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While most of us look to the big, famous Champagne houses for our bubbly, an increasing number of smaller makers have begun to appear in recent years, and American importers have begun to seek them out. Many of the best Blanc de Blancs come from small proprietors like Larmandier-Bernier, Jacques Selosse, A. R. Lenoble, De Sousa & Fils, J. Lassalle, and P. Lancelot-Royer. Most of these wines are made in small quantities, from villages like Avize and Cramant, which are rated grand cru, the highest designation in Champagne’s grading system. (If you see that term on the label, it tells you the wine is 100 percent grand cru.) While the styles vary, the quality is impeccable, and even wine snobs can appreciate the reverse snobbery of a relatively unknown label. I suspect that boutique Champagnes like these are the wave of the future in Champagne—the bubbly equivalent of cult Cabs.

Midsized producers like Delamotte, Deutz, and Jacquesson also make very good Blanc de Blancs. Delamotte gets first refusal on the grapes rejected by Salon—makers of perhaps the most exotic Champagne in the world. It is produced only in exceptional years from severely pruned, grandfatherly old vines on the midslope of grand cru vineyards in Mesnil. (I can’t confirm if the grapes are harvested one at a time by blond virgins dressed in gossamer, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.) In the ′20s, Salon achieved renown as the house wine at Maxim’s, and has since become a password among true Champagne freaks.

One hundred percent sparkling Chardonnay is made elsewhere, including California. Schramsberg’s Blanc de Blancs has always been the most interesting and Champagne-like example to me. Mumm’s Cuvée Napa makes a pleasant, affordable Blanc de Blancs, but most American versions are too fruity for my palate. Francis Ford Coppola has just put out a Hawaiian Punch of a Blanc de Blancs, named after his daughter Sofia—a nice little quaff for a summer picnic, but a long way from Mesnil.

Like regular bubbly, Blanc de Blancs comes in both vintage bottlings and blends of different years. The vintage to buy, if you choose to spend the money, is ′96. The ′98 and ’99 aren’t quite as rich and powerful. The tête de cuvée superluxury wines are released much later—the current Clos de Mesnil as of spring ′06 is the mind-blowing ′95. Salon’s latest release seems to be the exquisitely complicated ′96. And I have seen both the ′88 and ′90 Ruinart in stores recently—relative bargains at anything near one hundred dollars. But there are also many excellent nonvintage Blanc de Blancs, starting at around thirty dollars.

So have a blanc Christmas. And a blanc New Year.

MONK BUSINESS

The Secrets of Chartreuse

The history of wine and spirits in Europe is inextricably, some would say excessively, bound up with that of the monastic orders of the Catholic Church; by the end of the Middle Ages, asceticism had become nearly synonymous with dipsomania in the popular imagination. The Cistercian, the Benedictine, and the Carthusian orders all contributed to the preservation and development of viticulture, winemaking, and distillation. Among the most glorious examples of the symbiosis of spirits and the spiritual life is the mysterious elixir created by the Order of Chartreuse, the Carthusians, one of the oldest religious orders in Christianity.

The order was founded in 1084 by the scholarly ascetic Bruno in the shadow of the Chartreuse Mountains near Grenoble. In 1605, the monks at a Carthusian monastery in Vauvert received the gift of a manuscript titled “An Elixir of Long Life” from the marshal of artillery for King Henry IV. Already ancient when it came into the possession of the monks, this manuscript has a history as eventful as that of the Ark of the Covenant as narrated by George Lucas. The formula contained therein was so complex that it was more than a hundred years before the apothecary at the order’s headquarters in Chartreuse finally unraveled its mysteries.

The first batch of the medicinal beverage