Tiny Bubbles

On the subject of wine, I thought it worth resurrecting this post that I wrote for Just Grapes a little over a year ago.

My love of Champagne began, believe it or not, when I was 3 years old. As the story goes, on a flight to Florida, my parents gave me a tiny plastic cup filled with the golden bubbles. Whether out of curiosity or for their own amusement, they fully expected me to wrinkle up my tiny nose and push it away. Little did they know that it would go down easily, and I would ask for more.

My love of Champagne only grew stronger when it helped me through the death of my first marriage. I lived with a good friend during those difficult days who opportunely owned a large and varied collection of Champagne. His earnest belief was that one could not be truly unhappy while drinking Champagne.

It was with this theory in mind that I chilled two bottles of wine before the election rally in Grant Park last week. The first was a sparkling wine from Oregon. My hope was that if the evening did not go well, we couldn’t feel too hopeless while drinking something related to Champagne. The second, the wine that ultimately was drunk, was the Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill 1995, a wine whose taste lived up to its prodigious name. Rich and nutty, with big golden bubbles, full-bodied … it flowed down as easily as that first sip from my bemused parents. A perfect way to toast a new president and a new day in America.