Champagne Vagrant

I should be shot. Two days ago I went to a Champagne tasting in Elgin and got my hands on the most expensive bottles of bubbly that I will ever touch. I really felt like a thief at the table, my champagne qualifications are certainly not good enough to justify me getting to sip on $700-1100 bubblies.

The group I tasted with is filled with winemakers and vineyard owners who take this tasting business very very seriously. Every bottle is sheathed in red velvet bags with hand-sewn

numbers, a huge jump up from the paper bags I'm used to seeing cover bottles of liquour. Many people bring their own tasting kit complete with carrying cases and specially engraved tasting glasses. Some people even bring notebooks in the same material as the carrying cases. Perfectly outfitted, they use the notebooks to write down not only tasting notes but a score for every wine or bubbly that goes by. Robert Parker would be impressed by the diligence of the 1-20 scale and the excel tracking that the group master uses to meticulously rank each product.

Pretty soon in the evening, I became convinced that I would be kicked out of this high-culture wine tasting society. Strike one, I had no fancy carrying case but instead came in with a cardboard box with 6, not the required 8, wine glasses packed in with haphazard care. Turns out I believe that you can pour out the dregs of one champagne and re-fill the glass, clearly I am mistaken. Strike two, instead of a notebook, I had only a sheet of paper and a dog chewed pencil. Strike 3, a run-away avocado fell from my corn fritter onto my shirt and left a little spot that remained for the rest of the evening. Strike 4, I know very little about bubblys and, to be perfectly honest, don't even feel that comfortable popping a champagne cork. Strike 5, I still have a sinus infection and can't really smell slop.

But, much to my surprise, they let me stay for the whole tasting. At one point, the man sitting next to me invited me to chirp up and do the dissecting of the #5 champagne to which I meekly replied that I had very little to say. It's amazing how uncomfortable these events can make you feel-- people start talking about velvety textures and persistent, fine beads-- and you think to yourself, are we talking about a champagne here or are we talking about fashion week. At some point, I gave up on my botched nose and began writing down word for word some of the craziest, most colorful things people were saying, a great idea that added some real introspective flare to the rest of the evening.

My favorite part of the evening came when a corked champagne was served. This instance

just confirmed what I had felt all along, a wine tasting is an adult version of "telephone," where everyone is just trying to pass along, with as little manipulation as possible, the ingenious tasting notes of the person next to them. Of course, as we all remember from our grade school games of "telephone," the real message never quite makes it through, and the effect is that the poor chap at the end ends up with a tasting note of "poasted rubble with teast pondertones." In this particular instance, with the corked wine, it began with a whisper and chuckles between Justin and Robby-- two winemakers who are both making their own bubbly. Everyone careened to try to figure out what these two were saying. The "corked" whisper began to spread and you could literally follow it out from the epicenter, at the middle of the table where Justin and Robby were sitting, to the table ends. The poor chap leading the tasting was standing up and thus removed from the "telephone" wire. He began to talk about the flavors of the champagne until the whispers began to formulate themselves into comments that cut him off. From "do you think it may possibly be corked," it moved to "I think it may be corked," to "yeah, this one is corked," to "oh, the wet newspaper smell is overwhelming-- this one is definitely corked." The good news is that the wet newspaper ended up saving the day and all safely agreed that the champagne was corked before any ratings were given out.

The actual champagnes we tasted were pretty extraordinary.

From South Africa we had the Klein Constantia 000, a bubbly that was only made once, in 2000, by Ross Gower who is a winemaker now living in Elgin Valley. It was quite cool because his son, Robby, who is also a winemaker, was the one who told us about the bubbly. My favorite was the Champagne Duval-Leroy from 1996 which comes with a small red heart on the label, (though I would say that fact makes it less, rather than more appealing,) followed closely by the very unique Champagne Jacquesson, which had, for me, this strange sort of asparagus flavor that I didn't get in any of the others.

Sadly, the UK house of Denbies didn't fare quite as well, guess the brits should stick to tea and crumpets. In Denbies' defense, though, I liked it better than most of the rest of the group...