FEATURE
LET’S POP OPEN SOME BUBBLY
Understanding and appreciating kosher Champagne and sparkling wines By Yossie Horwitz
I
write this in the throes of winter, and I find nothing cheers me up more than a crisp glass of bubbly. With all that is going on in the world around us, I doubt anyone is going to find good cheer and celebratory vibes unwelcome, so the topic of sparkling wine (with Champagne at its core) seems particularly appropriate. Crisply refreshing and owning a near-perfect pairing ability with a vast quantity of foods, this genre of wine has been pigeonholed as a celebratory beverage and continues to fall short of gaining any real traction among the mainstream kosher-drinking crowd. Centuries of celebrity quotes trumpeti Champagne as a wine to be consumed early and often including from Winston Churchill (“Champagne is the wine
A Brut Rosé is served at the February 2020 Herzog-Rothschild 30th Anniversary dinner. (Tzvi Cohen/Royal Wines)
46 JLINK WINE GUIDE •
MARCH 2021 / NISAN 5781
of civilization and the oil of government”), F. Scott Fitzgerald (“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right”) and Napoleon Bonaparte (“I drink Champagne when I win, to celebrate and I drink Champagne when I lose, to console myself ”; a quote plagiarized and bastardized by Churchill himself into “In victory we deserve it, in defeat we need it”). How could these passionate advocates not have not succeeded in convincing the wine-guzzling masses to incorporate it into their regular repertoire? If they don’t, I hope my own view convinces at least some of you to reach for sparkling wine the next time you are looking for a refreshing and versatile wine. While the British actually “invented” sparkling wine in the 17th century, they failed to make it their own, partly as a result of their inability to grow quality grapes during their inferior dark and dreary English summers. It wasn’t until 30 odd-years later that Champagne was born, after a French monk named Dom Pérignon fiddled with the process and helped create the luxurious wine by refining a number of the processes. (While an avid winemaker and oenophile, he wasn’t actually the “inventor” of Champagne, per se.) Despite prevalent usage around the globe as a descriptor for any wine with bubbles, legally Champagne may only refer to sparkling wine grown in the chalky soil of France’s cool-climate Champagne Appellation D’origine Contrôlée (AOC), which yields grapes with considerable acidity contributing to Champagne’s food compatibility. In order to be labeled as Champagne, the wine must also be produced in accordance with a stringent set of rules comprising the traditional méthode
