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This Friday, from 6-8 pm, we are hosting our annual holiday fizz fest. We are happy to have Shucks Oyster bar in the shop, too, with fresh oysters on the half-shell. In the past, we’ve hosted Champagne-only holiday events, and while I do love Champagne (and we will indeed have some very good Champagne this Friday) I began to feel that we have inadvertently given other styles of sparkling wine a raw deal, and so this year we make amends and will exit the Champagne-only ghetto and taste Champagne side-by-side with its more rustic brethren. We are pouring two delightful pét-nats: the first, delicate and perfumed, is from Chris Brockway and is made from the once-deprecated-but-now-undergoing-a-renaissance grape, valdiguié; the second is from Manel Avinyó, made from sumoll, a grape that is only to be found in Penedès. We are also pouring Andrew Jones’s piquette, a type of rustic, low ABV wine made from adding water to the leftovers in the wine press after pressing, and re-fermenting it, a process which yields a salty, gluggy, lightly fizzy beverage. Piquette is the wine that poor French farmers once drank after selling their wine off to others, and I imagine mopping my brow with my foulard while guzzling this wine. There would be an accordion, too. We are also pouring three Champagne-style wines, including of course Champagne. The first is the inaugural release from a new California winery, Blue Ox – all organically farmed grapes (chardonnay, pinot, meunier, if you must know) and made into a beautifully crafted méthode traditionelle wine. You don’t see many small-scale producers making méthode traditionelle wines in California because, frankly, it is a pain in the arse to do so, but Josh Hammerling and Noah Kenoyer were crazy enough to have a try at it, and I am glad that they took the leap. To finish, a razor-sharp Cava made from organically farmed xarel·lo, and JM Sélèque’s “Solessence,” made in part from Sélèque’s solera and the other part from the 2016 vintage (chardonnay, a goodly amount of meunier, and a splash of pinot). Special by-the-glass: phenomenal biodynamic, single-vineyard 2010 vintage Champagne from Francis Boulard. Broc Cellars Valdiguié Pétillant Wine Mendocino 2018 |
Friday 12/13 6-8 pm $15
Holiday fizz fest
Holiday fizz fest
