15 HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ALL! SANTE!

15 HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ALL!  SAnte!

In ancient Egypt bees were known to have flown into being from the tears of sungod, RA.   Wax candles were used on cakes to celebrate birthdays, sending honeyed smoke back to the creator asking RA for favors (or that ‘wishes may come true.’)  1400 B.C.

Do you ever wonder which birthdays we should be celebrating for delices we enjoy without counting the years?  Staples that spice up our meals; staples we toss into our market baskets without further thought?   Well here are a few to whom we can all offer Big Birthday toast of Champagne.  SANTE!

Bonne Anniversaire to:

Pepsi Cola, 121 years old

Dr. Pepper, 110 years old

French’s Mustard, 110 years old, born at the St. Louis World Fair, 1904

A-1 Steak Sauce, 119 years in the USA

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, 118

Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar, 114

Hershey’s Kisses, 107

Nabisco’s Barnum Animal Crackers in that circus box, 112.  They originally were created at Christmas time, and the strap at the top was to hang on the tree.

Peter Pan Peanut Butter was born in 1928 and put into cans.  But metal shortages in World War II introduced the change into glass bottles.

Beaulieu Vineyards is also 100 years old:  “When you know fine wine, you know B.V.”  the old radio commercial ran.

Ice-cream in cones, 86 years old.

Now here are some really old-timers:

Bananas, lemons, limes and oranges, 6000 years old, born in the Indus Valley.

Cinnamon brought by Phoenician traders to the Peloponnesos, 1250 B.C.

Fois Gras brought to Greece by armies from China where fattened geese provided such a luxury, 450 B.C.

Sake produced in the Nada area of Japan by a special rice and Miyamizu or ‘holy’ water, 225 B.C.

Bread is produced and sold en masse in bakeries in Rome, 190 B.C.

Kiku-Masamune sake, 1659 A.D., Kobe, Japan.

(I am working on a next blog featuring Taketo Kano, owner, Kiku-Masamune traditional sake.)

When you see and re-taste such dear old friends, please raise a frothing Champagne glass and toast them with appreciation for the joys brought into our lives by their flavors and aromas and goodness gracious, that je ne sais quoi that brightens our eyes and sparks taste buds, much as Champagne does. 

Soon Imperial General Julius Caesar will stride onto these pages and tell us all about marvels that we enjoy today that were born even farther back in time and space.  Soon.  Just not quite yet, Caesar.

 

Madam Champagne,

The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne

20 January, 2014

13There is a man who dreams in stars.

I have a friend who dreamed in stars.
Oh, I know Dom Perignon said he was drinking stars.
But my friend is Stars.  Stars, stars, stars.
He drank stars; he saw stars; he cooked with and for stars; he had stars at his feet, and he drove a starry car.  And in my friend's wake all who flocked to his doors too became stars. 
To enter his starry establishment was to become star-dusted. 
You may wonder, could there ever have been such a place as I dream, called Stars? 
Of course there was. 
I know this star-gazer, star-enchanter:  he is my friend, Jeremiah Tower. 

Jeremiah is made of stars:  composed of Co2, the gas of life, the gas that fuels stars. 

He is ever-ready for a new star-struck adventure.
Like his current love of finding stars at the bottom of the sea as he soars among those denisons, the largest of sharks called whale. 




For Jeremiah this adventure is necessary because, he explained, he once had a fear of the sea. 
Did, I wonder, he have a fear of stars?


If so he has mastered both by up-close and personal contact, breathing that gas of life. Stars.


As we celebrate the birth of the King of Stars, of Heaven and Earth, shall we not also all aspire to breathing, as Jeremiah does, the gas of life, Co2, the stuff of star-dust? 

And, in so doing, let us all praise our creator, and wish each and all of us on this planet a star-filled and glorious New Year:2014.

Madeleine, Madam Champagne


If you have read this blog before you must know that before it ends I will speak of another friend who in fact invented Champagne.  Julius Caesar. 
He is getting close to rebellious if his word is not heard soon.
So I quiet him and offer him some of what he too loves, Co2.
I see Caesar lift his kylix, and, with a smile, toast the world.


Can any of you guess how many bubbles there are in every 750ml bottle of Champagne?

Champagne Toujours,
The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne...soon.

11 Wolfgang Puck is Champagne

“My darling,” exclaimed the wonderful British actress Coral Browne (at the time not long married to charming, funny, brilliant, kind Vincent Price), “darling, if they served breakfast at ‘Ma Maison’, I’d eat breakfast,” she concluded in her resonant rolling voice. 

That was 1980.  I’d just returned to Los Angeles and was in the wine business.  Soon thereafter I went in search of this mythic establishment where the crowds could not be contained, so wild they were for the ambrosial meals served by the wunderkind Chef, Wolfgang Puck.   It was mid-morning when I went to my appointment to taste with owner, Patrick Terrail, Burgundies from Bouchard Pere et Fils I was representing.  I drove by the address a few times.  Perhaps I had the wrong address?  But on my fourth try I saw the sign.  There was no restaurant du Luxe facing me.  Perhaps Coral was having one of her jokes?  This “Ma Maison” was a shack in the middle of a vast parking lot.  There were no valets in uniform.  Only a plastic duck stood guard, and the canvas flaps that were the walls were blowing in winter’s morning breeze.  But there, in the front, was a swanky vintage Rolls Royce, so I figured the duck had already received one guest.    

  Walking into the kitchen door, I looked to ask permission of the Chef.   And there he was:  the wunderkind.

Just seeing how cute he was I understood Coral’s infatuation.  I was yet to taste the cuisine of dreams, however.  Wolfgang put down a large spoon, introduced himself, and his sous-chef, and accompanied me into the restaurant-tent where I would conduct the tasting.  We chatted, and, when Patrick arrived he bowed out, back to his waiting pianos.  I could not help but notice that, sitting in a slight gloom, with a few plastic ducks around his feet, was Orson Welles.   That was somewhat startling, but it confirmed I was really in Oz-land, Hollywood; and that ‘Ma Maison’ was decidedly part and parcel of California glamour.    

Patrick Terrail himself was culinary royalty.  He was nephew to Claude Terrail, proprietor and host-extraordinaire at Paris’s Tour d’Argent.  Once I heard that I understood the plastic duck.  Ducks, I should say, because the presence of plastic ducks marching around the walls, the floors, guarding every spot inside this plastic sheeted, astro-turfed haven of gastronomy called ‘Ma Maison’, was impossible to miss.

 We were about to begin the tasting with Le Corton.   Wolfgang fortuitously arrived bearing proper stemware and joined in.   From his first remarks I knew he knew wine.  After several such morning tastings, we three became friends.   Ma Maison had many of my wines on the list, so frequently I took business clients, and certainly my company’s brass when in town, to Ma Maison.   I was prepared at my first lunch there to test Coral Browne’s assertion that if “they served breakfast” she would begin eating breakfast.   Coral was rarely wrong.  But I was not the one who would prove her right.  You see, over the bar there hung a sign which read:  “Aimez vous le canard, ou aller vous faire voir;” “either you love duck, or get out of here.”   Every time I went to Ma Maison to dine, Patrick took the orders at my table.  And when he’d get to me, he’d pat me on the shoulder, saying:  “and, for you, the duck.” 

Fortunately for my gastronomic experiences, Wolfgang opened “Spago” soon thereafter, and, over all these years I have gotten to taste so many of the dishes he dreams up.  Wolfgang is ever innovative and bubbly of personality.    While he is a great chef, he also oversees a vast enterprise.  Like Champagne he could not bubble so constantly, dreaming of new worlds, if he did not have a very Champagne personality:  he allows all who work for him to blossom, doing their best.  And therefore his empire functions in harmony. 

Wolfgang remained throughout my wine and Champagne career a supportive friend.  He poured thousands of cases of the Champagnes I represented, and we did many bubbly events together.  He even invited me to bring Champagne Gosset on his TV program once, and served with it my favorite Wolfgang dish with Champagne, his Smoked Salmon pizza.  When he introduced his frozen foods at a luncheon hosted by his friend, and mine, Jeremiah Tower at Stars in San Francisco, I happily joined the celebration, bringing Champagne Henriot’s Cuvee du Soleil to add billions more bubbles to this roof-raisingly joyous occasion. 

Today I name Wolfgang a Champagne Chef.   Sante, Wolfgang.  

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Near me, pacing the floor as I type, is a nervous General.  He wants to know when I will start saying more about him.    “Soon, Caesar, soon.”

Madeleine.

The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne. 

12 12 2013

9 BRUTAL BUBBLES

Often people ask me, "why is Champagne called BRUT?"

“Words, words, words,” replies Hamlet when Polonius asks what he is reading.

And Hamlet is right.  Words only signify what we say they signify, and that often changes with the times and like the times. 

A case in point are the names, the labels, given to styles of Champagne.  Champagne names do not always mean what you might think, and there are reasons for this.  

In the 1790s when Champagne was beginning to achieve consistency in atmospheres of pressure because bottles were stronger and corks tied down more firmly, when clarity from lees was still a dream that was being experimented with in all the chalk caves filled with bottles under Reims and Epernay, in this time refrigeration was only as good as your climate, and was, as we know it today, almost a century in the future.  For preservation, meats were salted or hung, which gave a pungent or a sweet and rotting smell to larders.  And the resulting dishes were powerful in taste.  In order to hide over-saltiness or gaminess, sauces were devised that were stronger and over-the-top flavorful and rich.  And since Champagne, like all other wines, was meant to accompany meals, though the dosage of sugars added in the liqueur d’expedition as the final cork was put into the bottle was high, the Champagne tasted dry to taste-buds primed by powerful- tasting foods, and was therefore called Sec, which means “Dry.”  It tasted dry therefore it was Dry, though it was sweet.  “Words, words, words.”

About twenty years later, around 1810, the time when remuage was being perfected, allowing bottles of clear Champagnes to be shipped around the world, an Englishman approached a favorite Champagne house and asked for a Champagne less Sec.  In fact, though the man asked for a Champagne less “dry”, he was really asking for a Champagne less sweet.  Obligingly the Champagne house created for England a Champagne they called Demi-Sec, or “half-dry”, meaning what it was, a Champagne “less-sweet”.   The weather in England may have had something to do with this strange request.  Since 1800 the winters had gotten steadily colder; in 1810 the Thames froze over, which had not happened since Samuel Pepys wrote about it in 1667.   Likely most English took advantage of this climate change to store foods, unsalted, in ice-rooms, allowing truly fresh meals.  And with such came the desire to drink a “less-sweet” Champagne, Demi-Sec.    

Things went along like this for about another fifty years, and the 1860s saw the beginnings of kitchens that had “ice-boxes” in which to “refrigerate” and keep foods fresh, practically eliminating the need to salt for preservation.   And once more the fresher tasting foods brought palates in line for tastes in wine.  Again the Champenois attribute the odd request for a Champagne less “sec” to an Englishman, and so they replied by once again cutting the dosage and creating a wine they labeled this time in English to make certain the British understood:  “Extra Dry”.   That must have done the trick because for the next almost forty years labeling and drinking of Champagnes stayed pretty much on an even keel.   

Then once again, it happened.  To celebrate the change in Centuries, in 1900, Edward Albert, The Prince of Wales, future King Edward VII, sent his cellar-master to Reims, to Champagne GH Mumm, with, yet again, an astonishing request”:  The Prince desired to celebrate the coming new Century with a Champagne with less dossage.  Sacre Bleu!   While such a request came as a shock to the Champenois, no one dared say so to the Prince, or to his emissary.  What they expressed in private, “C’est brutal de boir un vin si sec,” they expressed only on the label:  BRUT.  And, once again the Champagne maker cut the dosage to a level considered brutally dry.

 

  

Of course the taste the British express in Champagne has proved to be excellent, and today when we drink Champagne most normally it is a “brutally dry” bottle labeled BRUT.    

“Words, words, words.”  Yes words often are all upside-down, as in Champagne labels.

Today the term “Extra Dry” still proves to confuse consumers and wine-shops and sommeliers.  It should be dryer than Brut, but in fact it has a dosage half again sweeter.    This is hard to explain without going through all the above explanation.

“Words, words, words.”

Once again the unthinkable has happened.  There is today a Champagne even more brutally dry, called Brut Nature.  It is a specialty of some Champagne Houses, and is in fact the way all Champagnes are when they have finished their second fermentation in the bottle, have spent years on their lees, and are about to be riddled and disgorged for clarification,  just before being dressed and shipped to you and me.   At this stage the Champagne is brutally dry, or Brut Nature, or Brut Zero.   It is a Champagne for special foods, like oesetra caviar. 

In the last twenty years this words confusion has been slightly rectified in Champagne.  Some terms have been switched in the line-up, trying to make the dossages and words more understandable.  

1810 -1900                                                                                                 1990:

Sec:  between 50g of sugar and 32g per litre                     Demi-Sec: 50g-32g/l

Demi-Sec: between 32g and 17g                                             Sec: 32g-17g

“Extra Dry”: between 17g -12g                                               “Extra Sec”: 17g-12g

Brut:  less than 12g/l                                                                  Brut: less than 12 g/l         

                                                                                                          Extra Brut: 6g/0g

                                                                                                          Brut Nature: 0g

Personally I like it better the way it was.  “Words, words, words.”

Sec, and Demi-Sec, and “Rich” or Doux Champagnes are great dessert wines; Extra- Dry is marvelous with savouries like pates and spicy soups and Asian foods.  Whatever Champagne types you consume they become far more than words.  They become dreams.

A votre santé!

Now, beside me is an antsy Commanding General.  He wants me to get along with all these words, words, words, and start wording off about him.

Caesar, I promise your time is nigh.  Soon, soon, soon.

Madeleine de Jean.
The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne ©
December 8, 2013

8 Amazing Memories .... Dare to touch the sun!

This morning I went to Jensen’s Market, Palm Springs's finest foods market.

I went to see my friend Kevin, the wine guru at Jensen’s.

And I went to see Jensen’s “Mr. Chicken”, Pete.

Today Pete was “Mr. Turkey” too.

He was not wearing his turkey hat, not his chicken hat, but I recognized him.

Pete’s smile is unmistakable; and he likes to be called “Pierre”.  I am happy to oblige, especially when he does such a fine job boning a turkey breast. 

As I waited for Pete, aka Pierre, to do his work, I realized I was listening to John Denver singing his Rocky Mountain High.  

And that segued into an Amazing memory.

In 1977 I was sommelier at Moran’s Riverside Restaurant.  The restaurant was a Renaissance room, overlooking the Mississippi in New Orleans’s French Quarter.  My job was simple.  The owner, Jimmy Moran, said he wanted me to create for him “the finest wine cellar possible. “  He never asked what I paid; he trusted me to do what he asked me to do.  And so we had a great time together building this wine cellar. 

Moran’s restaurant was on the second floor in a newly remodeled eighteenth-century building.  It was only accessible by elevator from the courtyard on the ground floor.   The kitchen, just to the east of the dining room, was situated above the pasta-making facility, also on the ground floor.  Between that ground-floor pasta facility and the kitchen above was the wine cellar.  It floated between floors, and had great ventilation as well as security. 

I had plenty of room to house current-drinking wines from the great regions of France and Italy and some from Spain, as well as that newly discovered territory, Napa, California.  And some from The Finger Lakes’s iconic Dr. Konstantin Frank.    I also had adequate space to house, in unopened cases, those wines that were too young to serve.  Each was marked with my suggested date of serving.  

In my search for the “best” I had thought of Mr. Moran’s customers and what would please the majority.  Thanks to Michael Broadbent and Michel Roux as well as many of my vineyard-owning friends, I had found fine vintages of the best Second and Third growth Bordeaux as well as those I loved from the Cru Bourgeois, and the estates of Julius Caesar’s Burgundy.  Of course for the minority who could afford the ultimate, the greatest vineyards of Burgundy and Bordeaux, Italy and Napa, had their bins.  Every bin was clearly named and marked “do not disturb” so the waiters would not go in frantically moving bottles that were sleeping into perfection. 

One morning Mr. Moran told me that John Denver had heard about the wine cellar and was bringing his entourage for dinner that night.  By the time I entered the dining room for the dinner service I had sort of forgotten what he had said.  I had been receiving some 600 cases of our house wine that day, and that is a long and important job.  About half an hour after the night’s service began I looked up. Someone was waving me over.  It was John Denver.  Really.  He was holding the wine list and smiling.  Really.  We, his wife Annie and he and I, discussed what the group was eating, and then he chose the wines he thought would be best.  His father agreed. 

Their dinner was about to enter the desert course when John waved me over again.  He wanted to see the wine cellar.   So we walked through the dining room into the kitchen to reach the stairs down to the wines.  One bus-boy, just finishing polishing the silverware, looked up.  Stunned by recognizing John Denver he dropped all the silver at John’s feet.  Joining John in an uproar of laughter, the whole kitchen erupted in relief.   

John followed me down the staircase and into the wine cellar.  He really was curious as to how and why it was arranged as it was. 

Like a troubadour he carried his guitar.  Entering the cellar, seeing how it might swing and dislodge a precious inhabitant, he removed it, laying it carefully over a newly arrived case.  When we’d made the circuit, he picked up his faithful pal.  “I’d like to sing a song for the wines,” he announced.  

“Do you mind singing in the stairwell,” I asked?  I took a deep breath.  How do I tell John Denver ‘no’?  “This is a nursery.  They will dream your song, inventing themselves anew.  But perhaps inside this room the reverberations will be too upsetting?” 

The troubadour understood.  Strumming the first bars as he strutted out, John Denver began to sing for and to Mr. Moran’s wines, “Rocky Mountain High.”   A movement made me look above John’s head.   There was the whole kitchen staff, bus-boy in the foreground.  And in back the whole of the dining room too.  It was an Amazing Moment. 

Waiting for “Mr. Chicken” this morning,  John Denver’s refrain, “Rocky Mountain High,”  followed by his soaring note that would fall into “Colorado,”  I was amazed by the immediacy of those long-ago surroundings crowding in memory.  I can see the faces of Annie, his wife, and that of his father as John waxed lyrical in choosing the wines.  They understood they were in the presence of a fleeting dream, of a troubadour.

John Denver’s song tells of the majesty of America’s natural heritage.  As on the first Thanksgiving let us again celebrate our human similarities and our native differences.   He also tells us of his voyage, like Pharoahs of antiquity, to touch the sun.  All together now:  “He left yesterday behind him; you might say he was born again.  You might say he found a key for every door.   He climbed cathedral mountains; he saw silver clouds below.  He saw everything as far as you can see. And they say that he got crazy once; and he tried to touch the sun.  And he lost a friend but he kept his memory.  Now he walks in quiet solitude the forests and the streams, Seeking grace in every step he takes.  His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake; And the Colorado mountain high.  I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky.  You can talk to God and listen to the causal reply.  Rocky mountain high.  …..Colorado.”

I’d be a poorer person if I had not this amazing memory of such a troubadour touched by the sun.   Wine, god Dionysos, caused us to meet; caused John to sing on that stairway long ago, inspiring bus-boys and chefs and diners to do greater things, like reaching for the sun. 

John eventually did reach for and touch the sun.

Now I have an Emperor next to me who is getting antsy to tell his story.

But, Julius, your time is not yet nigh.  Shussh.  Soon.

Madeleine de Jean.

Dream Amazing dreams.  Dare to touch the sun.  Dionysos is there to uplift you.

The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne.

Thanksgiving day, 28 November, 2013.

Comet ISOS is nigh.  Today it is touching the sun.   Will it survive?

7 Amazing things ...

I like to write about amazing things, wondrous things, like the transformative powers of the god Dionysos and those found in Champagne’s “gas of life”, especially at this time of bounty and thanksgiving, the season of harvest and good cheer.

But also at this season it is perhaps the time to write about amazing things that are not so wondrous, things about which it is hard to write because they are so sad.  Like children who live not far from any of us who do not have enough to eat everyday.    Like “Rosie”.  

I have been looking for Rosie since I saw her, last Spring, on a Bill Moyers-Chef Tom Colicchio-Laura Silverbush program about the Colicchio film “A Place At the Table.”  In that film twelve-year old Rosie shines with intelligence and the promise within herself.   But she goes to school so hungry every day that she says she cannot concentrate; that instead of seeing her teacher she sees a “banana”; and, instead of seeing classmates, to console her hungry-self she pictures “apples and oranges.”  Rosie is not looking for cakes and junk food.  She is craving a banana.    

I emailed Bill Moyers to see what I could possibly do to help Rosie.   I have had no reply.

This morning I was planning to write more about Champagne; “Champagne Toujours” after all is what this blog is called.  But, hello, I turned on the CBS news and there was Rosie talking about her banana teacher.  The Colicchios were on with Charlie Rose and Norah and Gail.    Dionysos is sending this sign so I write about Rosie instead of him today.

How can I find Rosie; how can I do something so that the next time Rosie is on television perhaps she will be acting in a drama she wrote and directed, instead of wishing for a banana?  There should be bananas in every child’s home; and apples and oranges too.   Who can help me to do something? 

This is a time of harvests and of plenty; a time of remembering our country’s heritage of giving Thanks; of giving thanks while learning and celebrating the differences of those with whom we share.  I can write about Champagne and fois gras tomorrow.  But today I want to do more than know that many children, right here in America, are wishing and dreaming of dinners they will not have.   How can I make a difference?  While there is harvest and bounty all around us, while twenty-four hours a day The Food Channel has programs showing gargantuan meals being prepared, there is want and need in children around all of us.  How can I make any difference?   

If you have suggestions please send them. 

That includes you too, Caesar.   If you have suggestions, you pass them right along.

Madeleine de Jean

The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne.

6 For The God Dionysos I Am Thankful

6 For Dionysos let us be thankful.

For this god of civilization, rising from the east, traveling ever westward, rising with the sun, divining the moon, god of ecstasy, of poetic dreaming, of architecture and mysticism, of rest in times of need, of springing into resurrection , divinity of madness and of song, dance and flight and fantasy:  I am thankful for Dionysos.  Where would I be without him?; without the vineyards of the world?; without the millions of vines, hundreds of thousands of artists and artisans working, doing, fulfilling the promise of the god? 

At this time of year the harvest of the the god  must give great pleasure to the weary vineyardists, hearing the wild fermentation and smelling the divine aromas arising from their efforts, from fermenters and casks, from pithoi and jugs.  Dionysos is at work.  Dionysos is about to arrive.  In fact in those vineyards devoted to carbonic maceration vinification he is already here, the first wine of this year has arrived:  Nouveau wines, made by sealing the grapes without air, together with their yeasts, so the yeasts go mad with hunger for the grape sugars they smell profoundly in this captivity.  In their frenzy they cannot wait, they will not wait, they do not wait for this divine meal.  Boring into the grapes the miniscule ferments begin to eat within the grape the wonder summer has wrought within, sugar.   Being overwrought in their feeding wildness, the ferments belch while consuming their divine meal, belch carbon dioxide and alcohol, bursting open the grapes.  And thus does Dionysos’s magic transform these un-pressed grapes into a wondrous wine of fruity flavors and fragrances of roses and persimmons.  Nouveau Gamay is particularly, headily delicious.  I am thankful it is arriving as I write.   By tomorrow I surely will have found several to enjoy during this thankful week.

Once, in 1984, when I was the western US agent for Bouchard Pere et Fils wines from their estates in Burgundy (akin to being the Sorceress of the West) the Ahwahnee Hotel in California’s Yosemite National Park and I hosted Yosemite’s first Beaujolais Nouveau wine weekend.   The Ahwahnee already poured Bouchard Pere et Fils Burgundy by the glass, and they wanted to be the first National Park to have a Beaujolais Nouveau festivity.  Mindful that Yosemite is one of the grandeurs of California, I wanted this festival to include some California Nouveau wines too.  So I went to meet with my friends, Robert Pecota in Calistoga  and Charles Shaw outside of St. Helena to ask them to please join us in celebrating the first wine of the year.  Then both were alone in making the real “Beaujolais style” nouveau wines with the Gamay Noir au Jus Blanc grape in the US.  In fact for Chuck Shaw’s winery this 1984 nouveau would be the first of a long tradition.   We all met in Yosemite in July, with wine-writer Robert Lawrence Balzer, and planned the Beaujolais Nouveau event for the release of the new wines in November.  Mid-November Jean-Francois Bouchard, the fils of Bouchard Pere et Fils, flew in on the Concord to bring the first cases of his nouveau wines.   Charles Shaw and Bob Pecota brought their in by car up over the snowy passes into Yosemite Valley.  Joining us to discuss foods that accompany well these young fruity wines was America’s darling, Chef Jeremiah Tower from his Star’s restaurant in San Francisco.  Writing about it was James Suckling, newly elevated to staff writer at the Wine Spectator.   Writer-showman Robert Lawrence Balzer played the master of ceremonies.  And all the rest of us there in the exhilarating Ahwahnee hotel enjoying these new wines with delicious Thanksgiving dishes.    For this first wine of the year I bow to Dionysos.

No thanksgiving would be truly celebratory without Champagne.  I am thankful for Champagne.  Another Grande Dame of Champagne, Madame Lily Bollinger, should be thanked for her advice given while describing her pattern of life:   “I drink my Champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad.  Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone.  When I have company I consider it obligatory.   I trifle with it when I’m not hungry and drink it when I am.  Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.” – Should we not be thankful for Madame Bollinger?

Thanksgiving is not quite here.   Maybe tomorrow I could find another small excuse to be thankful for Champagne?

Julius Caesar, be still.  Your time will come. 

Madeleine de Jean,

The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne.