Tiny Bubbles In Wine From Champagne to Pét Nat and Everything in Between

Class transcript:

Happy Sunday, everybody. Welcome, everyone. Happy Sunday. Great to see faces. Welcome, welcome. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thrilled to have you all in the mix. I'm very excited to be doing sparkling wine as our theme of the week. Thank you all for your suggestions about topics. Sparkling was really one of the top contenders for a future class for a long time, and I'm thrilled to take it on today. For the sake of provisioning for today's class, before we get started, just giving folks a few more minutes to come into the room here, I'm provisioning with a wine that is made in the style of champagne, and one that is made in what is called the method ancestral. So I have one wine in this case. Mine is from the Foothills of the Alps in northern Italy, but it's made in what's called the champagne method, which we will talk about at length very shortly.

And then I have another wine that is made in what is called the method ancestral, which gives wines that are lighter in effervescence than you would find in a typical champagne. Now, the method ancestral offerings, which are typically called 'Sparkling' or 'Cremant', so this wine is really a classic wine. It's in a wine, that goes for the wine, the wine that is the name of uh the the wine itself method ancestral is the means of producing that wine. They tend to be lower in effervescence uh if you can't find them in your market or you're unable to um equally fun to focus on a couple different styles of champagne like wines um whether that is something from Champagne proper um and something from outside of Champagne or if you wanted to stick to uh Champers itself um which is one of life's great joys then maybe two different styles of Champagne so, Champagne made from a different uh set of grapes maybe a Blanc the Blanc and a Blanc Noir which is something that you know we'll address uh at length later um if you only have one bottle so be it um you know if you just have supermarket kava so be it if you don't have any wine at all we're thrilled to have you uh in the mix thank you all so much for spending your sunday uh afternoon with me um on the topic of glassware i want to encourage you all uh to if you're drinking a couple wines um have a couple different glasses for yourself uh per person so that you can try them side by side um somewhat controversial here but you'll notice i do not have champagne flutes uh i feel very strongly about champagne flutes um they belong at jewish weddings um and that is uh it uh so uh champagne flutes are are bogus um uh i drink my sparkling wine out of uh proper wine glasses and we'll talk about why in a second but um if you don't yet have a proper wine glass um grab one uh it is uh better uh for the sake of tasting both still and sparkling wine uh i promise um so uh without further ado uh let's kick this off um thanks again uh for joining us today and i'll see you in the next video uh it is a gray rainy day in washington d.c.

And I can't quite decide, whether that makes uh isolation more or less bearable, um but I am uh counting my blessings, we've all been touched by uh the pandemic, current crisis, um in some way or another, uh some of us more than others, my heart goes out to all of you um who uh have been in that conversation for been more directly affected. I'm counting the blessing of wine at the moment and the blessing of being able to share these wines with all of you. Just wanted to make a quick special announcement, a teaser of sorts. For the sake of next Sunday's lesson, we are kicking it local. We have some local wines and we have paired with a couple, collaborated with a couple local wineries, to be able to offer a duo of both white and red wines that you can purchase online for the sake of that class.

And I'll have more information at the end of this lesson. So very excited to announce that local collaboration for the sake of next Sunday's class. But for the sake of this class, we're talking sparkling wine. For many of you, we're talking champagne. I wanted to kick it off, as always, with a bit of verse, but this is from the great Marlena Dietrich. She said that champagne makes you feel like it's Sunday and there are better days around the corner. So thank you for that, Marlena. There are better days for all of us around the corner. I've got a bit of verse. This is kind of a sexy poem of sorts. I haven't, you know, most of my poetry has been, you know, not unprofound by any means, but a little more serious.

This particular bit of verse is, you know, a little more sultry. So this comes from author Katherine Doty. The poem is called Yes. It's about the blood banging in the body, and the brain lulling in its bed, like a happy baby. At your touch, the nerve, that volatile spook-tree, vibrates. The lungs take up their work with a giddy vigor. Tremors in the joints and tympani. Dust storms in the canister of sugar. The coil of ribs, heat, steam, and up begins to glow. Come here, I love that bit of verse. I love you know it's lusty. It's about you know that immediacy of joy. It's about effervescence itself you know, you know. It's a poem about a lover, but sparkling wine – a lover in and of its own right, and inspires that same you know set of sensations.

And they really are unconscious; you know there is you know that thrill. I love the line about you know that jangly you know kind of a tree on edge; you know the nerves firing all at once, and drinking a glass of sparkling wine drinking you know great champagne has that effect physiologically in the same way that you know first love can as well. So we're gonna start with a tasting activity. I'm hoping at home that you all have a wine glass for those of you that missed my rant earlier. I am avowedly anti-flute, so there. Are many vessels that you can use for the sake of tasting sparkling wine. I am a bit like Edna Mode with capes we have to hear you have the flute, which is evil, it's pernicious; CO2, carbon dioxide is what gives us the life of sparkling wine but CO2 is a bit out of the question.

acrid and if we throw it in a flute, and you know aesthetically the bubbles they look beautiful as they rise in the glass, but the second you put your nose in that glass, you know you get the poisonous gas CO2, you get singeing, you know your nostrils CO2, you get no perception of the wine breathing at all, you get a poisonous gas. And the glass does absolutely nothing for the taste of the wine; the Coop is much more you know worthwhile. The Coop itself mythically said to have been designed by Napoleon and modeled after Marie Antoinette's breast, which is very evocative but probably not true at any rate. The Coop has much to recommend it. We used to take a tail-up goat honestly as much because I like the idea of imagining everyone at a Gatsby garden party, as for any merit of the flute itself as a vessel for tasting; but when I am seriously considering sparkling wine, I use a regular wine glass.

There is no reason to drink out of a dozen different glasses with different shapes, one good glass will do. The same wine glass that you use to taste burgundy and Bordeaux, you can certainly use for champagne. For the sake of this initial exercise, I want us to consider sparkling wine as a wine and you can appreciate the amount of you know wonderful you know it gives this textural enjoyment of a sparkling wine that is very unique, it is very different than the way we experienced other lines. But it can be a bit of a distraction as well. I find very often that when I taste a sparkling wine, I register what is called the moose, the texture of those bubbles, but I don't register the taste as much.

It takes a a little longer to get a fuller appreciation. For the taste of the wine. Now, for the sake of this exercise, I want you to really steadily swirl the wine in the glass. And that will throw off the CO2. So the CO2 is dissolved in the wine itself. It is a byproduct of fermentation. It is the oft-forgotten byproduct of fermentation. Sugar, through the action of aerobic yeast, begets not only alcohol, but also CO2. And even in a still wine, there is quite a bit of dissolved CO2. By swirling the glass, you are expelling, essentially, that CO2 and creating a more still wine. Now, having created a more still wine in your glass, I want you to appreciate the wine itself. Taste the wine itself as you would evaluate other still wines.

Taste it for its acid structure. Taste it for its dryness. Taste it for, you know. You know, fruit. Is it tart fruit? Is it, you know, richer, riker fruit? You know, taste it for, you know, tannin, even, for the sake of a rosé. Or, you know, for the sake of some of these wines that are bracingly acid-driven. You know, they have this perception of astringency, even. But taste the wine. Try to get past the texture of it. And then, you know, drain your glass, and refill, and taste the wine with effervescence again. And try to get a sense of how your perception of the wine evolves, how it changes with and without that gas. So for my sake, I'm tasting a beautiful wine from the Loire Valley from a good friend that operates Vintage 59 right out of Washington, DC, Xavier Weisskopf, a beautiful Frenchman who makes exceptional wines, in this case, from Chenin Blanc.

And I've agitated the hell out of this. So I've no doubt that it's practically still, at the moment. And it embodies everything I love about Chenin. It's racy. It's acid-driven. It always has this crunchy, kind of Basque pear kick to it. But there's this honeyed quality to it, as well. And there's something lightly floral, and something incredibly fresh. It tastes like a fabric softener commercial, in the best possible way, but without the creepy, And it makes you want to eat. It is hugely fun. I think it's enjoyable in and of itself as a sparkling wine denuded of that sparkle. But I'm going to drain the glass here, in the name of science, and revisit now with this. And this is a style in pétillant original, which is a form of pétillant natural.

Brut, or pet-nac, that is more lightly effervescent. And in my mind, this wine is carried off well, because while enjoyable in its adulterated still form, it is elevated because of that particular bead. And I encourage you all to hit up Sarah Thompson moderating here with questions, comments about that particular exercise for the sake of kicking things off. Sarah wanted me to recommend, and I failed to, that I was going to start with my more lightly effervescent wine and then move into my more fully effervescent wine, if that answers any questions. That said, I think it's less important for the sake of this exercise where you go with this, or the trajectory that you build out. The end of the day, you know, you can move back and forth more fluidly for the sake of these wines without really kind of punishing your palate than you would be able to with some other wines. Thompson, what do you got for us?

I went to the videotape, and I believe one Sarah Thompson has been muted. That will go on the blooper reel, everyone. Very exciting. But I'm going to unmute one Sarah Thompson so she can tell me. What is coming our way from the commentators in our mix? Sarah Thompson, what do we got? Would you decant champagne ever? That is a registered trademark, excellent question, Sarah Thompson. There is a subset of hipster Psalms that, particularly for racy, dry, what is called non-dosé wines. That are. Basicly, unadulterated Bonclair that are enamel stripping. They like to decant those wines, old, even like older vintage champagne, for the sake of softening that acid structure. I do not like to do that. You know, you can think about the glass as a mini decanter.

By the mere fact of pouring a sparkling wine into a wider glass, you are stripping away some of that effervescence. I think it's important not to carry that too far. Especially for wines that are well made. And I think that decanting champagne takes that too far. I understand why people do it. It's just not my bag. But yes, people do do it. And then what are your thoughts on sparkling red wines? They’re one of life’s great joys. They are, you know, neglected. I think they're like the beers of wines. You know, the most famous sparkling red wine is Lambrusco. And there are Lambrusco's that are every bit as profound as the fine of champagne. But you know, it is a bit of a Miller High Life of wines, you know, it’s something you throw back and it’s fun.

But you know, they’re pizza wines, they’re, you know, gastronomical wines, they’re wines you want to eat with. They’re hugely fun. And they take something in red wine that, you know, people love to build up. And, you know. You know, take very seriously. And they make it fun. They give it levity. And I think that's hugely important. You know, I like; you know, I like wine; I like art that, you know, plays against type. And sparkling red wine does that, you know, ever so beautifully. What grapes are well suited for sparkling wine? So the lifeblood of sparkling wine is acidity. And we will talk about that. In the context of the champagne production process. But the best sparkling wines come from acid-driven varietals and very often come from marginal northern climates.

Champagne is, you know, at the almost the 50th parallel. So it is very far north. And sparkling wine works there because even though you know the grapes are relatively high in malic acid and and racy and green apple driven, you know, that acid gives the wines, you know, structure. But it also makes them, you know, food friendly and enjoyable and fun. So Chenin Blanc is a classic sparkling wine grape. The typical Troika in Champagne is actually dominated by two reds, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. But Chardonnay is hugely important, arguably the most important to the blends, depending on which village you're in. But there are a variety of grapes that do well in fizzy wine. And it's something that people are playing with more and more. But the one essential trait is that acidity.

Great. So we are going to move on. And we are going to talk about different ways of making sparkling wine, you know, think about, you know, how did these tiny bubbles get into the wine? And we are going to do that through the lens of the history of Champagne. But there's a bit of a subtitle here because everything that you've been told about Champagne, everything that is popularly, you know, kind of, you know, the legend of Champagne is a lie. It's all a lie. So you can, you know, consider me your, you know, Morpheus to a class worth of Neos. I'm here to dispel those myths. Because the truth is endlessly more, more fascinating for the sake of Champagne. The popular myth of Champagne has everything to do with a monk.

And he is a very famous brand. And he, you know. Has, you know, given his name to one of the most famous wines in the region. And he was actually a very good wine maker. That's Dom P. So Dom P was a Benedictine monk. The legend is, and there's even a date if you, you know, dig deeply enough into the bogus history of the legend. August 4th, 1693. Dom P stumbles upon a happy accident in his cellar. There is a bottle of wine that young corks that are sparkling. And he says to his fellow brothers, he says, come quickly. I am drinking the stars. I have captured the stars in a bottle in my wine. That never happened. That was a marketing myth spread by his fellow Benedictines prior to the French Revolution.

Dom P. Was going to justify their existence in a world that was mobilizing against them. Dom P. Was a very gifted wine maker. But he was hired by, you know, the Abbey that employed him to prevent wine from sparkling. So you know, that piece of legend is a huge lie. The truth of champagne is that historically it was a trade route. It was a major trade route. Cutting from Paris east to the industrial regions of Germany. There are major trade routes going from the Low Countries to Switzerland and Paris, and Champagne rather exists along that axis. Champagne also sits in the center of a geological feature called the Paris Basin. The Paris Basin is a massive sedimentary; it's essentially a slump in the earth's crust.

And it exposes all this chalk that is hugely fortuitous for the sake of making acid-driven wines. And you can see Champagne here at the northern extremity of where it's possible to ripen grapes in France. They've been making wine steadily in this region since the fifth century. Historically, the wine was still. Historically, the wine was largely red from Pinot Noir. There's a river that cuts from Champagne to Paris, the Seine, that made Champagne one of the wines of choice in the French capital. So part of the popularity of Champagne as a wine has to do with, you know, these geological and geographical, you know, kind of accidents. The region itself. The region itself wasn't known for its wines prior to the 17th century in the sense of being known for Champagne.

People would talk about the wines of the Montaigne, which is, you know, a mountain at the northern end of the region of Champagne. People would talk about the wines of the River Valley, which is the wines, you know, coming west from Reims. But they didn't talk about champagne as a larger regional product until the 17th century. And honestly, Dom P. As much as I badmouth him, he does deserve some credit for that, because in as much as he did not invent sparkling wine and champagne as we knew it, he did improve a lot of the vineyard practices in the region. So he was revolutionary for the sake of blending the wines of champagne. He was revolutionary for the sake of limiting yields. So less wine, but higher quality wine.

He was revolutionary for the sake of carefully harvesting the grapes. And that's what he did. And bringing them in intact, and working with them more gently, and pressing more gently. He was making greater wines, but he was making greater still wines. If not Dom P., then who? The truth is, champagne as we know it was invented by the English. Champagne as a wine that ultimately ferments and creates six atmospheres worth of pressure depends on very sturdy glass. The English had sturdier glass. They had a lot of glass. Then the French, much earlier in their history, starting in the late 17th century, English merchants were importing wine from champagne, still wine from champagne. They were adding it back to their own bottles in London. And cafe society was drinking sparkling wine as a fad.

So champagne, as a fizzy wine, was a great 17th century fad that originated in London. Champagne, as we know it. But as an industrial product, as a French product, is a creation of an amazing woman. So as often happens historically, Dom P., a Benedictine monk, got credit for the work of one Veuve Clicquot, the widow Clicquot. And much of what we take for granted about champagne. Much about what makes it a popular. It's a popular drink. It has everything to do with techniques that Barb Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardine developed with her German cellar master, Antoine de Mouillet. So if we fast forward to the French Revolution, we have the widow Clicquot, the Veuve Clicquot, that gives her name to the yellow label, which is actually the original label that she designed herself.

Don't get me started on the wine. The wine. The Veuve. So the Heritage medium is a luxury brand now that has been fundamentally debased because it's made at such a scale that it can't be an artisanal product anymore. We're going to talk about that later. The widow herself was a total badass. She was the daughter of a textile merchant family that remarkably kept their heads in the French Revolution because they quickly went from ébougeouin merchants to devoted Jacobins. Jacobins. Jack, Jack, Jack. They transitioned. They survived the revolution. She was married off to the son of another prominent textile merchant family that also owned vineyards. Her husband passed away. French gossip said he committed suicide because the business wasn't going well.

But she shifted in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, and she truly loved viticulture and saw the wines of the region, the wine industry of Champagne, as having untapped potential. And she saw sparkling wine, which at the time existed, but was considered a debased version of the region's wines. The still wines were still the most prestigious. She saw the future for growth in them. But she recognized an inherent problem. For the sake of her sparkling wines. And that was something that has to do with the fact that the wines were very unreliable to produce. And once you produce them, that the wine itself was essentially murky. So she and her cellar master, Mueller, devised a way of making a crystal clear product, which we'll talk about in just a second, that was much more consistent than it had been before.

And because of that, her wines became hugely famous in the Tsarist Russia. The Tsar at the time said that the widow's wines were the only ones that he would drink. It became hugely popular in London, which embraced Champagne centuries before. To the extent that people didn't ask for Champagne, they just asked for 'the blue'. They would ask for 'the Widow'. And the reputation of the region spread from there into the modern era. So what process did the widow and her cellar master devise? They devised what is known as the method traditional, or the method Champenois, within Champagne. Without putting the cart before the horse, it's important to note that Champagne is a region synonymous with the wine. As Brad, as you know, we're reminded in Wayne's world, the name Champagne has been conflated with all sparkling wines, just because it's a successful brand.

But by law, Champagne only comes from the region. That said, you can make wine in the style of Champagne anywhere. And the method has become, you know, more significant than the region itself. This is the method. So it's a two-stage production process. Basically, you make a wine, and then you make it all over again in bottle. So you have a first fermentation. You make what's called Bonclair. And Bonclair. Typically, it's 10 to 11% alcohol. The acid is raging. It's enamel stripping. Tasting through Bonclair in the cellar is a punishing experience. And you, you know, kind of get a sense of what is working. You make your blend, and the magic happens in the bottle itself.

So the core truth of the method traditional, the production process for Champagne, is that it is a wine made through a second fermentation that's carried out in the bottle itself. So you add a mix of that blended wine, what's called the liqueur de tirage, which is basically just sugar and yeast, to that little bottle. And then you throw a crown cap on the wine, throw a bottle cap on the wine. You set it down, and you set it and forget it. And there's a fermentation that's carried out under pressure in the bottle. And the glass is strong enough to withstand that pressure. And you're left with a beautifully sparkling wine, typically at about, you know, six atmospheres worth of pressure. Which equals 20 million bubbles or so.

The problem being that you're left with sediment in the bottle. The genius of the Widow Clicquot, you know, her innovation was what's called rémouage. The process of expelling that sediment. So what they did was they took the bottles. They threw them in what's called a riddling rack, which originally was her dining room table. You know, set with holes for the bottles at an angle. And you position them at 45 degrees or so. You slowly turn them. The yeast works its way into the neck. You plunge the yeast cap in icy cold salted water. And then you expel that plug. And that plug contains all the solids. You're left with something that is crystal clear. And that is a marketable product that you can sell.

And you can send to, you know, any cafe in the world where people can then enjoy it and appreciate it for its consistency. The last stage in that process is adding what is called the liquor of the expedition, which is dosage. So I talked about Vinclair, the original wines being incredibly acid driven. It's a case that most champagnes, even champagnes labeled as brut, have some sugar in the form of acidity. And that is the form of wine with a little bit of cane sugar added at the end of the process. And that is to apply balance. It sounds, you know, to those of us who've been, you know, really beaten over the head with this notion that, you know, wine should be dry, wine should be dry, you know, like a perversion.

But a little bit of sugar does not create a perception of sweetness. It gives weight. And it lends balance. And in the right circumstance, it can illuminate. It can illuminate a wine. It can give you a fuller sense of what was already there. A fuller sense of fruit. You know? You can try an exercise at home, add a little bit of lime juice or add a little bit of sugar to your wine, and the perception of the wine will change. A little bit of sugar will give the fruit and the wine on the nose a perception of lushness. A little bit of additional acid will close it up, will lock it down. And the same thing happens for the sake of champagne.

Now, alternatively, not for the sake of our method and the wine itself, but for method ancestral wines, you're dealing with a much simpler means of production. You're dealing with what Dom P was guarding against. You're dealing with a wine that is bottled early. So the method ancestral is ancestral because originally it was accidental. You would bottle your wine, you would leave it in the cellar for the fall, come back to it the next spring, and the warming temps would reinvigorate fermentation through the action of leftover yeast and sugar, and create fermentation and effervescence in a wine that you may or may not want to have effervescence. But it is a technique that has been re-embraced, particularly in the natural wine world.

And a big part of that is because it's much easier than going through the hassle of that two-stage fermentation process that I talked about for the sake of champagne. It's a lot easier just to bottle everything early. Typically, you're bottling early. For the sake of Brix, there's about 20-plus grams per liter of sugar left in the mix. And if you throw a bottle cap on the wine at that point and just leave it to its own devices, it tends to ferment almost fully dry to a point at which it has a lighter bead of effervescence. So typically, Petit Natural wines made in the méthode ancestrale, they're left with about three to four atmospheres' worth of pressure. And you get a finer bead because of that.

But that more delicate effervescence very often, somewhat counterintuitively, can be more food-friendly. Very often, the full fizz of a champagne can be a bit distracting for the sake of pairing. Very often, that full fizz can take over the party, whereas something more kind of playful, coquettish, for the sake of the méthode ancestrale wines, it plays with the tongue and it plays well with friends in a way that the méthode traditionnelle wines do not. And I'm deploying those two terms, method traditional and method Champenois, are one and the same. The Champenois, starting really in the first decade of the 20th century, started to aggressively promote and rigorously enforce their brand internationally, such that you couldn't call anything made outside of Champagne, Champagne, such that you couldn't even say that your wine was made in the Champagne method.

You had to devise a different verb for it. So traditional became the nomenclature for wines made like Champagne outside of Champagne. And ancestral is used for the subset of wines that are made through one continuous fermentation process, but interrupted early. And I know that's somewhat counterintuitive and hard to understand, but, you know, nonetheless delicious. And it should be said that wines made in the method ancestral can also be disgorged. They can have the same set of processes applied for the sake of getting rid of that little bit of cloudy yeast at the end of the process. My Pétillant Original is actually disgorged, but very often you'll have wines that, in the French, would be called surlattes or surlis, that are bottled with the lees, or in Italy they say col fondo.

So often you'll have Pétillant Natural that is a little bit murky, and a little bit hazy, and a little bit cloudy. And that's because the lees are still in the mix. That byproduct of fermentation is still in the bottle. And there tends to be less of it than there would be in method traditionnel wines at the same stage of their life. But, you know, very often that's something that natural winemakers in particular like to play with for the sake of their wines. I'm going to talk about Champagne as a region, as a wine, what makes it different than other sparkling wines made in the same style, but it seemed a fortuitous moment for the sake of questions. If your mic is hot, Sarah Thompson, hit me. It sure is.

What temperature would you serve champagne at? So, I went on my glassware screed, and there's going to be a temperature screed, there's going to be, you know, invective about serving champagne at the right temperature to go along with it. I just totally forgot about it. So, we're dealing in Fahrenheit here, because that's what we do. Just like, you know, we don't like the metric system for the sake of distances. It doesn't make any sense, but we're going to do it anyway. So, the home fridge, you know, typically lands, you know, 42, 44 degrees, depending on, you know, where you're at. I actually think that's kind of a perfect temperature for the sake of sparkling wine. That's too cold for the sake of most still whites.

There are people who like their sparkling wine cold as fuck, and for their sake, if you're one of those folks, there's nothing wrong with that. Either grab an ice bucket, which no one has at home, or just throw it in the freezer. You know, cast the frozen piece aside, you know, find some space for it, give it 30 minutes to an hour. It won't freeze. Alcohol has a much lower freezing point than water. If you leave it in there long enough, it will freeze. Don't leave it in there for too long. But if you like it really cold, throw it in the freezer for, you know, half an hour, an hour. But I like it right out of the fridge, and then I like to let the wine warm up.

I enjoy doing that for white wines as well. I think it's fun to get a sense of a wine as it starts to, you know, come into its own, as the temperature rises. You know, how does the taste evolve? How does it change? Most champagne makers that I've tasted with, they get really upset that people taste their wines too cold. You know, they feel like, you know, if you're tasting it ice cold, you're not tasting the wine. You know, you're just enjoying something, you know, for the sake of alcohol and bubbles. And there's nothing wrong with that, you know? I mean, that's why I like cold beer. I don't want to taste Tecate, you know? I want it to taste like ice. But this is way more expensive than Tecate.

What else you got? Yeah, what about the sugar levels in champagne? You kind of touched on it, but what does that do for people's hangovers? Yeah, so I've learned a valuable lesson about, I actually haven't read much about this scientifically, but anecdotally, you know, as far as sugar and alcohol levels go, Sarah's brother Owen has taught me a valuable lesson through the ages of one of the great tiki bars in the world, Archipelago, that sugar will always give you a worse hangover. So, yeah, maybe there's some truth that, you know, drier wines, you know, give you less of a hangover. A bigger issue in Owen's drinks is probably the rum, and then less sugar. And the same is probably true for the sake of champagne, honestly, because very few people drink Demi-Sec anymore.

In the days of the Widow Clicquot, the wines she was selling were sweet. They were very sweet. They were way sweeter than Demi-Sec is today. Champagne, since the early 19th century, has consistently gotten way drier. It's come too far. So there are different terms used for the dryness of champagne. The foremost important being Brut. Brut is dry. And these are actually terms that are regulated. So Brut is regulated by the French government and measured in grams per liter of residual sugar. Residual sugar sounds terribly scientific. It is a measurement of sugar left in wine post-fermentation. So it is the sugar that is remaining in the bottle that is unfermented. So the levels of residual sugar are regulated under the French system according to a tiered system.

Brut, there's a lower tier for even drier wines called extra Brut. And then there's a higher tier for sweeter wines called Demisec, essentially or half dry or off dry. Nobody drinks the Demisec anymore, but Demisec and Thai food or spicy food, Chinese food, man, Demisec and like the old lo mein, you know, one of life's great joys, you know, get after it, you know, find a good Demisec and make that happen. There's another tier that is very much in vogue, which the kids call Brut nature or it's called non-dose, Brut zero. The zero ostensibly would stand for residual sugar, but there's always some sugar left in a wine that remains unfermentable. Typically, you know, even in the driest instances, you know, you're talking two grams-ish.

That notion of Brut nature applies to wines that are bottled without any dosage at all. This wine that I have is Brut nature. That said, it's actually super ripe, so it's 100% Chardonnay, but, and as such, it is blanc de blanc, but there's a richness to it, there's a fullness to it that is surprising to me, because initially I read that it was Brut nature, and I thought it would be austere, but it's rich and voluptuous and ripe. That's kind of the hierarchy for the sake of dryness. I think it's really important to note that even those Brut wines, even those dry wines, or even those extra Brut wines, very often have sugar added. Adding sugar has become very unfashionable, but it's hugely important.

I think one of the most illuminating tastings I ever did was a dosage trial, trying the same wine at different levels of sweetness. It is the case that adding sugar will not make a wine perceptibly sweet, it will just change the flavor profile in these enigmatic ways. It's not the case, too, that it's a linear. It's more like harmonic convergence. It's wildly amazing. It's fascinating, but it's important not to rail against sugar because drinking dry wine has suddenly become fashionable. Sugar has its place. In terms of natural champagnes and the natural wine world of champagnes, can you discuss that a little bit more? Champagne is kind of a hard fit for natural wine. Champagne is essentially manipulated. You're adding yeast for the sake of second fermentation. You can get around that. You can add must with live yeast in the mix and try to make it more naturally. Champagne is a place for me that puts the lie to the notion of natural as an aspiration for the sake of wine. I think it's important to working sustainably, being a responsible environmental steward, being open and honest about what's in your wine, those are all important things. As it concerns natural wines, I love a lot of wines that are quote-unquote natural, that market themselves that way. But I think it's important to understand that the notion of natural wine, air quotes, is a marketing vehicle. It is not necessarily a methodology. That said, there is now a certification in France for natural wine. Eric Asimov of New York Times just wrote a piece about that. It's all bullshit, honestly.

There are as many ways to make a good wine as there are to write a good poem, and I wouldn't want to enforce them on anyone more than I would want to say that you have to write in iambic pentameter or not, or you can only make sonnets. That said, in the vineyard, champagne has been transformed in the last couple decades in a way that's really important. In the post-World War II era, champagne was very much a 'let's throw pesticides and herbicides at everything and consequences be damned' kind of region. There are a lot more producers working biodynamically, working organically, working sustainably, whether certified or not, and who are deeply concerned about the impact that they're having on their own environment.

It also should be said that there's much more interest in making champagne a wine than there had been within the last couple decades. Champagne is a brand. It's a hugely successful brand, but as it exists in the market, it's a product very often more than it's a wine. There are seven grand marks, so seven luxury brands as they exist now that control over three quarters of the market in champagne. Most of the wines that you find even at a decent liquor store, especially the non-vintage ones, they're brands. They're wines made at scale. For me, there's something cynical about them. That said, within the last decade or so, there's been a movement toward what is called grower champagne. Grower champagne is champagne that is produced with grapes that you yourself grow.

It is like domain-bottled anything. Historically, the great houses in Champagne purchased fruit from smaller growers, and there were all sorts of riots when that relationship went awry. In the modern era, you see more quality-conscious smaller growers saying, 'You know, I'm going to make my own champagne that is infinitely better than the luxury brand that they're making under the aegis of some publicly traded entity.' That's where Champagne has gotten really interesting. Champagne has also gotten really interesting because it's a pretty large region with a variety of different not a huge variety of different soil types, but a decent variety of soil types and three major grapes to work with. They each have their own imprimatur. That's really compelling. People are starting to suss that out more. I think that's hugely fascinating.

I think that's more interesting than any kind of debate about ideological purity for the sake of naturalness. Can you go briefly over, you talked about late disgorging. Can you talk about what that means and what that does for the flavor profile of a wine? My bottle doesn't have it. I don't have champagne. I should have gotten champers. I'm sorry I didn't. At any rate, disgorging is that process whereby you throw off the leftover remnants of the fermentation, the second fermentation process. Now, really interesting things happen as a wine ages on the remnants of that fermentation. There's a scientific name for that process. You have the secondary fermentation. You throw sugar and yeast in the bottle. You set it on its side. The yeast work for a few months.

They do everything they can, heroically. They make more alcohol and a lot of CO2 and it dissolves into the wine. But then they consume all the sugar they can and they pass away. They die. As months pass, the yeast cells themselves start to degrade. It's a process called autolysis. That contributes all sorts of really fascinating chemical constituents to the resultant wines. Aldehydes, lactones, terpenes, all of these chemical signatures that don't exist in any other wines. Well, that's not entirely true. It's cherry and some other things that are made with a lot of yeast and aged for as long as time. But that aging in the bottle after that secondary fermentation is something that defines the finest champagne-like wines.

By law, vintage champagne, the finest champagne, cannot be released unless it's aged on those lees, is the word for that leftover debris, unless it's aged on the lees for at least three years. Vintage champagne cannot be released until at a minimum, three years after its initial production. The more you age wine on the lees, the longer you age it, the more of that what's called autolytic character it gets. Think about things that people love about champagne, that bready, yeasty, brioche-y character. A lot of that is not down to the wine as it comes into the cellar or the vineyard. A lot of that is down to what happens in that individual bottle over the course of years on the lees. People take it really far.

People take it five years out, a decade out, thirty years out, ten years out. The cool thing about that biological aging on the lees, too, is it’s a bit of a weekend at Bernie’s scenario, where the wine stays alive and it doesn’t age. Benjamin Button would be a better analogy. Maybe not Bernie, because we’re not propping up a dead guy. He’s still alive. It stays alive and it doesn’t age according to conventional curve. It continues to evolve and develop. Now, it’s not going to get prunier. It’s not going to get prettier. It’s going to take on more of this dried porcini powder weirdness, but it’s amazing. All that said, typically, champagne producers will disgorge things in batches. Very often, they'll indicate a disgorgement date on the back of their label.

It'll say, usually in French, [something]. My French is terrible, but it's a cognate, so I'm sure you guys can figure it out. It'll give a disgorgement date. Usually, it's a month and a year. You can get a sense of when your wine's disgorged. Let's say I had, let's say I was lucky enough to have a 1990 Champers lying around. That wine will taste very differently if my 1990 champagne was disgorged last year than it would taste if it was disgorged in 2000 and has been aging in the bottle oxidatively off the lees. Since then. There's that added variable for champagne in terms of disgorgement date, that's hugely fascinating and fun to nerd out about if you love champagne. Once you open these bottles, like most of us have, what's their shelf life?

What's the best way to store it if you want to hold onto it for a little while? Shelf life, not good. The best way to preserve champagne is to drink it. CO2 It's not that the wine suffers. The wine's really acid-driven so very often the wine would hold up much better than other wines do. It's just the CO2 falls flat. A couple things. The colder you keep it, the longer. The less of that CO2 will escape. Then, for a long time, I was like a sparkling wine truther when it came to storing sparkling wine in the fridge without any kind of cork. The guys at Cook's Illustrated did this whole thing and they claimed that storing it without any kind of cork was the best way to do it.

I have to say that I have since gotten the best ones, honestly, the ones that clamp down and then have additional vice grip on the side that swings down, they're just better. They are I don't know what Cook's Illustrated did wrong, but they work. They really do work. Just a cork as such is bobo. It's not going to work, but the hardcore thing, they do work. That's the best way. Keep it cold as fuck. That's the best way. What else you got to talk about? There have been three people who have asked the question about the spoon method. Can you talk about it a little bit? That's a German thing, yeah, silver spoon. I feel like that's like a couple German wine merchants with a sense of humor.

We're going to spread this myth and see how many English champagne drinkers try this kind of thing. That's bobo. There's no scientific basis. For the sake of each of these classes, it's a fun I really enjoy the science of wine. It's a fun chance to read more about all these things. I didn't know much about that. I hadn't read much about it, but I read an extensive scientific consideration of CO2 evaporation rates in champagne and stuff like that. That was one of the first myths they were wanting to dispel. As you go into talk more about champagne, if you'll just consider a couple of things about how many vintages go into non-vintage, and if champagne is vintage, what are some of the standouts? In addition, history of champagne as a celebratory drink.

Wow. Those are all really great. I'm going to share a map of the region, and we'll talk I'll try to touch on all those points. You've got the Champagne wine map. You can get a sense of where it is within France there, which is to say northerly. Again, you're in a marginal climate that gives you wines that are acid-driven, and then a sense of the larger region here. The historic part of Champagne is the mountain, the Mont-Fond de Reims. Reims was the coronation site for the kings of the Franks for the better part of half a millennium. And the wines of the region derived some of their prestige from that. But the wines of the Mont-Fond it should be said tend to be heartier, full-bodied.

The core truth of Champagne as a wine is that it consists of three blending partners: two red grapes and one white. The white grape is Chardonnay. The red grapes are Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, which are essentially the same divergent forms of Pinot. Pinot Noir, and they each bring something different to the table. The Mont-Fond de Reims, depending on which way you're facing, is a better site for some varietals than others. It's said in Champagne in particular that Chardonnay really likes east-facing vineyard sites. So the Cote de Blanc, that's not an ironic name. It is a corner of the region that is famous for its Chardonnay. So when you see a wine in Champagne labeled Blanc de Blanc, there's only one, well, historically there were multiple options.

In the modern era, there's only really one option for the sake of the grape. You can know that it's 100% Chardonnay. The vineyards are uniformly, so this is a slope, much as Burgundy is a slope. The vineyards are uniformly east-facing and that is particularly auspicious for the sake of Chardonnay. We talked about the Paris Basin earlier, which is strewn full of chalk. The soils of the Cote de Blanc are very poor. They're very thin. And there's a lot of limestone, which Chardonnay really loves. The vineyards of, or the wines of Champagne are classified at the village level. So when you see Champagne classified as Grand Cru, that is classified as a village. It's not classified as in Burgundy by a particular vineyard. You're talking about a whole village.

And they're a bit like Bordeaux. They think in terms of the price that a village's wines ultimately fetch for the sake of assigning those designations. Many of the most famous Grand Cru's are in the Côte de Blanc. And they are uniformly, again, devoted to Chardonnay. The Montagne, particularly the south-facing sites, Boisy comes to mind, Ailly, they are Pinot-friendly regions. Pinot Noir, in particular, is beautifully there. Do yourself a favor if you haven't ever. So Champagne, people think of it in the context of an aperitif. It deserves so much more credit for the sake of the things it can do as a pairing. If you've never done it and you're feeling fancy, grab a Rosé from Boisy. It's a Grand Cru The Rosés de Boisy, they look like lighter reds and they are steak champagnes.

Drink steak champagne. It's fucking awesome. Don't drink it as an aperitif, drink it as like a main course kind of wine. They'll blow your mind. It's super cool. The third leg of that stool, Pinot Meunier, was very much an also-ran, but increasingly people working with it, it can have more of kind of a vegetal quality. It loves clay. As you work your way west in the Valley of the Marne and closer to Paris, these vineyards here, much closer to Paris proper than they are Epernay, for instance, it's Pinot Meunier territory, and Meunier can turn out really interesting wines that almost have this Cap-Franchi kind of like vegetal spiciness to them that if you're a champagne nerd, can be super fun.

Some also-rans for the sake of champagne that are increasingly significant for the sake of grower producers, making really awesome wine would be this region that is either called the Côte de Barre or the Aube. Some of the best values in Champagne are to be found here. And then the Côte de Cézanne, just south of Epernay. You are well south of Champagne proper here in the Barre, so it should be said that you get much more reliable ripening for the sake of the red grapes in that corner of Champagne. Typically, the merchants of Champagne will keep many vintages of their wine on hand. Champagne is more often than not a non-vintage product. That notion is kind of misleading. Multiple vintage would be a better term to ascribe to it, in the sense that it's not unlike a Solera system.

You have a blend of a lot of different vintages worth of wine, and you're keeping stores of wine for the sake of hedging your bets historically against underripe years, and for the sake of creating a product that is consistent for the sake of maintaining a brand. You are keeping around wines that you think will give weight to wine in leaner years, or conversely give length to wine in broader years. More often than not, I would say non-vintage Champagne would be a blend of at least four to five vintages. The bigger houses keep a library's worth of wines around well into multiple dozens of different individual wines. In as much as I'm railing against these bigger brands, there is an art to blending Champagne and maintaining consistency.

A lot of the guys that work at the bigger houses and make the bigger brands, they're hugely talented. Creating a commercial product that is consistent and delicious is a different challenge than making an agriculturally based artisanal wine, but it's nonetheless a compelling intellectual winemaking challenge, and hugely fascinating. Now, typically in Champagne, producers will only declare a vintage wine when conditions are the best. But Champagne is very much a global warming winner. It's another one of these marginal climates that is benefiting as the world warms 1 to 2 to 3 degrees centigrade. The ripening is less of an issue now than it has been historically. Historically, Champagne was harvested in warm years at the end of September or cool years in October. There have been several years recently when it's been harvested at the end of August.

That would have been unheard of even in my lifetime. So yeah, the wines are getting more reliably ripe, which means that you can make good Champagne a lot more frequently than you could formerly. I'm going to touch on one more thing, Thompson, and then I'm going to do a little bit of shameless plugging and we'll close out with some Q&A. So we haven't touched at all on wines from outside of Champagne. Champagne in as much as it is a geographically based entity, is also the inspiration for wines from around the world. And you can make wine in the method of Champagne almost anywhere using almost any source material. It just so happens that the nomenclature is different, which can be hugely maddening. I like this little graphic.

So there's a lot of Champagne like wine in France itself, but they can't call it Champagne because it's not from Champagne. In France, wine that's made in the Champagne method outside of Champagne is called Crémant, typically. The best of which, in my mind, comes from the Loire Valley. The Loire has an equally compelling history of making sparkling wine, as compelling as Champagne. You know, I think the first lie that the Champagne Loire told you was that they're the only people making sparkling wine. They make some of the best sparkling wine, don't get me wrong, but they're certainly not the only people doing it. So they make a lot of amazing sparkling wine in the Loire. There's a region of Champagne in the foothills of the Pyrenees called Lluçà that has evidence of commercial sparkling production in the 16th century, well before even Dom P was making still wine.

So, you know, even in France, Champagne doesn't have a monopoly on bubbles, tiny bubbles in wine. People will say in English, traditional method, cava is well known as a sparkling wine. I think it's better known as a black-bottled industrial supermarket product than as a honest-to-God artisanal wine, which is hugely sad because cava is amazing. Cava comes from a troika of native beliefs as it exists just west of Barcelona. They're all white. They are Xarello, Macabeo, and Parellada. There's like a fun lisp that happens there in Catalan. Cava, by law, is made in the same method as Champagne. It used to be called Cava in Spain, and then the merchants of Cava proper got litigious, and they had to rebrand, so they said, you know, let's call it Cava, because that's where we're aging our wine.

So Cava equals Cava equals sparkling wine. Cap Classique is this weird South African thing that's historically fascinating and occasionally delicious. Spumanti, you know, whatever. Typically in Italy, they'll talk about Spumanti as a wine with Champagne-like effervescence. When they say Frisante in Italian, they're talking about something that's made more akin to the Proseccos. So Frisante equals more Petnat, Spumanti equals more Champagne-like. The most significant region for Champagne-like wines in Italy, which Sarah is exploring as we speak, is Franciacorta. In Lombardy, Franciacorta uses a similar set of grapes as Champagne. They don't mess with Meunier. Usually it's all Chardonnay and Pinot Noir with the occasional injection of Pinot Bianco. Franciacorta can be super delicious. We're going to close things out with Sekt. I want to Sekt you up. Sekt is German fizz.

Sekt is the truth. So delicious. A lot of the great wine lists in the world, if we flashback to the pre-Great War era, they celebrated Sekt alongside Champagne. The term itself comes from this obscure Shakespearean reference, which a German actor promulgated when asking for a cup of Sekt rogue in a German cafe. Somehow that evolved into Sekt. But it's really fun for the sake of puns. Sekt typically comes from Riesling. I know, you're thinking it's going to be sweet. And it can be. But Riesling as sparkling wine is just hugely, hugely delicious. They drink a lot of it in Germany and Austria. Very little of it makes its way stateside. When and if you come upon it, drink it.

It can be flirty and fun, just like Cabernet Riesling, but it can be equally profound and amazing in and of its own right. Those are some of the names that people ascribe to wines with gas outside of the Champagne region proper. We're going to get back to questions, I promise. I just want to circle back to our original verse, yes. And just get back to the thrill of drinking sparkling wine. It is truly one of life's great joys. In terms of champers as a celebratory entity, I think it's self-explanatory. The bubbles in the glass, they just have this immediate biological effect on us that makes it worthwhile. And the fact that women like Widow popularize it for the sake of European royalty made it the original luxury brand, which is why we continue to treat it as such today.

And honestly, in as much as I'm celebrating these wines from outside of Champagne, when you get married, when you celebrate a birth, I think only Champagne will do. Don't get too cute with it. That is fun to celebrate, especially in the midst of a pandemic. And I hope you understand a little bit more about how these tiny bubbles get in the bottle. And I encourage you to appreciate the wines themselves, stripped of the fizz. And to consider what makes Champagne different from the Petit Nantes that I'm drinking, or the fizzy Northern Italian. To scrape away that legend and to understand it more fully and be better for it. So next week we're celebrating local wines. I am going to update our website and have a link for you all for the sake of that particular link.

I was hoping to, I'm going to share actually, I'm going to try to share the website of the winery itself and their wine store. Because it's Walsh Family Vineyards. And they are an amazing winery in Loudoun County, Virginia. And they are a husband and wife team. They make beautiful, beautiful wine and they sell it online. If you're in Virginia, you can actually buy wine from other merchants through them as well. They have been promoting a podcast themselves. And that's online. On Fridays, well worth joining. But for our sake, we have two 2-packs. We have a Petit Mansang 2-pack. And again, this is through the Walsh Family website. And we're celebrating their wine, celebrating the wine at Early Mountains. So Walsh Family is in Loudoun County, which is due west of DC.

Early Mountains in Madison County, which is south and west. And we're featuring Petit Mansang, which is one of my favorite local white varietals in two different forms. And then we're featuring a couple vineyards from the foothills of the Shenandoah. One Merlot, one Cab Franque. So it's a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure for the sake of next week. You know, you can do a white thing, you do a red thing. And we'll have Nate from, hopefully Nate and Sarah, from Early Mountain. As well as Ben Jordan. From, I got that backwards. We'll have Nate and Sarah from Walsh, and hopefully Ben Jordan from Early Mountain in the mix to talk about their wines as well. For the sake of those of you joining us from outside the DMV, I'm gonna have some additional information about Cab Francs and Merlots, and God forbid Petit Mansangs that you can buy elsewhere to follow along with us. And we will speak to what works about those grapes here, what is intrinsic about them, and stylistically how these individual winemakers think about the way that their wines relate to more classical European tropes. Without further ado, I want to celebrate you all and join together in our customary toast wherever you are enjoying your stars in a glass alone together. Cheers.

All right, Johnson, what do you got for me? Bill, before we go into questions, there's a code, right? So when they go I'm gonna put the code into the chat which is drinkwell. Yes, there is a code for the sake of shipping. It is Drinkwell, and that is the title of Nate and Sarah's podcast additionally, but if you type in, we're like a real live podcast with codes now. This is amazing. If you type 'drinkwell' into their promotional code algorithm, you will get some kind of discount that Nate told me about shortly prior to us going on air. So drinkwell is the code. I will include that information both in the email that I send you all shortly after we disband here and online as well.

And then in terms of people getting those wines, are they shipping them? Will it arrive by next Sunday? It absolutely will. I wanted to promote it as punctually as I could for the sake of our podcast so that people had more time, but Nate and Sarah are applying the labels themselves. They're doing everything out of the winery. I was on their Friday podcast and I think I told them on Monday I was participating and got my wine on Wednesday. So they're all over it. They've got you covered. Awesome. Great. What do you have for the sake of questions, Thompson? Hannah Lee actually sent in a question and she wants to know, can a Negociant blend a champagne vintage? Can a Negociant blend? I don't see why not, Hannah Lee. That's an excellent question.

So Negotiant is, it should be said, just to kind of unpack this a bit, is a someone that purchases either grapes or still wine or even, or typically still wine and then blends it themselves and produces their own wine. But yeah, absolutely. A Negociant could purchase wines from a given vintage and declare a single vintage wine as they wanted to. And honestly, many of the you know, marks, the great houses, essentially act as Negotiant manipulants. They will do just that. And the notion of single vineyard champagne has become very you know, popular recently. But historically, it was almost always a blend. You were almost always looking for, you know, fruit from a particular vineyard that gave you, you know, think about it musically, that gave you one kind of note, you know, you wanted a treble, and then you wanted a bass note, you know.

So it just, it would have, you know, been to blend almost exclusively. It is very rare, especially in a marginal climate like Champagne, to find a single vintage vineyard wine that can give you anything, everything, that is a compelling soloist. You know, more often than not, you know, you're looking for blending components as opposed to, you know, that one compelling piece. So yeah, I would say if anything, you know, the single source is an exception to the rule. And even historically, the grower producer is also an exception to the rule. Typically, everybody was buying from smaller peasants. On a separate note, somebody is asking about the smaller the bead, and whether that means the better the bubble. Yeah, yeah. So, the size of the bead has more to do with the amount of CO2 dissolved in the wine.

So, the more atmospheric pressure in the bottle, the bigger the bubble, typically. The smaller the bead, the less pressure. Should be said, the velocity of the bubble changes as the wine warms. And then, it depends to some extent what other solids are dissolved in the mix. So, there's actually an academic, there's a book, a full book from a physics, a French physics professor about the science of effervescence in wine. It's actually kind of fascinating. But, he did this experiment where he scored a glass with acid, so that the glass was perfectly smooth, and poured champagne into it, and it had no bubbles. That's not to say that the CO2 didn't evaporate, but it had no bubbles because the bubbles only exist because of imperfections in the glass itself.

They rely on what are called nucleation sites, so they need an imperfection to permeate. So, the more matter there is in the glass, the more bubbles there will be. And in terms of the gross size of the bubble, I think it has more to do with the amount of dissolved CO2 than anything else. Okay. What gives with the sugar cube and bitters in champagne? That's a classic champagne cocktail. Yeah, I'm not gonna, that's a classic. You know, that's a that's just a way that people like to enjoy their champagne, you know? You know, I'm not gonna argue with that. I think if you do do that, A, you know, use a sugar cube, by all means, and it has to be like a perfectly formed cube.

Don't get cute with it, with the like the sugar in the raw, like sad, misshapen like brown lumps. It should be like a perfect geometric cube. Angostura bitters are the only bitters that will do, and by all means, use a cube. I mean, you know, if you're making a champagne cocktail, you want to imagine yourself, you know, wearing a flapper dress. I mean, even I want to imagine myself wearing a flapper dress and a double strand of pearls and you know, drinking with that. So, you know, do that. But it's a classic cocktail. And champagne's always been acid-driven, so it's always a wine that, you know, if you want it to support more sugar, will support more sugar. And then, let's get into some personal questions.

About, you know, your favorite sparkling wines outside of champagne. Oh, outside of champagne? Yes. Cava. Cava, cava, cava. So, you know, I like that, so I find very often, you know, when someone tries to you know, do something else, so you know, champagne is the inspiration, obvious inspiration for most sparkling wine makers. I think it's much more compelling to try to find your own voice within that. What I love about cava is that the greatest houses in cava, they're producing wine according to the champagne method, but they're using their own set of grapes. So, their Troika, Shirelo, Macabeo, Parejada, they bring something very different to the party than Chard, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier do. And then, the other thing about cava is cava supports really long élevage on the leaves really well.

You know, and it's stupid cheap. You know, the market still hasn't come around to cava. You know, most good vintage champagne starts at $50 a bottle wholesale. You know, God help you if you want to buy it in a restaurant. You know, a good vintage cava, you know, $30. And that's for something that could be like profoundly delicious. It just, it doesn't sell. You know, people don't want that at a cava, sadly. You have to go to a better merchant. And honestly, when I'm looking for stuff like that, I end up going online. So, Aster, who I've linked to before, for the sake of our emails, is great. Chambers Street Wines in New York, they're amazing. They celebrate cava too. Sect, I talked up, is a fun pun.

And Riesling as bubbles is just beautiful. And it works both ways. So, Riesling works as a Prosecco-like sparkling wine that's floral and fresh. And then, when you lay it down, when you give it this extended contact, it becomes something else entirely that's like really weird. But strangely enjoyable too. I've had some fun moments with French Accorda in Italy. It gets strange, I don't know, I haven't found as much of it stateside that I've loved. There's some solid domestic bubbly. You know, Shromsburg comes to mind as probably like the grand mark of California. And they have caves that were dug out by the same Chinese migrant labor that built the railroad. So, historically it's kind of fun. And also, it's a German wine, which is fitting because most of the greatest houses of champagne were owned by Germans once upon a time.

But for me, if I was just to recommend one region, everybody sleeps on cava, but they're amazing. Amazing cavas available. And what about your favorite food pairings? I know that you love- Fried chicken, fried chicken, fried chicken, fried chicken. You're doing yourself a disservice if you've never gone to Popeyes, gotten a full bucket, and, you know, don't skimp on the champagne just because you're going to Popeyes. Get a really, and actually like vintage. You want like autolytic, like bready, brioche, yeasty champagne, like just the Krug, just like ball out and eat Popeyes. Also, Popeyes has MSG, which MSG and champagne are fun. Oh, like failing Popeyes, so if you want to get fancy, if you want to get bougie about it, Bonchon.

I would- Bonchon's great, like the heat on Bonchon would scare me a little bit for a drier champagne, so that's why Popeyes is good, because, you know, they don't bring the spice to the equation quite as much. So I wouldn't introduce that added element of spiciness. Unless you're dealing with Demi Sec, but fried chicken and champagne. You know, yeah, there are a lot of tropes that people throw out, like caviar's fine. Yeah, fine, whatever. Caviar's fine. Honestly, like I like, I'd rather drink trout roe, I'd rather eat trout roe than caviar, but I'm kind of a weirdo that way. Other classic, you know, kind of, champagne is beautiful for its versatility, honestly. It does, like, it doesn't, it doesn't always pair with things in the sense that, you know, so for me, there's this Hippocratic oath with pairings, like it's a 'first do no harm' kind of thing.

So, if you're gonna work with someone's food, if you're gonna work with, you know, a John Seibert, hypothetically, who, you know, is working at a Michelin star level and makes amazing fucking dishes, you know, the first thing you wanna do as a, you know, nerdy wine type is not mess things up. So, at the very least, you wanna be like a good background singer. So, you know, you wanna find a wine that, you know, or a set of wines for a list that, are, gonna play nicely with friends. The best pairings are, you know, the pairings that, you know, create this yin-yang. They're, you know, this like sensory experience where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

If you've seen Ratatouille, which is like one of the greatest movies about restaurant life ever, they do that like weird visualization thing where Remy's eating the cheese and the strawberry and he eats them separately and then eats them together and there's this like amazing visualization that happens. Like, that's, for me, like, that's the gold standard of pairings. Champagne gets there. So, like, Popeye's champagne, yeah, it gets there. Like, the thing that champagne does well, you know, is that it resets the palate. So, you know, even if champagne's not ideal, it'll just kind of like, you know, clean the windshield and like prepare you for another thing. What champagne doesn't do well, what dry champagne doesn't do well, sometimes is like, um, like spicy food.

Like, spicy food and like really dry champagne is not fun because the dryness of the wine, as acid driven as it is, the CO2 will just kind of like heighten the perception of the heat in a way that's not fun. But the acidity of it cuts through richness in dishes really well. So, it does work beautifully with a lot of different things. If you're gonna, if you're gonna eat caviar, don't do blinis, throw it on like a potato chip. Like, I think like, champagne wants salt. So, like, um, like a large fried chip, like a good, like, I used to like the Grandma Utz's in champagne, and caviar, that would be, I would sign off on that. Um, you know, but um, fried, fried stuff in champagne is the answer.

Um, last but not least, what's the ageability of champagne and other sparkling wines? How long can you name down for? Yeah, incredible. Like, incredible. Um, it becomes really different. So, um, Champagne starts to, so as, as wines age in general, you know, they tend to, um, you know, lose it depends on the wine, but they tend to lose some of their youthful exuberance. They, they lose that you know, fresh, you know, floral, fruity tonality and they take on something that's, you know, more savory. And, you know, can be, you know, a little harder to warm up to. Um, and then typically, you know, in the case of Champagne, it's a little more like, you know, earthy, mushroomy, umami driven.

Champagne, you know, is a wine that, you know, has that light blood and acidity, it ages really beautifully. Um, it ages differently whether it's like a late disgorgement, um, like we talked about earlier, or whether it's spent a long time in bottle, um, uh, after being disgorged. Um, but, you know, vintage champagne in particular ages exceptionally well. It just, it gets different. So, like, you know, it's kind of a caterpillar and a butterfly thing. So, um, uh, cork, are both oxygen and CO2 transmissible. So, vintage champagne tends to be, it gets progressively less effervescent. Um, which can freak people out. Um, uh, um, and, you know, it's, there's nothing wrong with the bottle. It's just, you know, there is that gas transfer. It's just what happens.

Um, which is another reason why I don't like decanting champagne. Um, uh, and, and so, you know, it's just a different animal, but it becomes um, for me, it becomes more, more profound. It's weightier. Um, you know, uh, it's, it's more cerebral, too. Um, you know, there are, there are less uh, wines that, you know, you want to kind of drink at a dinner party and there are more wines, you know, you want to share with just, like, one person, you know, and, or, or, you know, drink by yourself and just kind of, like, try to understand. But, yeah, but, but, like, champagne can be among the most age-worthy wines in the world. The very last thing is I'll say a number of people have been trying to order Walsh family wines and are having a little bit of trouble navigating the site, so can we provide really specific instructions on how to get in and do the local delivery?

I, I should have posted it on our website prior to, uh, but, um, I think if you go through the, so I'm gonna try to pull that up now for the sake of, um, our browser, but if you go through um, their, their site, um, and, and we can all try this, uh, together here, do, you know, through the magic of screen share, um, uh, so, um, if you go into wine, um, there's a drink well tab, uh, if you just click on that, um, uh, it should be a link directly to the two-pack, um, and then, um, add to cart, uh, and then I'm gonna, you cart and Klein to close out and hope good things happen, but, um, there you go, um, so you can check out as guest, um, and include all your delivery information, so hopefully it should be just that, just that easy.

But, uh, the, if through the Walsh Family Wine site, it's just through, uh, drink well, uh, under the wine tab, and, and again, if you're struggling with this, um, I will, um, very shortly, uh, post all of this information on our website, and, and thank you all, um, for, um, you know, supporting, uh, uh, Walsh, uh, and, and getting after this, uh, so quickly, um, uh, you know, you, you do have to kiss a lot of frogs in Virginia to find, uh, the wine's worth drinking, but they are there, um, and there are some really lovely, really amazing people, um, you know, pouring their life into the industry here, um, and, you know, wine, uh, as much as anything else we eat or drink is an agricultural product, and, um, you know, we should, should be supporting, uh, for those of us in the DMV, uh, these amazing local, local projects. Great, um, so, uh, thank you so much, Sarah, thank you so much, guys, for, for joining us, um, I'll get busy, um, and, uh, get online, uh, posting all of this stuff, um, cheers, uh, to you all if you still have wine in the glass. All my love.