A Little Esoterica With Your Champagne
I’ve probably drunk as much bad champagne as anyone to mark the New Year, weddings, rotating the tires on the car. Celebrations and champagne are like politicians and corruption – you just can’t imagine one without the other. Yet many of us probably have never had a drop of real champagne. I mean the authentic stuff that won’t give you a headache within 15 minutes of imbibing. Look, you say, everybody already knows that champagne comes only from La Champagne region of France, and the bubbly served at the wedding of the bald guy in marketing is technically “sparkling wine,” not champagne. OK, fine. So you’re educated about food and drink. If you follow foodie blogs, that’s no surprise.
But there are other tidbits about champagne I’ll bet you didn’t know. As we tip a glass to the end of 2010, let’s drink in these facts about the fizzy stuff:
- France’s La Champagne actually isn’t a great area for growing grapes. In fact, the wines the region produces are marginal because the grapes are high in acid. But the conditions ARE very good for producing champagne.
- A raisin dropped in a glass of champagne will continually bounce up and down from the bottom of the glass to the top. (No clue whether this oft-repeated nugget is true. Maybe I’ll bring a box of Sun-Maids along on New Year’s Eve to test it.)
- Back in July divers found what is believed to be the oldest batch of champagne when exploring a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. Observers say the 30 bottles were produced in the 1780s and were en route to Russia. Word is when a couple of the bottles were uncorked, the stuff tasted swell.
- How is champagne like football? In that the indentation at the bottom of a champagne bottle is called the punt.
- Monsieur Perignon’s first name was not Dom; that is a title given to Benedictine monks which is derived from the Latin, “dominus.” The first name of the man who contributed so much to champagne culture was Pierre.
