Champagne - book

Last Christmas my son gave me a book on Champagne. Actually, he and his mother give me so many books at Christmas it takes me this long to get through them all. Anyway, my son, knowing that I had been reading books on salt, oysters, cod, caviar, and other such things, decided I would like a book about Champagne. As I don’t really care that much for Champagne, I put off reading this until now. The book is Champagne, by Don and Petie Kladstrup. It has given me an entirely new respect for this beverage of Kings, Queens, and whoever else can afford it. It is said that Winston Churchill began each morning with a bottle of champagne, and it is apparently true that Peter the Great took three or four bottles of champagne to bed with him every night. The history of Champagne is fascinating and the Kladstrups trace it from its beginning through three wars with Germany, crop failures, grower revolts, diseases, bad weather, and just about every disaster you can think of. They discuss how it has changed from the beginning, when it was sweet and often laced with apple, pear, and even beet juice, to the present popular dry vintages. They also give rather vivid details of how the French tried to hide it from the Germans, or relabeled bottles so they could ship only the worst to Germany. When phylloxera devastated the French vines they refused, for a time, to import U.S. vines on the grounds that they would not produce good wines. Eventually they learned to graft French vines onto American rootstock and thus the industry was saved. The accounts as to how the French managed to keep selling their wines around the world in the face of blockades and poor transportation are quite fascinating, as is the account of how they dealt with prohibition in the U.S. The invention and making of Champagne was by no means an easy and uncomplicated process. Contrary to popular belief, the monk, Dom Perignon, did not invent Champagne and in fact did not want his wines to sparkle at all. Before the winemakesrs completely understood fermentation and what happened to make the bubbles, bottles of wine blew up so commonly that the winemakers had to wear masks to protect their eyes from the broken glass. Also, it took them quite a while to learn how to get rid of all the sediment. All in all it is a most interesting book if you are interested in such things. Of course the multi-billion dollar Champagne industry nowadays, controlled by huge corporations and operating on a much grander scale than previously, is not at all the same as it was, and what you might think of as the romance of the business is gone, but even so I look on each bottle of Champagne now with a much different attitude than previously. I might even learn to like it.

Some one asked McCain what he would do about the problem of inner-city violence and decay and such. Predictably, he offered a kind of military solution based upon the “success” of the surge. He would send in troops to control the neighborhoods and make them safe, arrest the wrongdoers, and etc. In short, a kind of martial law. I wonder if he ever heard of Fascism? Calamity John rides again!

LKBIQ:
“So great was their love of the vine, so strong their determination to save something for those who returned, that day in, day out, they risked – and sometimes gave -- their lives for the vines.”
Patrick Forbes