Santé!

"After one taste of French food ... I was hooked. I'd never eaten like that before, I didn't know such food existed. The wonderful attention paid to each detail of the meal was incredible to me. I'd never really drunk good wine before, and knew nothing at all about it. It was simply a whole new life experience." – Julia Child

This week I went with a friend to a French wine masterclass at O Chateau, a wine bar near the Seine. Living in Paris, you can’t help but notice how important wine is to the French culture. I have been on a few tours of different wine cellars and caves during my weekend excursions, but I had yet to learn about tasting wine, ordering wine, pairing wines with food, how to read a wine label, and the different wine regions of France.

During the tasting we sampled one champagne, two white wines, and three red wines. We first learned how champagne differs from other wines. The initial step in wine-making is putting grape juice into large vats, and then adding sugar and yeast, the two elements that cause fermentation. After the fermentation process for ordinary wine, you simply bottle it and sell it. However, with champagne, you  then add more sugar and yeast into the bottle with the wine. This sugar and yeast will cause a second fermentation. With the bottle sealed, the gases stay inside and create sparkling wine, champagne.

We were taught the importance of first looking at the wine, before tasting it, checking for clarity, because wine should be clear. By looking at the brightness of the wine you learn about the acidity of the wine. The brighter the wine is, the more acidic it will taste. You can tell a wine’s age by looking at the meniscus, the ring around the top where the wine meets the glass. The meniscus on a white wine will get darker with age, while the meniscus on a red wine will get lighter with age. Finally, swirling the wine and looking at the legs/tears on the side of the glass will show the alcohol and sugar concentration. The more legs there are, the thicker they are, and the faster they go down, the sweeter your wine will taste.

My favorite part of the class was learning about the different wine regions of France. The French don’t order by the grape like we are used to doing in America, such as Pinot noir, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Merlot, etc. They order their wine according to the wine region, such as Bordeaux, Alsace, Val de Loire, Sud-Ouest, and Bourgogne, and within those larger regions are even more specific regions like Pays D’Or in Bourgogne. The French people know their wine; when they see on a menu that there is a white wine from Cote Chalonnaise, they recognize that it is a region of Bourgogne (Burgundy) that produces Chardonnay grapes, so they will know that they are ordering a Chardonnay. Out of ALL the wines we tasted, the Chardonnay was my favorite. It was wonderful to learn so much about French wine! We left the class feeling more than a little tipsy, but also much more confident about ordering and buying wine in the future.