The Devil's Wine: Champagne, Prosecco, and Cava

We are about to open a moway chando champagne champagne.

How do you open a bottle champagne safe?

Me?

I usually let's see.

Hold on, Oh I use a towel.

Yeah, I don't like it shooting across the room. Yes, that's the way you. Oh, it's rose.

So we're going to be talking about now that we've popped open our champagne, we're going to talk about the three sparkling wines. The main sparkling wines, which is prosecco, champagne.

And caba exactly perfect.

Celebrating the New Year is something people have been doing for many, many years.

The oldest recorded New Year's has to bees date back to around two thousand BC in ancient Mesopotamia, and the celebration lasted for up to twelve days.

My god, I can't even do it one night. What are they doing for twelve days?

Wow?

I think there's no better way to ring in the new year than with a little bubbles tears. My name is Evil Longoria and I am Maraon and Welcome to Hungry for History, a podcast that explores our past and present through food. On every episode, we'll talk about the history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients and beverages from our.

Culture, So make yourself at home.

Even the outstecks celebrated New Year's huh.

Well for them, the last five days of the year were considered dead days because there was no guarantee that the gods would grant another year, so everyone feasted. And Signora has got plastered?

Why Senora, because they weren't if you were over a certain age.

Oh, the older ladies, older get plaster older ladies.

Well, obviously they had a great calendar, even though it may be different than the one we followed today.

But there was always a celebration at the end of a cycle.

Which we now consider the end of the year. That is so interesting to me.

Do you make your New Year's resolutions? Do I make New Year's resolutions? I don't know.

I'm a goal writing person and I write them down all the time. Same but I think, like if you zoom out and try to do a macro, like what do I want to accomplish this year?

You know?

I guess I could be a resolution, but I'm not the traditional of like I'm gonna lose weight, I'm gonna exercise, because I do those things and I try to do them all the time, like I'm gonna eat better, I'm gonna drink less, although no, I don't ever say I'm gonna drink less, but but you know what I mean, Like I'm not a big like I must have this resolution on January first.

I usually am pretty good with that throughout the year. Throughout the year, yeah, yeah, do you make resolutions. I do, like.

Goals, like you say, yeah, the goals, but I also I do it throughout the year. But at the end of the year, I definitely I think. You know, one year was really interesting. I read something, you know, write something down like at the end of the week, like something that you're grateful for that happened y this week, and I started doing it that one year. My husband and I started doing it, and then we read and

You did nothing, no accomplish nothing, but you know, it was so interesting.

Every Sunday we would write it and we continue doing it the whole year, and it was we're healthy, everyone's healthy, everyone's healthy.

Yeah, but do you know what because I go by the moon cycle.

So every time there's a full moon every month, I manifest, I write down, goals, I write down but you write it as if it's happened. You know, I am healthy, I have a great marriage. You write it as if it's already done. So I do that with like the new moons, but resolutions.

I'm going to start doing that.

Yes, you have to, because there's power and the moon. Also, when did champagne.

Become associated with New Year's Yeah, that's really interesting. So wealthy French citizens began drinking champagne in the seventeenth century as a symbol of prosperity, and during the nineteenth centre, this rising middle class began drinking it to emulate the taste of the aristocracy, and it's been a staple of celebrations.

You know what I do. I collect vintage coops, really coops.

Yeah, yeah, I love the well these like these antique coops for champage. I just love, like the great guts be and the engraved crystal cruisers.

Huge champagne coops are my Champagne coops are my favorite.

They are my favorite. They are They're gorgeous.

Well, there's also this like clinking of glasses is a tradition that I find so interesting, Like where did that come from? Like when you go salu, why do we have to bang our cups?

And yeah, I mean it is such a really it's a beautiful custom right and engages all of the senses.

There's a lot of origins to this.

There is, yes, you toast to life, to health, to happiness. But there's a great book, The History of the World in six Glasses. Oh, it's a great book. Wow, the author top Standard. She traces the toast the invention of beer in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and he suggests that the clinking of individual glasses symbolizes the original shared vessel that ancient humans drank beer from. So this is his

Well, the one that I'm most aware of is in the Middle Ages. Like I this is the one I heard that you would you would like smash your glass so hard that it would spill in the into the other one's cup or wine glass. Or whatever they were drinking, and it would show confidence that one person wasn't being poisoned.

And that's the one I've always heard.

That's like the medieval drinkers, you know, would pour like a little wine into each other's glasses just to ensure everything was poisoned fruit.

And that's definitely a big theory, but you know, in reality, some of these medieval poisonings were soiated with the fact that there was a lot of lead glazes on pottery drinking cups.

So they were accidental poisonings.

Accidental poisons, not your enemy necessarily, sometimes maybe, but often there was lead.

I love sparkling wine, and they're all made with like different great varieties, flavors, different processes. Some are protected under geographic indication, which is like a set of regulations that limits the naming of food and drink to like the specific region, which is Champagne. Also tequila is one of those as well, which that's all often referred to as a appellation. So I think we should start with, like what makes wine sparkle? Like where does this bubble come from?

So sparkling wine is basically a wine which bubbles when poured into a glass and in a nutshell, because there's all of this science behind it. But in a nutshell. To turn a still wine into sparkling wine, the base wine is put into a champagne bottle with some priming sugar and yeast.

A cap is put on the.

Bottle and it's allowed to ferment, and the fermentation produces carbon dioxide, and because this trapped carbon dioxide can't escape, it creates bubbles.

So in a nutshell. And so who made Who was the first to make sparkling wine? It must have been French?

There, well, yes, and no, okay, So the French monk don't. Pignon is thought to have been a vegetana.

Marion was a monk. He was a monk. What yes, No, he.

Was a monk, so he knew he would the monks man they were making beers and they were making you.

Know, nobody who knew this would be like the you know, for being a monk and lives simply Who knew that today in today's society would be such a similar luxury, luxury and opulence totally.

So he is thought to have invented champagne in sixteen ninety seven. One of his was to prevent the wine from becoming bubbly, which at the time was had to.

Ruin the wine. Oh if it was bubbly.

Oh yeah, So due to the cold temperatures in France at the time, it was just too cool to leave wine in barrels, who was often bottled before full fermentation could be completed. And so the these bubbles, you know, ruined the flavor of the wine. But he tasted it, and he said to have said, come quickly, I'm tasting the stars. But in reality, yeah, in sixteen sixty two, so a few decades before Dunpignon, an English scientist named

But they also said that English winemakers had been adding sugar to wine for a long time, even before this man's discovery.

Exactly exactly, So, hey, who the Brits were the first ones to make sparkling.

Sparkling wine.

Let's talk about Champagne, and that's specifically France because you have to be you know, it has to be produced in the northeast of France, in five wine producing districts within the historical province of Champagne. People don't realize, like it's an actual place and it's a blend of pino noir, pino mouniere and chardonnay, and it's it's fresh and.

Fruity and bubbly.

And this is probably the most famous sparkling wine, right.

Definitely the most famous. I would say, yes, it's the one that people associate with bubbles with this. Champagne wines were being cultivated in the region of Champagne going back to the Romans in the fifth century, but it wasn't until the.

Last half of the seventeenth century.

It wasn't until the last half of the seventeenth century that wines of Champagne began to sparkle. Originally, Champagne was just a pale, pinkish wine made from pino nora grapes used in coronations throughout the Middle Ages, and the sparkle was discovered by accident in the seventeenth century.

And yeah, because everybody thought the bubbles were like a fault, like the bottles exploded or the quarks popped because of the pressure. And because of that, it was called the devil's wine.

Isn't that funny?

The Devil's wine because it was like breaking. Yeah, and that quark, that moussilee, this sort of.

The wire that goes on top of the cork.

Yeah, because you know when you open a bottle you have to twist the thing that was invented in France in eighteen forty four to prevent the quarks from just popping from the pressure.

Wow.

But then, I mean it quickly became a favorite of the French quark because as far back as you can read in art in books, you see the French court with champagne in their hands, and how it was always served for royal festivities at the Palais in Paris, and you can see all these guests that loved seeing the court jump out of the bottle.

Who's Madame Pompadour.

Madame Pompadour Louis, the fifteenth Mistress is said to have ordered champagne by the gallon for her extravagant parties, and they said that one of her parties in seventeen thirty two, she served over eighteen hundred bottles of champagne in a single evening, in a single evening, in a single evening, that's a lot of chanatau champagne.

Wow, chage.

I want to talk about the type of bubbly I love, which is prosecco.

Is that your favorite?

It is, well, cava and prosecco.

Yeah, I love proscco. That's usually what I have at home is I usually have to sected out. It's just it's easy drinking.

It's easy drinking, and for me, it's like a lighter bodied grape that offers like I don't know, more floral aromas, the grapes that they use for prosecco, or like chardonnay, pino grease, pino noir. It's just light and fruity or it's a little sweeter than champagne and cava. But I just I love it. And prosecco is produced also in the northeast of the country, northeast of Italy and four provinces.

And it's I love it too, and it's it's affordable and it's consistently good.

It's just always good.

Wines in this area were also produced during the Roman Empire.

But what did the name prosecco come from.

The name prosecc or proseccum has roots in the thirteenth century, but it wasn't applied to this sparkling wine in the area as prosecco until the late nineteenth century.

They've improved it so much since the thirteenth century. Their production methods have really shifted prosecco to like a dryer, more elegant style. That is, like you said, it's pretty easy to drink it to enjoy throughout the world. And it's been synonymous with Italian lifestyle as well.

And who doesn't love that Italian lifestyle? I know. But here's my new My new obsession has been cava. Is it?

Well?

We were just there. You spent so much time there. I was.

I was in the cava fields, in the harvest, in the Filix Serra festival.

How was that?

This is what inspired this episode? Tell me about that?

Oh my god, it was so so fun. Most of it, most of cava is ninety five percent.

Of covas produced in Catalunya and it's like a blend of cherello, barayada, masabeo grapes.

It's fresh, it's floral.

I like it because it's not as sweet as prosecco and it's not as dry as champagne. It is fantastic, and it's also Cava's process is exactly like champagnes, where Prosecco's is not.

Proscco's process is a little different.

Right, But the term cava was adopted by the Spanish in nineteen seventy because they wanted to abandon the use of potentially misleading jumpine yeah from champagne, and so the.

Word cava actually means cellar.

So the cava is most all most but not all is in catal.

The kava designation it sort of has an unrestricted set of laws. So sometimes, you know, it's very easy to get the kava designation, and it's not that easy to get a prosecco or a champagne designation. So some of the best producers don't want their name associated with this sort of anything goes but Appalachian.

So there are a lot of.

Really interesting women making sparkling wines that are not necessarily cavas, but but not not to say that there are some.

Really great, great cava in the town of Sanduni. That's where I went, Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the town I was.

So, I know it's a Sanva sounds Italian. I guess it's yeah, which is like a language unto itself.

This is the town of San Sandi Danova. That was.

It's a very very important town in Cataluna. And this is where the Felix Soa festival was. And Felix Sara was this bug that affected all the vineyards in the eighteen eighties and everything. All the vineyards that had been there for centuries had to be uprooted and had to be replanted with Masaveo, Pariaa and sharello grape varieties. So

And it made its way. Did you go to the festival and did this? Did people dressed they dressed like the bugs? I sent you the video, No you did it, I did not. You have to send it. It is the craziest festival. And because the whole town of this San so Danova. They are all in the wine business.

There are their growers, picked planters, they're all part of the industry of kava, and so they're all in the street and they just celebrate like the rebirth of the town and the rebirth of cava. So cool, it was so fun to what how fun they're sparkling wine in Latin America.

Yes, where, Well, there's sparkling wines really good, with sparkling wines being made in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil and also Mois Chandon, which is what we had today. Their very first winery outside of France was in Argentina in nineteen fifty nine, and Chile's been making sparkling wine since eighteen seventy nine. Mexico is making really interesting sparkling wines.

But they're called venos espomosos.

Venos espomosos. Yeah, they don't have like a name, and they don't.

Have an Appalachian based Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mexico.

And I was just reading that they're doing a lot of champagne in the sort of pet natch, you know, the pet this sort of natural way sort of when you think of pet nats.

There's like a trendy like organic.

Yeah it's sped, but it's the original way to produce sparkling wins, the ancestral, you know way, and they're doing a lot of these. Some of the sparkling wines are kind of cloudy, and so there's there's people in actually all over the Latin America there that are making these pet nats. But there's this woman, Fernanda Barra of Winer

By then, Waterlupe in Mexico is still very new.

Area. Wines in Mexico is very new. I actually like the whites.

They have some really good minerally white wines that I like. After the break, we're going to get into the modern history of Champagne.

And the women that made it happen.

Don't go anywhere.

The champagne business as we know today was born because of women. Yes, I'm just saying no, it is I did not know. So when I drink champagne, I don't drink a lot of champagne.

But when I do, it's woof.

Clico, wolf clicke, I didn't know, madam, that was a woman.

Wolf means widow. What yes, let me see this wolf clicko means widow.

Here's this scrape book, the Widow clicko woof Clico.

The story of a Champagne empire and the woman who ruled it.

It's a great book.

Barb Nicole Pon Sardine Clico, better known as Madame vuf Clico. She's the granddame of the champagne world. She was born to a famous textile family, and she married into a famous textile you know, manufacturer, And he decided that he wanted to try his luck in the in the wine business.

Yes, and so he did.

They did with her at his side, and then the wine business wasn't going well, and then he died unexpectedly. So here's this twenty seven year old widow with this failing wine business. And she was very entrepreneurial. So she became the first international businesswoman. She saved She basically created the champagne industry.

In France. Wow, I didn't know vuv Plico did that. Yeah.

Wow.

So Don Perion was a monk and move Plico is a widow. Yes, I am learning some stuff to day. She was interesting.

She tapped into the Russian czars really wanted French champagne. They wanted champagne, and she after the Napoleonic Wars, she was able to sort of she found this market and she got in there and she created this incredible, you know, wine business, and she created this process known as riddling.

You I don't know if you've seen Oh, yes I have. I did this in Coba. You did how you rotate the bottle? Bottle? Yeah, so the fermentation.

So legend has it that in eighteen eighteen she took a kitchen table, she drilled holes in them at an angle, and she stuck the bottles in there so that the bottles are stacked on their sides, and then.

You gradually rotate until the bottles are facing downwards.

Right. But that process consolidates the yeast at.

The neck of the bottle, and that allows it to be removed quickly and easily with uh not losing so much product.

Right, because you have to remove some of them to do the second fermentation. So it's this this process that's a mainstain in champagne, in the nat of a champagne.

But it's something that she developed. Wow, And she.

Wasn't the only one. There were other ones Louise Pomeri, So Pomeri is also a big champagne. What did she do and so she's responsible for the flavor that most of us associate with champagne. She also she was also a voves lots of widows.

She was a widow too. She was a widow too, so.

She married this prominent textile family, so lots of textile and champagne connections.

When she was thirty eight pregnant.

With her second child, her husband died. Her husband died, and then she you know, transitioned away from So basically she created champagnes for the British, and she knew that the British loved these hard ciders, and she decided to create champagnes for them.

But the English preferred their drinks dry. So she was the first one to create a champagne with a dry profile exactly.

And the ones that Plicode was doing were a little sweeter, which is what the Russians liked. So the ones that Louise Pomeriy developed are really basically she developed the brute champagne, which is the standard of sales worldwide. It's like this dry champagne.

And then another widow Bollinger. Yeah, that's another famous champagne house.

That's another one. So she co founded the Bollinger Champagne House. In eighteen twenty nine, at the height of the Second World War, she lost her husband and she stepped up to become the head of the champagne house at forty two years old. She was famously quoted in The Daily Mail in nineteen sixty one saying.

I drink champagne when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone or when I have company. I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry, and I drink it when i am Otherwise, I never touch it unless I'm thirsty.

Oh my god, she was just constantly drinking it. I love these pioneering women.

Yes, me, me too, Me too.

Well.

Cheers to our cava prosecco, sparkling wine paigne episode.

Thank you everyone, have a great New Year's Eve.

Thank you so much everyone, Thanks for listening. See you in twenty twenty bye, see you next year.

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