Okay. I like Champagne.

I stand corrected, or perhaps I should say I kneel corrected. Je suis desolee. (I believe it was one of the Rombauer-Becker ladies, in The Joy of Cooking, who quoted Dumas fils as saying that certain champagnes should only be drunk kneeling with the head bared.)

I tasted a champagne last night, and it was not like bubbly stone-water. It was subtle, softly fizzing, light, slightly sweet, a little biscuit-y and buttery in its aromas, and golden, and marvelous. It was the kind of wine that mesmerizes and makes you want to take just one more sip, and another, and just one more after that. No wonder old-fashioned ladies from Fannie Farmer's time advised that it could accompany any part of any meal you liked, from aperitifs to the roast. No wonder the great Colette (I believe it was she) drank it in all moods. This one was (all in one breath) Besserat de Bellefon Brut, Cuvee des Moines, Blanc de Blancs, from Epernay, France. It costs $82 a bottle.



To decipher the label: "Besserat" and "Bellefon" are simply the surnames of the couple, M. Besserat and Mlle. Bellefon, who married and really got down to the business of establishing M. Besserat's family winery in the early 20th century. This French import may be called Champagne, of course, because it is from Champagne. Brut literally means crude or raw, and signifies the second-driest type of champagne made -- Extra Brut is the absolute driest. (The brut category of sweetness -- or lack thereof -- was created after "Extra dry" and "Sec," dry, had been around for a while.) Cuvee des Moines is a type of champagne-making perfected in the 1930s, involving a smaller dose of yeasts and sugars added to the base wines, so as to produce a little less fermentation and finer, more delicate bubbles. Cuvee means the mixture of still wines that go into the champagne, and moine means "monk," so literally Cuvee des Moines would mean "monks' mixture." I assume this reference pays tribute to the role of monks like Dom Perignon in creating champagne centuries ago. Finally, blanc des blancs -- white from white -- means that the champagne is made entirely from base wines of chardonnay only.

And really, there is nothing more to say. You merely drink it, and feel grateful that some kindly soul at the wine shop bought a bottle to open, and to share.

What would Mrs. Wilberforce drink?

A few days ago, some friends and I were discussing, among other things, gray hair. We are all at what I think the French politely call "un certain age." Nancy dyes, I don't, Melanie doesn't need to. Nancy mentioned a colleague who proudly does not dye, and who says, "I earned every one of these gray hairs."

" 'Nobody cares,' " Nancy said she riposted (I wonder). " 'I could be as gray as my mother, too, if I wanted. Dye your hair.' "

I wonder. Not long ago I watched the old Alec Guinness movie The Ladykillers, in which the otherwise practically unknown Katie Johnson plays Mrs. Wilberforce, the sweet or eccentric or dotty or formidable (insert better adjective here) Old English Lady. In this movie, set in the (contemporary) 1950s, she dresses in the fashions of the 1910s, speaks beautifully, recognizes Boccherini, defends abused animals, hosts crowded tea parties, cherishes the memory of the late Captain Wilberforce who drowned in a typhoon in the South China Sea while rescuing the parrot General Gordon, and otherwise drives Alec Guinness and his gang of bank robbers to distraction. When she relaxes with a book in her parlor, you just know she is reading Shakespeare or Alexander Pope, or a biography of Disraeli. She is the old lady I want to be.



Of course she's a fantasy -- people who know the movie notice that the screenwriter and director were both Americans -- but as philosophy teaches, to what can we aim, in any department of life, if not perfection? Mrs. Wilberforce does not dye her hair. In fact during the crowded tea party, she and her many friends all warble the old song, "Silver Threads among the Gold." There seems to be something about her, about that firm pink-cheeked face, nobly hooded eyes, and carefully set gray hair, which bespeaks a lack of anxiety about stopping things that can't be stopped. One gets the impression that this lack of worry leaves her time for Pope, tea parties, and Boccherini. That it makes her, perhaps -- ageless?

What would Mrs. Wilberforce drink? I suspect she would drink what the cookbook and manners writers of her youth would have suggested, the standard sherry with soup, Sauternes and whites with fish, claret with game and champagne with the roast. Cafe noir and bonbons in the drawing room, of course; one simply cannot imagine her guzzling diet Pepsi dressed in a fleece warmup suit after her workout. How nice it is to lament the lapses in tasteful, adult living that seem to have occurred before one was born, and that are therefore not one's responsibility. Certainly, then, one is excused from trying to ameliorate them -- one may simply complain. Always fun. Besides, isn't the world full of far more important problems? I wonder.

As a tiny little point of comparison, consider that when she made The Ladykillers, Katie Johnson was about 77. Not much older than Gloria Steinem is now. That icon of youth and freedom, of the appraising eye and the milky skin and the flowing hair, will be 74 a month from today.

Sweet and dry

It took a while for me to understand the difference in taste between "sweet" and "dry" wines. My first and I hope sensible question was, how can a liquid be dry? The distinction can still be hard to grasp, because some of the characteristics of some wines, like high alcohol levels or the presence of oak, can give a sensation of sweetness where in fact the wine's sugars have fermented away. The tannin in red wines can also leave your mouth with a dry, "chalky" feeling, even if the wine itself may have standard alcohol levels and therefore some residual sweetness in it. (No wonder the great aim of winemakers is "balance"!)

Sweetness, the wine books say, is a taste that you will recognize at the tip of your tongue, even if you hold your nose and thus don't smell a wine's fruitiness or other aromas. A dry wine will not show up, so to speak, at the tip of your tongue in that way. What made all this more clear to me was a taste of champagne.

At one of our Friday night tastings at the store we sampled four sparkling wines, just in time for New Year's Eve. One was a Moscato d'Asti, a sweet sparkling Italian white; one was a sweet French sparkler, Toad Hollow Risque, that was not champagne (no indeed -- Vin vivant, Blanquette Methode Ancestrale, the label carefully explained); one was a California champagne, Mad Annie from Woodbridge Cellars; and one was the real thing: Laurent-Perrier Brut, champagne from Champagne. (Venture to the cellar for a look at the labels.)

The Moscato d'Asti was very sweet, with an almost lemon-syrup flavor that would be great fun at a party or perhaps with a festive dessert. Toad Hollow Risque had a fresher, clearer flavor, and was a shade less syrupy. The Mad Annie California champagne smelled like tart apples, and had a plain hard feeling in the mouth that was very different from the first two wines. And then came the Laurent-Perrier. I sipped. I savored. I swallowed. And I thought: if you cooked stones in water, and then added bubbles, it would be this.


Now the French have not made Champagne the luxe gustatory goddess that it is by advertising it -- or by creating it -- as "bubbly stone-water." But that is exactly the flavor that it left in my mouth. I thought: all right, I understand. This is dry.

I didn't care for it, though it pains me to say so because champagne -- the real thing, the French thing -- seems so sophisticated that I feel I should like it. Every wine book rhapsodizes about it, and includes the delightful stories about goddess-figures like Marilyn Monroe drinking it at any hour of the day or night, or (intellectual) goddess-figures like Colette drinking it when tired, or excited, or sad or happy. It is supposed to be the perfect experience. The work that goes into making champagne is Herculean in itself. I have a new and slightly snobbish horror at what happens to whole cases of the stuff in Super Bowl locker rooms.

But I wouldn't come running for another glass of Laurent-Perrier Brut, at least, not yet. (The bubbles are a little seductive, I must say.) Experts affirm that with time and experience in wine drinking, your palate "dries out," and you develop a liking for less-sweet wines. Of course that implies that you are developing correctly in terms of personal sophistication. But, experts also say that there is definitely a modern-day stigma about sweet wines. Willie Gluckstern in The Wine Avenger, in his usual poke-the-reader-in-the-eye style, even claims that newbies always betray themselves by insisting, all the time and anywhere, that they want "a nice dry wine." Jancis Robinson notes more diplomatically (in How to Taste) that "in recent years the mass market has been schooled to feel proud of liking something dry," and Hugh Johnson says, "The world used to drink much more sweet wine than it does today -- though there are signs that sweet-lovers are at last giving themselves permission to indulge" (How to Enjoy Your Wine).

Johnson seems to be right about our ancestors' taste for sugar. Old menus from Fannie Farmer and Mrs. Beeton advise Sauternes, a lavishly sweet white Bordeaux, with the early courses of a meal, which traditionally would have been fish. Even champagne used to be very sweet. That famous and glorious Veuve Clicquot became the rage in the 19th century when its maker, Madame Clicquot, dosed it with plenty of sugar to appeal to the taste of the Russian troops who happened to be camped in their thousands all over the province of Champagne during the Napoleonic wars. It is less sweet now.

I would suggest that, as the modern day cliche has it, it's all good. Sweet or dry, white or red, all, or at any rate some one of them, have their place in your beverage repertoire depending on the meal in the offing, the guests, your mood, and so on. What does puzzle me is the mindset of people who will not drink or even try entire categories of wine, not for any health reasons that I know of, but simply by preference. I know people who are "reds only" or "whites only." Sometimes I'd like to be rude and quiz them. Of all the thousands of wines in the world, I'd like to ask, no red -- or no white -- can ever possibly please you? You're sure?

Well, perhaps they are sure. Madeleine Kamman writes very wisely, in her The New Making of a Cook, that over the years she has learned above all to respect people's innate tastes. And who am I to judge? ... I don't like champagne.

Chardonnay, again

Learning about wine through tasting it is a little like learning a foreign language. After a while, the various experiences of flavors and smells begin to settle out, and -- just as in a foreign language you begin to understand when this tense is used or when that tense is used -- you begin to understand what you have read in books, or at least begin to understand what it is about wine X that you like, or about wine Y that generally you don't like.

Last night I tasted one of the "unoaked" chardonnays that are becoming fashionable among winemakers now, as they react to the overuse of oak barrels and oak chips to add depth to chardonnay. Strangely enough, this taste of a chardonnay "nu" (naked) helped me to understand why this grape might need a little time in an oak barrel to begin with.

The wine was Kunde Estate's Chardonnay Nu 2005, from Kenwood, California (Sonoma Valley). Wine writers say that you should consider three things when you try a wine, not so that you can be a Connoisseur but simply because these three things contribute to your pleasure and also tell you something about what you are drinking: they are color, aroma, and of course taste. This chardonnay had a lovely pale, clear yellow color, exactly like morning sunlight, as absurd as that sounds. (It doesn't take long before the novice wine drinker is compelled to use terms just as gooey as the professionals use. Other people's rhapsodizing might not be much use -- see a previous post -- but there is something about the product that just seems to require one's own groping after tangible, sensual word-painting.) It also smelled deliciously of pineapple and sweet lemon.

The taste -- well, I am not too sure about that, because as it went down almost all I tasted was "hot." That is alcohol. The Kunde's alcohol level was over 13%, to be expected since the chardonnay grape does tend to ferment to high levels. But for me, that spoiled the previous two pleasures of the wine. And I began to understand what wine writers mean when they describe, vaguely it seems, what oak does to wine. Makes it "gentler," they say, more sophisticated, complex, savory, smooth, soft, toasty, vanilla-y, and so on. I could well imagine a winemaker in Burgundy -- chardonnay's home -- centuries ago, tasting this and thinking "it needs something else."

But what? The Burgundian winemaker's answer, centuries ago, was "let's hold this in oak barrels." Most chardonnay growers and makers around the world ever since have agreed that was a good idea, except for those who are reacting to all that oaky uniformity and are fueling the nu backlash now.

And which is better, or at any rate more to your taste? It might depend on your meal or your mood or on lots of other things. That's the beauty of learning this particular foreign language. The more you understand, the more you get to decide the rules of usage yourself.





(Here: two typical and reasonably priced chardonnays: a Georges DuBoeuf from France, and Robert Mondavi's Woodbridge label. Jancis Robinson credits Mondavi with setting "the gold standard" for chardonnays in California.)

Wine-y recipes

"Grape Harvesters' Soup" comes from Richard Olney's Simple French Food, published in 1974 by Wiley Publishing. The presence of ripe tomatoes would indicate a recipe meant for August or September -- grape harvesting time (without that New World vegetable, it is simply a variation of the many variations of French onion soup). We ate it before a meal of leftovers, but being fresh-tasting, light, and a little tart, it would be a good first course before something really rich like duck or a pork tenderloin.


1 and 1/2 lbs. onions, thinly sliced (I used a leek as well);
1/4 cup olive oil;
Salt;
4 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped;
3 medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and coarsely chopped (I must admit I never peel or seed tomatoes. Once your fresh tomatoes are cooking, you can lift the peel from each one, especially if you only cut them in half to begin with and they have a big outer surface exposed to the heat. No need to chop coarsely -- they will fall apart. As for the seeds, my philosophy is deal with them.)
1/2 teaspoon sugar;
1/2 cup dry white wine;
6 cups water

Cook the onions gently in the olive oil in a large heavy pan, until they are light golden and uniformly soft. Add the salt, garlic, tomatoes, and sugar and continue to cook slowly, stirring occasionally, for another 10 minutes. Add the wine, increase the heat, and reduce by half, stirring, and then add the water. Bring to a boil, and continue simmering, covered, for 45 minutes to an hour. You can float a piece of garlic-rubbed toast in each soupbowl for serving.




These "Poached pears" come from La Bonne Soupe Cookbook by Jean-Paul Picot and Doris Tobias (Macmillan, 1997). The ingredients are simple: 4 or 5 pears, a lemon, sugar, and wine.



It will take about a week or so for your hard, grocery-store pears to ripen. Peel them (really), cut them in half, and cut away the stringy core. Immerse the halves in a small bowl with water and the juice of half a lemon. Bring 3 cups of wine -- red or white -- to a boil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan along with 1 cup of sugar and a 2-inch slice of lemon peel. Once it boils, keep cooking it over high heat for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium, drain the pears from their lemon-water, and slip them into the hot wine syrup. Cook the pears until they are tender, about 10-12 minutes. Turn off the heat, and let the pears sit and cool in the syrup. They can be served at room temperature or kept in the fridge and served chilled. If you use red wine, after a few days in the fridge they will take on a deep red color. They are especially delicious at room temperature the first day, accompanied by a little scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Hints of honeysuckle and olive paste, with aristocratic structure and a bony finish

I am beginning to be convinced that descriptions of the way a wine tastes -- "peach and mango notes, a hint of lychee, cream, and ginger" and so on -- are almost useless, and are one of the first things we should all throw out as we begin our adventures in enjoying wine. There is no way that another person's tasting notes are going to be of the slightest use to me, unless they encourage me to slow down and treat the wine as the sensuous, "foodie" experience it is. Wine does have lovely color and delicious smells; it is much more than fermented grape juice. When I take the time to smell, taste, and think for a moment or two about what a wine reminds me of, I find I do remember it, and I do take more pleasure in it than I might otherwise have done.

But no one can have someone else's tasting experiences, and so the trouble with all those little paragraphs in magazines, or even on the label of the wine bottle, describing wine in all that precisely flowery language, is that first of all they do sound ridiculous -- how can something taste like acacia (isn't that a tree)? -- and second, they discourage people from trying wine because they seem like tests that the newcomer has to pass before he can go on. If the back of even an inexpensive bottle of Gallo tells you that this wine has flavors of boysenberry, chocolate, and anise, and is "decadent" and "silky," what if you don't taste all that? Does that mean you don't understand wine, and should therefore stop trying it? Moving on to the really white-tie-and-tails professionals, here is a tasting note about a Vouvray, from the March 31, 2007 issue of Wine Spectator (p. 158):
"Taut and nervy, with a bony frame carrying fig, quince, and persimmon notes through the chiseled, minerally finish. Fine balance and length. Very precise. Best from 2008 through 2015. 2,295 cases made." (And by the way, wine professionals do chortle at examples like these themselves.)

The price of this Vouvray is $27, which isn't outrageous for a good French wine. (Note how many cases they've got to sell. Quite a few. It isn't as though they've only produced ten, and so have to sell each bottle for $500.) And Vouvrays are good. They are made from the chenin blanc grape, and are white wines of a very pleasant, part-sweet, part-acid flavor -- sweet and acid is the combination of soda pop, after all -- with a sort of lightly rich, nearly bubbly creaminess in the mouth. I wouldn't know what figs, quinces, or persimmons taste like, but the last part of the description, "best through 2015," tells us that this wine will still be good in eight more years. That's an important piece of information: a wine which can be aged that long is, you might say, the real deal, well made by experienced people who are looking ahead and planning to provide you with a nice return on your $27 investment in 2015. Or sooner, if you prefer.

This brings us to our third trouble with sensuous wine descriptions in magazines and on labels. They sound pretentious, they discourage newcomers, but they do represent somebody trying to convey information about quality in a beverage that is, to be fair, more complex and interesting than water, coffee, or diet Coke. Wines can be entrancing or disappointing or just plain weird for a reason, or for many reasons going back to the weather in the vineyard that year, or to the winemaker trying out a new grape clone whose characteristics turned out to be not what he expected. "Balance" and "taut" and "nervy" are all words that the wine writer is grabbing at, to try to express this. (Okay ... maybe he should have known he was going nowhere with "nervy.")

So wine descriptions are, for better or worse, probably going to be with us for a while. Someone, and I wish I could remember who it was and where I read it, pointed out that centuries ago wines were simply described as either "noble" or "well-bred" or not. By the mid-20th century, wines were described as either masculine or feminine. It has only been since the 1960s -- when the grape variety became the thing, and not the place of the wine's making -- that wines have been compared to fruit and flowers. And everything else. Wine Spectator boasts "More than 1,100 wines rated" in this issue alone.

We return to the problem that other people's descriptions of wine can never be yours. My suggestion would be not to try to make them yours. If nothing else (complaint number four, I think), the precision of all this wine-language makes wine seem as if it should be a cocktail, every one as recognizable and as different from the next as a Tom Collins is different from a Bloody Mary. Perhaps ( ...ssshh .....) that was never the case, and was understood not to be, back when our winebibbing ancestors merely classed wine as "noble" or "feminine." Perhaps it was all meant to be normal, good, and everyday, which is simplicity itself.

"How wine is made"

No matter how many times I have read about the mechanics of making wine, and no matter how well professional wine writers simplify matters, I still have had a hard time understanding exactly what goes on. It is all fundamentally so ancient and easy, they agree: crushed grapes, natural yeasts on the skins, it sits it ferments voila you have wine. Of course if you do this at home, it won't be very good wine ... so then what else happens to it, at the wineries?

Months of reading and listening to people who know more than I do has helped clear things up somewhat. First, red wine is made by churning up the red grapes and letting the juice, pulp, and skins sit together for a while. All this goo is called the must. Churning red grapes gives red wine its dark color and its tannins (the compound that seems to make your mouth shrivel a little, the way strong black tea does). White wine is made by the juice being pressed out of the skins and allowed to run off and ferment separately, free of the skin color and tannins that would overwhelm a white wine's desired delicacy.

Grape juices, either red or white, can ferment and/or age in a stainless steel tank, in an oak barrel, or both in succession. Wine makers can rely on yeasts naturally present, or they can add more. When the juices have fermented and become wine, they are still going to be full of extraneous matter, even the white wines that were never churned up with their skins. If nothing else, they too carry the dead yeast cells -- the lees -- that have finished the work of fermenting and have sunk to the bottom of the tank or barrel. Wine drinkers don't necessarily want to see this, unless they have bought a great and expensive red, like a Bordeaux or a vintage port, which will go on aging and "throwing off" yeast-cell sediment even in the bottle.

So most wine is cleared before bottling either by being pumped gently out of its sediment-filled tank or barrel into a pristine one, or by having a special filtering agent laid on the surface of the liquid. (Or both.) This agent sinks slowly down to the bottom of the tank or barrel and carries all sorts of wine-gunk with it. The "agent" might be a particular form of clay, Bentonite, or it might be isinglass, taken from the swim bladders of a fish. When the wine is "fined" like this and is crystal-clear, it is ready for bottling.

Being about as germ-phobic as anybody else, I have wondered about what is done to wine to make it safe to drink. (By the way, Hugh Johnson in Vintage: The Story of Wine relates an old legend about wine being discovered in the royal court of ancient Persia, by a desperate harem maid who drank off some forgotten and weirdly bubbling grape juice, thinking it was poison and would end her troubles. When instead it cheered her and blessed her with "refreshing sleep," she told the king, Jamshid. The rest is oenophilia.)

Apparently, not a great deal is done to wine to make it "safe," because many of its properties -- alcohol, sugars, acids, tannins -- are themselves preservatives. If it should spoil it will simply become vinegar, which is itself another preservative (albeit an unpleasant drink). Wines aren't pasteurized, except for some kosher wines which are flash-pasteurized, because heat will cook the alcohol and ruin the taste. What the winemaker must do to ensure flavor is to ensure that his equipment is scrupulously clean. Cold tanks and cold cellars help, as refrigerators help us preserve our food. And what he can do is offer his land, vines, grapes, or wine, at a variety of points in the process, a little further help so that he ends up producing what he intended, and not something you would make pickles with.

One of these little helpers, to borrow a phrase, is sulfur. It is a normal part of fermentation anyway, and is present in many other foods, like bread and dried fruits. But it has also been used as a spray to prevent mildew on the vines, and to clean barrels of any surviving yeasts and bacteria that can live in wine, multiply, and make vinegar. Sulfur also protects wine from air itself, which in large doses is not wine's friend. (A cut apple or banana turns brown in air. Wine oxidizes in the same way. Johnson explains: "It has been said that before the advent of sulphuring, the grape variety scarcely mattered, since all wines rapidly oxidized and thereafter smelt and tasted similar.")

After the wine is bottled it is shipped to your local grocery store or wine shop, from whence you buy it and take it home. You can hope that the wine wasn't parked next to furnaces and boilers, or under hot lights, along the way, but at least once you bring it home the responsibility for it is yours. Some wine writers say that more wine, nowadays, is just plain good -- well made, well cared for, affordable, reliable -- than at any other time in the planet's wine-drinking history. At any rate we are more fortunate than our remoter ancestors, who used to keep the stuff in goatskins and dilute it with warm sea-water (from Johnson's Vintage, again).

And, for the germ-phobic among us, it is good to know that with wine we have a product that, as far as my limited knowledge goes, carrries no unsuspected problems in quite the way that ground beef, raw eggs, and unwashed lettuce can. It is meant to taste good and provide pleasure with meals; if it has "gone bad," the most it will do is fail to provide those pleasures, in which case of course you won't drink it. Voila.



"Sherman's Lagoon" by Jim Toomey. (c) 2008 Jim Toomey. Used by permission of the artist.

Stopping time

"Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I'm finding enjoyment in things



that stop time. Just the simple act of tasting a glass of wine is its own event. You're not downing a glass of wine in the midst of doing something else."

David Hyde Pierce






Stopping time on a snowy Saturday -- Groundhog Day, appropriately enough -- is even easier with, let's say, a little glass of pinot noir, a few crackers, and a bit of cheddar cheese. If you want to read John Gay's To a Lady on her Passion for Old China, or perhaps watch Dark Victory, why so much the better.