Champagne Rory

I know, I know… New Years Eve is all about the Champagne…. and Champagne Rory would be the first to tell me that…

But There is something about a Kir that makes me nostalgic, which makes it appropriate on the last day of the year.

Kir is a cocktail made of dry white wine and Crème de cassis, a thicky syrupy liqueur made from black currants most often made in Burgundy.

It makes me nostalgic because it reminds me of my first trip to France, when I was 15. We were at our hotel in Paris and had been on a busy all day long touring various sites when two elderly ladies who had joined our tour asked my room mate and I if we wanted to join them for drinks before dinner. This girl, who’s name I don’t remember, and I thought it was lovely that these ladies screwed up their courage and finally went to Paris as they had always wanted. OK, they went with a bunch of high school kids, but frankly, I think that it gave them a different perspective on the trip. After all, we played frisbee in the Amphitheater in Nimes… How many times do you see that?

Well anyway, I think the ladies appreciated that we didn’t treat them like three headed space aliens. And so we met them….

and we drank Kir.

And so did I last night….

Happy New Year!

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Yes, this is a dangerous and highly immature game, but I like to think that I have something on Champagne Rory!

It would take 37 glasses of Sparkling Wine to kill me

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Each of us has his or her foibles. One of my downfalls is the Wine Book. Amazon.com sends me frequent reminders of my wish list and recommended items. And so, on my shelves sit over a dozen books yet to be cracked. Just a week ago I received two new books, ‘To Cork Or Not To Cork’ by George Taber, and ‘Question Of Taste, The Philosophy Of Wine’, a collection of essays edited by Barry C. Smith. I actually spend more money on books than wine. Yet, with books queued and precious little time to read them, I revisit a book each year around this time, a book called ‘Champagne, How The World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War And Hard Times’, by Don and Petie Kladstrup.

There are other great wine books, and others about Champagne, but I am especially drawn to the Kladstrups narrative style; much of the book reads as history, and does so with a reverence and honor to the place and people it covers. Le champagne the beverage holds a unique place among the world of wines and la Champagne the province possesses a history as rich and relevant to Western Society as almost any other.

‘Champagne’ begins with Attila the Hun, whose army of seven hundred thousand warriors were turned back by a consortium of Gauls, Visigoths, Franks, and Romans in 451 AD, setting up a bloody record of la Champagne the battlefield host to the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, religious wars, civil wars, the Napoleonic wars, the Wars of Spanish succession, and more recent horrors of trench warfare in World War I and the siege and bombardment of World War II. Kladstrup and Kladstrup juxtapose the war stories to the concept of le champagne, the world’s most glamorous beverage, and allude to what one writer calls the Champenois “taste for contradiction.”

The more pleasant and romantic story of la Champagne begins with the Christian conversion of Frankish warlord Clovis and some three thousand soldiers on Christmas day 496 at Reims. Legend has it that the church was so crowded that bishop St. Remi could not reach the holy oil to anoint Clovis and a white dove appeared to carry the vial to the bishop. The group celebrated with the local wine, and though it was not the straw golden sparkling beverage we know today, le champagne began an association with celebration that exists to this day. The story of Clovis inspired nearly every King of France to be crowned in Reims and celebrate with champagne.

These are just some of the stories in the easy and quick read that is ‘Champagne’, and I highly recommend picking up a copy as a companion to the celebrating of the holiday season that is upon us. What makes wine so special, and I assure you that champagne is in every way a wine, is the the ability to tell a story. Ninety percent of the beauty, I say, occurs outside of the glass in the stories of a time and place and the people who have farmed, fermented, packaged, sold, and resold that thing that culminates when you pop the cork and take a sip.

Lately I have had reason to celebrate and have been drinking champagne almost exclusively. But drinking champagne does not need a reason or occasion. Rather, drinking champagne is the occasion. November and December see the emergence of a particularly festive alter ego of mine named Champagne Rory. As I preach to staff and guests at the James Hotel and David Burke’s Primehouse where I work, drink champagne and you will have a good time. Champagne Rory certainly does.

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