End of another year?
Break out the bubbly to celebrate survival!
And how about something new and slightly different. . . . and inexpensive, too.
Our latest discovery is a sparkling wine whose French producers claim it precedes Champagne by more than a century. As we all know, in France the only wine that can be described as Champagne must come solely from the region in the northeast part of the country. Anything produced anywhere else must be labeled "sparkling wine." Producers from other nations are not bound by French law.
The newcomer for the upcoming New Year's Eve is called Blanquette de Limoux, by Saint-Hilaire, and it's a brisk, nicely fruity, light-hearted sparkler that tastes good and teaches lessons in history, geography and linguistics at the same time. It's priced at less than $15 a bottle, and is fine for toasting, or to accompany a meal.
We first tasted it at Monarch, where Matt McGuire, recommending it highly, was serving it by the glass. A few weeks later, we were at Overlook Farm in Clarksville, Mo., and chef Tim Grandinetti was pouring it as an aperitif.
The story of the wine is fascinating, even if it may have improved through the centuries by some judicious editing.
Limoux is a small community in the Languedoc-Roussillon district of Southwestern France, adjacent to the Pyrenees Mountains, which separate France from Spain. According to Beau Davis, a blogger at a site called basicjuice.com, Benedictine monks were making wine at their Limoux monastery in the early days of the 16th century, using the Mauzac grapes that they grew. They called it Blanquette de Limoux, with Limoux the site and Blanquette the Occitan word for white. Occitan? We'll get to that later.
Limoux, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, is cooler than many of its neighbors in southwestern France. The monks harvested and pressed the grapes, stored them in wooden casks. The wine began to ferment and the process stopped as the weather changed. In spring, warmer weather started the process again, and the carbon dioxide gas produced during the second fermentation, gradually and escaped, unnoticed, through the wood. In the 1530s, however, the monks began using glass bottles, from which the gas could not escape. And when a monk uncorked a bottle, he discovered that carbonation had arrived and what came out of the bottle was very different from what had gone in.
When Thomas Jefferson was ambassador to France, in the early 19th century, he stocked up on French wine, and reportedly liked it so much that it was the only sparkling wine in his cellar.
Today's Blanquette de Limoux must be 90 percent of the Mauzac grape, with Chardonnay or Chenin Blanc for the remainder. The sparkling wine I have shows a little Chardonnay in the finish. The wine is crisp, with a touch of apple in the aroma and on the palate, too. The bubble is small and even, and it has excellent flavor and it quite dry, though not as dry as some versions of Champagne.
I bought my Saint Hilaire Blanquette de Limoux at the Wine Merchant, but I'm certain that other wine shops will have it or can get it for you.
And that brings us to Occitan, the home language for Blanquette. Occitan is a form of Provencal, a dialect spoken in Limoux and other towns in Languedoc and a descendant of the vulgar, or common, Latin spoken by the Caesarean legions that occupied southwestern France for centuries. It also is close to the Catalan language spoken across the Pyrenees in southeastern Spain. Languedoc, the name of the region, comes from langue d'oc, which denoted a language using oc for yes, from the Latin hoc, in contrast to French, the langue d'oil, which used oil, or the modern oui, for yes. (This information is courtesy of Google.)
Anyway, a happy, prosperous and healthy New Year to everyone out there, and whether the history of language or of sparkling wine is important — or even interesting — we send all the very best from our house to your house.
–Joe and Ann