Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [57]
Vintage In the best years, when the growing season weather produces top-quality grapes, many wineries like to bottle some of the harvest as vintage (rather than blended) Champagne, to show off the characteristics of that particular year. I like it for variety. I don’t feel it’s necessarily better than nonvintage Champagne, just different, and certainly more expensive because it is rarer.
Blanc de blancs White wine from white grapes, as the name implies. Remember that most of the grapes in Champagne are black (as the industry refers to red wine grapes)—Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier—so this is a fairly rare specialty style, using only the Chardonnay grape. It is elegant and racy, and one of my favorite Champagnes with food, because it is so versatile. I especially love it with sushi.
Rosé This is another very rare style, made usually by adding a little bit of still (nonbubbly) red Pinot Noir wine for color. For me, the best rosés have the complexity of a red wine without the weight. Try one with dinner, and I bet you’ll be converted. Rosés go especially well with duck, salmon, tuna, and pork.
Luxury cuvée Cuvée (coo-VAY) means blend, or selection. This style (sometimes called Tête de Cuvée, loosely “cream of the crop”) represents the rarest and finest bottling of each house. Examples include Moët’s Dom Pérignon, Roederer’s Cristal, Krug’s Grande Cuvée, and Veuve Clicquot’s La Grande Dame. They are often, but not always, vintage-dated. They are considered to be more intense and complex than the other Champagne styles, but the differences are subtle. I think people buy them as much for the prestige as for the taste difference, because it adds to the fun and helps make a special occasion even more distinguished.
SWEET OR DRY TASTE? When “Brut” (rhymes with root) is printed on the label it means the wine is dry, with no sweet taste—the usual style of all the types shown above. The other styles, from least to most sweet, are: extra dry, sec (dry), demi-sec (off-dry), doux (sweet). A lot of people enjoy the touch of sweetness in the extra-dry style as an aperitif. Demi-sec makes a good dessert-style Champagne (the other styles are rarely exported to this country).
THE WINE OF LEGEND
Did the blind monk Dom Pérignon invent Champagne? Probably not. Was the young widow (or Veuve, in French) Clicquot the first modern businesswoman, bringing her late husband’s Champagne house to prominence in the czarist courts of Russia? Most definitely. Whether all the stories surrounding it are true, Champagne is the wine of romance and legend, and with every bottle you open you will add to the repertoire.
But if you are eagerly anticipating your next Champagne “occasion,” I have three words for you: Get over it. Say this to yourself: “I deserve to open a bottle of bubbly. I do not need an excuse. I do not have to deny myself and wait until some significant ‘event’ comes along.” For me, if the day dawns, that is an occasion for Champagne.
The High Price of French Champagne
Why is French Champagne so much more expensive than other bubblies? There are two reasons for the price premium of Champagne versus other bubblies. The first is supply and demand, which is always a factor in the French paradigm wines. Since the appellation system limits the use of a classic wine name to the produce of its particular growing region, the supply cannot be increased to meet demand. The price reflects this.
The second reason is the production process, called the Méthode Champenoise (method Shahm-pen-WAHZ). Getting the bubbles and complexity into Champagne is a major ordeal. Here are the steps:
Blending This is truly an art for which few people have the talent. The blenders take hundreds of different base wines from different years, grapes, and vineyard sites to blend the raw material for each different Champagne type to be made. If you think of how an Impressionist painter synthesizes countless discrete paint dabs into a beautiful and richly textured image,