unwrapped your Christmas gift, a strand of perfect south sea pearls nestled in a velvet liner within a robin’s-egg blue Tiffany Box. You toast your man with: Cherry Kool-Aid Richard’s Wild Irish Rose Last night’s coffee Champagne Question 2. You are throwing a lavish appetizer party to ring in the holidays, and your tables groan with a wide variety of luxurious seafood. The perfect accompaniment is bound to be: Mountain Dew V-8 Jello Shooters Champagne Question 3. You just got off the phone with Laura Bush, who has invited you to the Baltimore Naval Yards on New Year’s Day to christen a spanking new aircraft carrier. She tells you to bring an appropriate bottle to whack against the hull, so naturally you pack: A Quart of Utica Club Yoo Hoo A 1996 Beaujolais Nouveau Champagne There are few classier ways to toast your friends, create a celebration, or kindle a party than with Champagne. Champagne provides instant élan, injecting an explosion of joy into the quietest of times, transforming even a humble get-together into the deluxe soirée. Now that it’s holiday time—the most festive season of the year—you’ll want to have some good stuff on hand. Although the world is awash in sparkling wine, there’s really only one Champagne. (Or as the French trade lawyers would have it, there’s no really about it.) While imitators abound—there’s no dearth of Spanish Cava, New Zealand Pelorus, Sparkling Vouvray, German Sekt, and even eminently drinkable bubbly from New Mexico and the Finger Lakes—nothing comes close to capturing the panache of real Champagne. Champagne is winedom’s truest proof that necessity is the mother of invention. The marginal climate of the Champagne area northeast of Paris only permits grapes to fully ripen a few times a decade. As a result, the Champenois, as the locals are known, realized early on that they needed to blend juice from two or more vintages to make a complete, delicious product. This blending of different vintages is also how the producers try to maintain a consistent house style—why Moët theoretically always tastes like Moët and not like Taittinger. This type of blended, or “non-vintage dated” Champagne accounts for about eighty percent of what you’ll find in the market. But while this process of blending vintages may make the local juice palatable, it hardly makes it memorable. For that, you need the bubbles. The Champenois, in a second burst of inspiration, added a dose of sugar to their unfinished wine, allowing a second fermentation in the bottle, which produces not only an extra slug of alcohol, but those seductive bubbles which makes the whole froth slip down so easily. And this mellifluous combo of buzz and bubbles has incited conga lines, peace treaties, declarations of love, declarations of war, mosh pits, and millions of births, for centuries. Besides the non-vintage wine, Champagne comes in two other categories, both with decidedly higher markups. Vintage champagnes are produced from grapes of a single high quality year—usually with freakish weather. Because they represent juice that doesn’t have to be blended to make it drinkable, they normally sell at a $20 or more premium over their blended siblings. The 1996 vintage wines are now just being released, and are probably the best since 1990 or 1985, but I wouldn’t pass up a glass of a 95 either. Many wine snobs swoon over the pricey, fancy “tete du cuvée” bottlings that represent the pinnacle of the Champagne world. These are wines that typically come from the best grapes and sites, and you’ve no doubt heard of many of them: Dom Perignon, Roederer Cristal, Perrier Jouet Flower Label, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, Bollinger RD, and Pol Roger Cuvée Winston Churchill among others. But while these wines may represent the epitome of sparkling wine, their price tags are not for the faint of heart, topping out north of $150 a bottle. De rigueur though they may be for the fanciest occasions, I’d be hard pressed to use “tete de cuvée” and value in the same sentence. But you needn’t spend next month’s rent for an outstanding bottle; there’s plenty of superb Champagne that can be had for under $30. These include not only the non-vintage bottlings from the usual suspects—Mumm, Moët, Roederer, Pommery, Laurent Perrier, Piper Heidsieck—but frequently more interesting wines from smaller growers. In the latter category, look for the names Delamotte, Jacquesson, Montaudon, Ployez-Jacquemart, Guy Larmandier, Larmandier-Bernier, Pierre Gimonnet, Jean Milan, Pierre Peters, and Rene Geoffroy. Other stuff to know about Champagne From apparently the same people who brought you the “olive school of packaging” (where large is small and colossal is medium), when you ask for Extra Dry Champagne, you will in fact get sweet Champagne; if you want it dry, you have to ask for Brut. Champagne is normally made from a blend of three grapes: chardonnay (your generic white wine grape), pinot noir (your Red Burgundy grape), and pinot meunier (also a red wine grape). When it’s made from Chardonnay only, it’s labeled Blanc de Blancs; when it’s sources are pinot noir and pinot meunier only, it’s called Blanc de Noirs. Rosé Champagnes are usually made by allowing the juice (which is white, no matter what the color of the skins) to stay in contact with the red grape skins for a little while. Or, if quality is not a producer’s priority, he can cheat and make Rosé by adding a little red wine to the white champagne juice. Opening champagne can be a dangerous activity; the pressure inside a bottle is several times that of the tires on your car. Ergo, do not ask someone you care for to be the goalie on your Champagne team, unless they have one eye too many. Urban legend has it that one old monk named Dom Perignon discovered the whole bit about fizzinesss, but this is, alas, not true. He did, however, have a hand in introducing the cork, for which we owe him much thanks and many curse words. Here’s what you need to know: Hold the bottle. Slowly remove the capsule and tin cage, aiming away from civilization—and especially its cradle—at all times. Now, grab hold of the cork and turn the bottle clockwise until the cork pops out. Pour frothing Champagne into waiting Champagne flutes, which are tall and skinny, not the flat saucers famous from fifties movies. Or, if you’re in a hurry, you can just whack it across the hull of an aircraft carrier. Special Free Champagne & Sparkling Wine Guide Tom Stevenson is the world’s leading writer about fizzy wine. This year the latest edition of his 228 page guide is being offered as a free download on www.wine-pages.com. As Stevenson explains on the web site, “A combination of problems in the one year when I was supposed to be updating my Christie’s World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine (published July 2003 by Absolute Press, £35) delayed both that book and this one. When I finally finished the fizz guide, it was far too late for me to contemplate selling it. It was no one else’s fault, and not only did I feel a debt to those who had submitted their wines in good faith, but also did not want to let down my readers, who expected another edition. The only honourable course was to update the notes with wines I had tasted in the meantime, and offer my last edition for free.” Visitors can simply go to the site — one of Britain’s best, by the way, run by a smart guy named Tom Cannavan—to download the entire 228-page book. As Cannavan says, “There is absolutely nothing to pay, no need to register, and no strings attached: this is that rarest of things, a genuinely free offer for a top quality publication.” Mark Criden is the former chair of the Buffalo Branch of the International Wine & Food Society. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top