And so the nuance with which Dan is able to taste beverages is often lost on me. Before he was a sommelier, he was a bartender, and after tasting a cocktail he may say something like, It reminds me of Froot Loops left in milk. A taste of wine may lead to, I’m getting ripe peach or Cherries left in the sun. Poetic, really. But sometimes I just taste wine.
Still, he has followed me on numerous outings that relate to my interests. There was the dusty visit to Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, and the time we got a speeding ticket trying (unsuccessfully) to make the last guided tour at Edith Wharton’s historic estate in Massachusetts. So when we planned our honeymoon to Antibes and Paris a couple of months after our wedding in Brooklyn, I agreed instantly to include Champagne, less than a hundred miles east of Paris, in the middle of our trip.
In Champagne, neat rows of lush, bright green vineyards stretch for thousands of acres up and down gentle slopes. The undulating hills are the trademark of a region optimally suited for growing the wine that only they, within this particular appellation, are legally allowed to call “Champagne.” We set up tours at multiple wineries, including Champagne Bollinger, a house in existence since 1829, where we tasted La Côte aux Enfants on the hill where its grapes were grown. It was named so because the hill’s steep elevation was too trying for adults, and the lore goes that children hiked up to help pick grapes. Not anymore, the host joked, before popping open a bottle in the rain. They poured us glasses and singled out notes of hazelnut, and tart strawberry. Someone mentioned a creaminess, which I might have detected. Maybe.
Mostly, I was lost in the cinematic haze of the view.
