DOM PERIGNON DID NOT INVENT CHAMPAGNE

At the risk of going against popular opinion, Dom Perignon did not invent champagne. He was justly famous for his superb skills as a blender–but his legendary wines did not have bubbles.

He is supposed to have been so delighted with the bubbles that he turned to his sandal-shod brothers and called “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!” This is one of the great deceptions of wine history. It only made sense that Dom Perignon wanted to rid champagne of its bubbles, since there was no market for sparkling wines yet. In France, nobody wanted them.

Over the course of the next decade, Dom Perignon dedicated himself to experimenting with ways to stop the development of bubbles.

In fact, the idea that Dom Perignon invented champagne was always just imaginative marketing. It was a brilliant but misleading sales pitch. The popular legend has its origins in a late-nineteenth century advertising campaign.

In her book, When Chanpagne Became French, scholar Kolleen Guy shows how it wasn’t until the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris that the region’s champagne producers saw the marketing potential and started printing brochures about Dom Perignon. From that time on the celebrated monk became a legend.

For those who enjoy the romance of the Dom Perignon legend, there is even worse news. Wine historians now claim that champagne did not even originate in France. Champagne was first “invented” in Great Britain, where there was already a small commercial market for sparkling champagne by the 1660’s.

Monks like Dom Perignon knew that local wines could sparkle, even if they considered it a nuisance. If there was no market for bubbles, why try and sell them? The effect of unusually cold weather stalled the fermentation process in the winter and allowed for the natural unwelcome emergence of bubbles.

Even if Dom Perignon and his predecessors did not discover champagne, by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine.

Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle.

EVERYDAY TRANSLATING

“The art of wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Previously I said I was in awe of translators, but heck, we’re all translators. Everytime we talk to our family, our dogs, our friends—we’re translating what they are saying into something we want to hear.

What did your friend really mean with that look she gave you after your third glass of wine? What did your husband mean when he flounced out the door in the morning just because you were a little late getting home from your bridge game the afternoon before?

Your three year old doesn’t really mean he hates you when he says he does, he wants you to set him straight about who really wears the pants around here. It keeps him in his comfort zone.

We all have to live in this family, this community, this world. It behooves us all to darn well get over it and get together.

Get over being miffed at your friend and just give her that recipe she’s been begging for. Friends aren’t all that easy to find anymore. Go ahead and buy your kid that toy he’s whining for (unlkess it costs more than the mortgage payment.), And believe me, your husband will be home tonight and grateful for that special dinner you’re going to fix him. After all you could have called him yesterday.

Don’t make it too difficult for others to translate you.

THE CRUSH IS ON

It’s Fall, and Northern California is ripe! California wines are noteworthy, and this year looks like a bumper crop. Driving through the Napa Valley or the Santa Cruz mountains, the somewhat overpowering odor of fermenting grapes can give you a “high” from the open car window! I’m really not kidding. You don’t even need to pop the cork. When the crush is on, it is like sniffing a vat full of wine with your nose 2 inches from the surface. Well, maybe a slight exaggeration.
Wineries welcome you for tours, and the urge to pick up “just one more of that good stuff” can be hard to ignore.
It’s beautiful in these parts of the state at this time of year. The grapes hang heavy on the vines, bulging with sweet juice, while the leaves are just beginning to turn color in some vineyards, though not all.
To see these even rows leading off into the distance, is a siren call for an artist. Bacchus has been honored in paint and print for centuries.
I love the small family-owned wineries in the mountains. We like to grab a loaf of good french bread, a large chunk of cheese, and take off early on a sunny morning ending up at a nice secluded beach along the coast. Perhaps stop at a farm in the Russian River country for some new crop apples dripping with juice, and smelling like they were picked just for you. (Or maybe go to a farm where you canbe the picker. What could be a better fall day? Then shake the sand out of your shoes and drive home. Perfect.

THE WONDER OF BREAD

The joyful pealing of the bells of Notre Dame de Paris formed a beautiful musical accompaniment to an early morning cafe au lait and beckoned us across the Pont Neuf in spite of the pouring rain.  A frequent and sudden occurrence in Spring, some people were equipped with umbrellas, and others like me just got wet.

A large tent set up across the square from the cathedral pleaded for us to join the group who were hurrying in to get out of the rain.

Our senses were immediately assaulted by the delicious warm smells of baking bread.  We had stumbled into one of those memorable moments of travel I’m always talking about.  This time a competition of Paris bakers.

There were at least fifty bakers plying their trade, some wearing the toque blanche, and all offering an invitation to taste.  The variety of things made with bread dough was amazing; baguettes, rolls, loaves of many shapes, and even sculptured flowers and an Eiffel Tower.

Meanwhile, the sound of the bells and the rain on the roof of the tent, mixed with the warm and comforting smells made me feel I could stay in there forever enfolded in the familiar and sensual scent.  Much better than French perfume.

I am a bread baker.  Some of my most delightful memories are of bread baking in my mother’s and my grandmother’s kitchens.  I hope those same memories live in my children’s memories of my kitchen.

Bread actually is the staff of life.  Every culture has been making bread of some kind since the beginning of time.  The ingredients are so incredibly simple I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t make it.  Flour, water, yeast and maybe some salt for taste.  Yeast flies around in the air begging people to use it to make their bread rise (or their beer ferment).  You can even make your own sourdough by fermenting grapes.  Just put them in a cloth bag, bash them about a bit,  add some flour and wait a couple of weeks.  Voila! yeast!  Of course you can buy it already packaged, and it would be faster but not nearly as much fun.

Not for nothing do they call it your “daily bread”, it has sustained people all over the world for millenia.  The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam touts “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou beside me singing in the wilderness”.  Possibly the reason they were doing so much singing had something to do with the jug of wine.

The slang word for money is of course “bread” and we absolutely do need that!  So put your money on homemade bread, it’s a Wonder.