Champagne

Light thoughts

Winter delights

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Vacherin Mont D’Or

I’m not really much of a winter person, but there are always a few things to which I look forward when the snow starts dusting the mountains, as it did for the first time this week.

Over the weekend we had a local fromage favorite which, although it is neither champagne nor whisky, goes with either (in my unrefined opinion). It can also be more traditionally eaten with either red or white wine. It’s a versatile table companion, I guess – just the way I like them.

Mont d’or cheese is a soft cheese made of cow’s milk, and comes from the Jura region along the border between France and Switzerland, about an hour from our place.

This cheese definitely falls into the category of locally-produced, non-industrial slow food. It is produced only between August and the following March, and sold only from September to May. The history has something to do with winter cows, fed only on hay, not producing enough milk to make large amounts of cheese such as Comté, and farmers making due by creating these small rounds of cheese so as not to waste the milk they had on hand. The French version is made from unpasteurized milk, the Swiss from pasteurized.

The cheese is stored in round boxes made of blanched spruce, which certainly adds to the flavor. The early cheese, in September, is still very mild and fresh, while the later, more aged cheese can develop a stronger taste.

If you don’t like smelly cheeses, but you do like cream, you’ll probably enjoy this – it is usually eaten at room temperature, or warmed in the oven, and then scooped out in spoonfuls of rich, decadent goodness. A bit like fondue, but you don’t dip anything into the cheese itself. It’s rich, thick, but fresh and tangy from the spruce wood. Aromatic without being overpowering. Despite its soft texture, it is not really anything like brie or camembert.

The reason it’s on my mind is that we had it on a recent weekend at a small party, with a number of guests who had never had it and were a bit cheese-shy. We served it by gently scoring it across the top, sprinkling a few diced shallots and a couple of tablespoons of white wine on top, and then sticking it in the oven for 15 minutes. When it came out, we put it in the middle of the table alongside a basket of bread and gave everyone a spoon. The entire box of cheese lasted about five minutes.

Some people serve it alongside a small, simple green salad, or warm peeled potatoes. I’ve read that some families spoon it onto chocolate for the kids, but we haven’t tried that variation. We are generally purists and just take our Mont d’or straight.

‘Belts’ of pine wood are placed around the fresh cheese

Expat Thanksgiving – Update

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We spent a wonderful expat Saturday Thanksgiving with friends in London. I managed to find fragrant, delicious squash ideally suited for pumpkin pie (Crown Prince variety, for the intrepid squash pie experimenters among you), our host concocted remarkable gin cocktails (garnished with fresh cranberries, of course) with a cranberry syrup reduction made from our cranberry sauce, and we were able to introduce several non-Americans to the sticky-sweet candy joys of genuine pecan pie.

But best of all, we decided to smoke the turkey out on the grill rather than roast it in the oven. This was purely pragmatic – the oven was too small and the Weber was big enough. This wasn’t best of all simply because the turkey turned out very well, but mainly because someone called the London fire brigade, who showed up due to copious amounts of smoke originating in the vicinity of a house that was under renovation. So we had several concerned firemen shouting over a second-story terrace fence down into our small garden, home of the smoke-house bird.

It was only when our hosts opened the grill to reveal a massive, brown, succulent bird that the faces of the firemen relaxed into smiles. We invited them for dinner but I’m not sure they were impressed by our cooking methods. They wished us a Happy Thanksgiving and left. Thank you for checking in on us, guys, and for letting us finish smoking the bird!

Bottles of Bubbly

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Champagne & port tasting in the Pays-de-Gex, just outside Geneva: Standing in a group of people consisting of an American, a Swede, a Dane, two Brits and a German, discussing French products in French with a Portuguese port representative. Fairly typical, I’d say. The only people who didn’t really speak any English were the very knowledgeable and friendly French representatives of a storied Champagne house, Philipponnat.

They gave, however, an entertaining presentation that included the story of how their current bottle shape was designed. Namely, the photo above – which is of one of the vineyards used to produce one of house’s choicest Champagnes  – was taken back near the beginning of the 20th century. Someone turned it on its side – see the image to the right – and voilà! The Philipponnat bottle was born. Cute. The house has been run by the same family for 16 generations.

We tried three cuvées – Royale Réserve (mostly Pinot Noir grapes), Grand Blanc (all Chardonnay), and Clos des Goisses (Pinot Noir). All tasty – I don’t pretend to be an expert in nomenclature, but all three were unique and excellent in their own way.

The rep told us that 300 million bottles of Champagne – that is, products exclusively made from grapes harvested and processed in the Champagne region – are exported and sold every year. Seems like a lot. And the market is growing as developing economies have increasing populations that can afford to buy champagne. Like the market for good chocolate, the appetite seems to be insatiable.

Of Blight, Wine, Grafting, and a Kind of Success

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I found a poster hanging in a small local bistro just over the border in Switzerland, one of my favorite places to eat for lunch. It’s a vintage poster for a French seed nursery in eastern France – but it’s also an historical document of an agricultural calamity.

wine, switzerland, blight, france, vineyards

Poster for American grape vine stock in Switzerland, Photo: PKR

At first glance, it shows a young, robust 19th century woman among grapevines on the southern end of Geneva but on the French side of the border.. But what it is really showing is the effects of the great agricultural, economic and culinary calamity known as the French Wine Blight. Actually, the blight affected all of Europe and the UK, and was apparently due to the introduction of a non-native wine louse, Grape phylloxera into the regions.

Dactylosphaera vitifolii

The phylloxera is a complex little piece of work, with a life cycle encompassing 18 stages in 5 main phases. Very difficult to eradicate, and indeed, there is still no known method to completely rid Europe and the UK of the pest. It arrived in the late 1850s, and wiped out an estimated 60-90% of European vineyards over the next couple of decades. One of the challenges was that it took ten years for those studying the problem to be able to locate its origin, namely, the phylloxera that took so many forms.

Nothing seemed to work against the pest, until the hybridization technique of grafting European grape varieties on to rootstock imported from the United States was discovered. And thus began the task of reconstituting the wine industry – a process documented in part by the poster I saw in Switzerland. No surprise that this poster was here – Geneva is surrounded by vineyards.

I posted recently that the old and very fruitful Muscadet grapevine located in our garden has been one of the few unaffected by a locally occurring pest. We don’t know why, except that we never bring in outside stock, we don’t handle other plants, and our garden is walled.

In Europe, there were a few tiny vineyards that remained unaffected by the wine blight. No one knows why. They still produce extremely rare vintages of wine made from pre-blight, ungrafted stock. One of them is a Bollinger Champagne, the Vieilles Vignes Françaises. Another is a port wine in Spain, and a third is a Sangiovese grape in Montalcino, Italy.

Did I mention why rootstock from the United States was the preferred import for grafting?

It’s because phylloxera itself is a North American import, brought to the UK and then Europe on hardy American rootstock for planting by horticultural enthusiasts. The American rootstock was, of course, unaffected because it was resistant against the phylloxera. I’ve heard American wine buffs proudly claim that the US saved the French wine industry, but it seems a bit of a stretch since it was our own little pest that ruined it in the first place.

It’s a remarkable example of the triumph of non-native species within an entire growing sector.

The great Mothervine, oldest grape vine in the United States
Located in Roanoke, North Caroline

Muscadet Autumn

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Muscadet grapes

We have a grapevine that runs along one of our garden walls. It’s a  good ten paces long, not including the long droopy vines that hang three or four feet from the support wire to the ground. It was here when we moved here, and as I know that part of the garden was planted at least forty years ago, I’m assuming the vine is at least that old. I found, wired to its base, an ancient and barely legible label that read ‘Muscadet’.

I am neither a constant nor a patient gardener. Every year, our neighbor from the farm next door comes by during the growing season and tries to re-educate me on the finer points of trimming this grapevine. He usually misses my autumn pruning because I do it late, I do it stealthily, and he only sees the pitiful results once the damage has been done.

Four generations of his family, including his father, were gardeners for local aristocracy while they still lived in the small château up the road. His own large family garden has long stone walls, each heavily trellised with numerous grapevines. Every year, my neighbor wags his head and the occasional finger at my lassitude. I don’t know why I can’t remember the rules. The only real pruning rule I seem to keep in my head is the one passed along to me by my grandmother, who grew up on a farm herself in Washington State: Cut it all down, don’t be shy, cut it down as far as you dare.

I dare a little more each year, but my hand is always restrained by two considerations. First, what if I cut too much? I don’t want to kill the vine or any of the other old trees and plants in the garden. The garden was a wildness of wanton planting and careless attention when we got here, so I clearly fit in with the gardeners who have gone before me.

Second, and more importantly, I love the tangle of the vine. Its untamed strands weave and loop back upon themselves. They grow in the most impossible formations, they curl most helpfully around the support wires, they reach up or down at will.

So, today I did my usual ‘two steps forward-one step back’ type of pruning, and I know I will get a friendly lecture from my neighbor once he sees it.

Here’s the rub: The vine bears impossibly perfect grapes, every year. Fat, sweet, dark ruby, thick with scents from the apple and plum trees, the lavender, the sage all around. Not only that, no matter how I mistreat it, it never fails to bear 20-30 kilos (40-60 lbs.) of flawless grapes, far too much for us, our friends and even the greedy birds to eat during the harvest season.

Next door, my neighbor’s vines have been suffering over the past few years. Some kind of blight that sucks the life from the grapes, leaving them withered, pea-sized and ruined by August. Come the heat of late summer, he always asks me how my vine, abused as it is, has weathered the most recent attack that affects his vines and those of most of his friends.

I respond by bringing over a basket or two of the bounty. It’s a cheeky answer, because I don’t deserve any of the credit, and we both know it. It is pure luck that the vine is in a happy location, that it is isolated from other infected vines, that it survives each year of failed pruning at my hands.

I am merely an appreciative audience. The vine is an artist of itself.

Champagne. Frozen. Not good.

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That moment when you open the freezer in search of ice cream and find that someone left a bottle of champagne in there, and it’s totally frozen. Argh. What to do? I’ll let the bottle gently thaw in the fridge and hope the cork remained intact* – might still be able to drink it without adding seltzer.

Just kidding. I’d still drink it, and I would never add seltzer. I mean, it’s still champagne.

 

UPDATE:

Patience pays. The champagne is just as finely pearled as ever, it had the nice little swirl of cold steam upon sliding out the cork, and it tastes fine. Whew!

So the message is: Try not to forget champagne in the freezer, no matter how thrilling the occasion. And if, in all the excitement, a bottle of bubbly ends up frozen, don’t panic, and whatever you do, don’t open it right away.

We tried this once, to very dramatic effect. The bottle turned into an explosive fountain of expensive champagne slush. What was left in the bottle was flat.

Just set the bottle aside, on a counter if you’re in a hurry, in the fridge if you aren’t, and let it thaw.

Once the champagne is no longer solid, it should be fine to open and drink. Santé!

*Of course, if the cork isn’t intact or the bottle has popped, well…the only solution is to start cleaning up your champagne.

Tiny bubbles

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I can’t remember the first time I drank champagne, the real stuff.

I remember drinking sparkling wines from about age 14, and I liked them just fine. Growing up near Napa Valley in California, there were various good, domestic sparkling wines that weren’t too expensive, and then the Spanish Freixenet came on the scene in its sexy black bottle and that was my go-to brown bag beverage for pre-club entertainment all through college.

Now that we live in France, however, I am well and truly spoiled for choice, especially since we live only about two hours south of the lovely chalk-colored fields of the Champagne region. I love white wine, I love red wine, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I love Champagne most of all.

The sound it makes in the glass, a soft rush that reminds of the waves crashing on a Pacific beach back home in CA, the constant movement in the glass (well, for as long as there’s any in the glass, of course), the colors from palest eggshell to rich amber to peach rose, the variation in taste, even the soft sigh of release when the cork is gently eased from the bottle.

I once did a favor for some friends, I managed to sell a house they’d had listed for more than a year and really needed to see sold. I was lucky, I found some buyers, and the sale worked out – I was delighted to help because it took a big burden off some people I like very much. And it saved them the realtor’s commission. When they asked what they could do in return, I made the obvious (for me) reply: A nice bottle of champagne would be much appreciated.

Instead, they showed up at our place with not one bottle, and not two, but cases of champagne from a local specialty store – they’d gone in and asked for one bottle each of all the good champagnes, then delivered a few dozen bottles to our doorstep with the comment, “We didn’t know which kind you liked best.”

That was a pretty good day.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s bubbly-o’clock here. Cheers!