table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Confessions of a Champagne Snob

(Dec. 24, 2009)  It happens every year about this time, in magazines and newspapers, online: an outpouring of effervescent enthusiasm for holiday sparkling wine bargains. “The best of West Coast bubbly has rarely been better,” trumpets San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. The online wine merchant www.novusvinum.com features the “Top 20 American Sparkling Wines,” from a modest $19 for Francis Coppola 2008 Sofia Blanc de Blancs to a staggering $100 for Schramsberg 2002 J. Schram. Words like “festive” and “elegant” promise a transcendental experience.

They lie. Well, they pretty much have to lie. No one would be long in business selling wine or print ads if they told the truth: American sparkling wine at its best is not in the same class as even the least expensive imports from Champagne. The fact is, it may never be.

French Champagne at Libation. Photo by Joseph Byrd

GALLERY >

The world of cuisine is fertile ground for happy, often accidental inventions: the 18th century discovery that oil and vinegar could, by careful blending with egg yolk, be emulsified into Sauce Mayonnaise. Peking Duck: an ancient dish, eaten by wealthy Chinese, consisting of just the crisp skin of a fattened duck, slowly roasted to a glossy brown in a long process taking a whole day. Distilled spirits, a byproduct of 8th century alchemy that produced what an Arabic poet described as, “a wine that has the color of rain-water but is as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand.”

But the ultimate adventure may have been the one that produced gold from straw.

The French region of Champagne, a chalky terrain with cool summers, long produced the worst wine in Europe, thin, sour, and pinkish. Moreover, cold autumn temperatures prematurely halted fermentation in the cellars, leaving dormant yeast cells that would awaken in the warmth of spring and start fermenting again, often reducing casked wine to vinegar, or releasing carbon dioxide, which caused bottles to explode.

A long process from the 17th to the 19th century succeeded in trapping the carbon dioxide in stronger bottles, while other advances in technique removed impurities and added dosage (a brandy made from the same grape) to adjust the sugar. Et voila! Méthode Champenoise, naturally carbonated wine.

It would seem that the technology would be simple to replicate, and it is. But the taste and mouthfeel of true Champagne is even more elusive than the black truffle, and impossible to import. Domestic wines, no matter their pedigree, just don’t have it.

I resisted this reality for most of my life. Convinced that good American “champagne” was just around the corner, really inevitable, I loyally tried bad wine after wine. And when the major Champagne houses invested in Napa vineyards like Domaine Chandon and Roederer Estate, I was enthusiastic — until my second sip. The wines were nothing like the real thing. They were raw and uncultured.

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