From stems to stemware

It's no secret that Ben's ancestry in the Old World can be traced to a famous champagne house and when we bought this property with an eye for restoring the vineyard, we dreamed of our fate as champagne growers and reprising the long-lost family art of champagne making. Well, we haven't been able to accomplish as much as we had hoped in the past year towards those goals. The vines are all chardonnay, that much we have discovered. That's both good news and bad news. Chardonnay grapes can be used to make champagne, though in France, pinot meunier and pinot noir are more commonly used or comprise a greater proportion of the grape blend in a bottle. Chardonnay is also not as frost resistant as we clearly saw this year and it needs to be planted closely together which is not the spacing chosen by the previous owners of this vineyard. It's likely we will want to replant some acreage with pinot meunier considering our high elevation and tendency for spring frosts and somehow tighten the existing spacing of the chardonnay grapes if we are ever to make a bottle of champagne.

Until we have the time, energy and resources to see our dreams of a champagne vineyard materialized, I have tasked myself with appreciating the history of other aspects of champagne, namely the champagne glass. What better way to pass the time than to do a little antiques troving and online shopping? Did you know that most salespersons in a home goods store will look at you like you are speaking a foreign language if you ask where the champagne "coupes" are? It appears this classic and, in my opinion, ultimate statement of elegance has almost completely disappeared from the commercial scene in this country. Currently, the only options for purchasing champagne coupes, also called saucers in the U.S., are to buy extremely expensive etched crystal glasses like the ones offered by Waterford or Orrefors or to scour the antiques houses and ebay listings for those that were mass produced as late as the 1970's. Good luck finding a complete set with no etchings or chips if you go the antique route.

Since I just cannot fathom my half-French household, owners of vineyard property to NOT also be in possession of a set of handsome but not overly ornate champagne coupes, I naturally turned to www.google.fr to find some. With the baby on the way and my mother-in-law set to arrive in a week I had a deadline to find myself an easily available or at least deliverable-to-my-mother-in-law option that could also be transported duty-free to my home via her checked baggage. One of my first shopping stops was to a store called Habitat (Ah-bi-tah in French). It's a store that Ben and I are quite fond of shopping at whenever we go back to France and is like a Crate and Barrel meets a more colorful, more upscale IKEA. Suffice to say it's a modern, but not monochromatic (like West Elm) home goods store ranging in price from Mervyn's to Macy's. It runs the gamut and we always turn up some interesting, affordable surprises there. It's no surprise this is the place that had my kind of champagne coupe!


Et Voila! A red beauty of elegant proportions to show off the handsome bubbles we will pour over the holidays, hopefully coming to me unbroken, courtesy of Air France and my mother-in-law's one free checked bag.

So, we may not have our grapes or our wine but we will have the perfect glasses this holiday to serve someone else's fine bubbly!