“What does it remind you of?” my husband asked, swirling a glass of 2021 Bérêche & Fils Rive Gauche. When you marry a sommelier, your honeymoon will include wine, and not just the sipping of it. The study of it, the dissection of it, and the train ride from Paris to Reims to visit Champagne, home of its eponymous sparkling wine.
“It’s salty,” I responded, more to an unspoken question of what I tasted, rather than what it reminded me of. We were at Bérêche et Fils, a family-owned grower (a wine producer that grows their own grapes, as opposed to the bigger houses who buy their grapes from smaller farmers). Harvest had finished two weeks ago and the cellar smelled ripely of yeast, like fruit and uncooked dough. When the stopper on a barrel was lifted, we heard the bubbles fermenting, but it was dangerous to lower our noses lest we breathe in too much carbon dioxide. We blew gently on the opening and then sniffed the air for its scent. After the tour, we moved on to the tasting portion, five Champagnes in front of us. Five opportunities for description, speculation, and though it was possibly the best Champagne I’d ever tasted, I didn’t have much else to say—and I’m a writer, you’d think I’d be better at this.
Dan and I met while working at a restaurant in New York City, and our early courtship revolved around late-night glasses of wine and dishes of steak tartare in the West Village after work. Nights in a restaurant are often spent describing flavors, in sensory attention—at least when they aren’t filled with flirting with your coworkers or complaining about guests. I was always happy in a restaurant, having grown up with a father who loved dining out, but I was more likely to gush about the buzz of Szechuan peppercorns or the tang of adobo vinegar than the flint of a Chablis. If a palate is your personal experience and record of taste, mine was formed more through seeking flavors pushed to the brink than detecting delicate intricacies.
And so the nuance with which Dan is able to taste beverages is often lost on me. Before he was a sommelier, he was a bartender, and after tasting a cocktail he may say something like, It reminds me of Froot Loops left in milk. A taste of wine may lead to, I’m getting ripe peach or Cherries left in the sun. Poetic, really. But sometimes I just taste wine.
Still, he has followed me on numerous outings that relate to my interests. There was the dusty visit to Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, and the time we got a speeding ticket trying (unsuccessfully) to make the last guided tour at Edith Wharton’s historic estate in Massachusetts. So when we planned our honeymoon to Antibes and Paris a couple of months after our wedding in Brooklyn, I agreed instantly to include Champagne, less than a hundred miles east of Paris, in the middle of our trip.
In Champagne, neat rows of lush, bright green vineyards stretch for thousands of acres up and down gentle slopes. The undulating hills are the trademark of a region optimally suited for growing the wine that only they, within this particular appellation, are legally allowed to call “Champagne.” We set up tours at multiple wineries, including Champagne Bollinger, a house in existence since 1829, where we tasted La Côte aux Enfants on the hill where its grapes were grown. It was named so because the hill’s steep elevation was too trying for adults, and the lore goes that children hiked up to help pick grapes. Not anymore, the host joked, before popping open a bottle in the rain. They poured us glasses and singled out notes of hazelnut, and tart strawberry. Someone mentioned a creaminess, which I might have detected. Maybe.
Mostly, I was lost in the cinematic haze of the view.
All of the tours began with history: miniature renderings of the historic estates, biographical details of the founders, and examples of past bottle label designs. When we visited Champagne Delamotte, founded in 1760, and its sister house Salon, known for a rare wine released only in certain years, there was a display of old menus, including a 1954 example from the famed Paris restaurant Maxim’s. There was always a descent into the noticeably cooler stone caverns where the wine is aged underground. Many of the best Champagnes mature in barrels, often sourced from Burgundy, and some of which are a hundred years old. Several of the houses have a special person on staff just for the barrels, a cooper who manufactures and replaces the slats that have worn out.
By the end of our time in the countryside, I had heard one too many facts about barrels, an item I’d never given much thought to in the past. Though I’d endeavored to be present and interested, I ended up bored and fidgety, with a headache from all the wine. I was tired of being asked to conjure the memory of a stonefruit, and I could still taste nothing but the sparkle of excellent Champagne
Back in Paris, we went for dinner at Early June, where Dan held his glass of Viognier and said that it reminded him of white flowers. He held it out to me to smell, and I shook my head. I couldn’t talk about wine anymore, I told him, though he’d actually said something about flowers. And so, we continued the trip as we'd previously imagined, filling the next few days with vintage shopping in Canal St. Martin, mornings at the Musee d’Orsay, and sitting in cushioned windows with pastries flaking all over our laps.
On our final day in the city, we stopped into a Taiwanese coffee shop called Laïzé. As we ordered, the barista explained that the Taipei blend would be floral, whereas the Tainan blend would taste fermented, like wine. Stockholm-syndromed from the blur of Champagne tastings, I ordered the latter, curious to see how coffee could taste like wine. We sat in the industrial, cream-colored stone cafe, and after my first swallow, a clear sensation of stinky tofu filled my mouth. “Do you taste that?” I asked quickly, handing Dan my cup. “On the finish?” Meaning clogged my throat; my father, who was born in Taiwan, had loved that fermented tofu dish.
Dan tried it, but shook his head. He’d eaten stinky tofu before, but still couldn’t locate what I had found. “It means that there’s something on your palate that I don’t have. It reminded you of something that I don’t know the same way.”
I have always felt slightly ashamed that I wasn’t fond of stinky tofu. But I liked whatever remnant of it was resurfacing now, lingering on my tongue after each sip.
I had felt like I was pretending as we’d tasted wines again and again in the country, trying to pull peach from cherry. But I had learned something unexpected: how to access an imagistic reach into the past. Maybe that was why Dan had asked not what I tasted, but what it reminded me of—a question framed in memory, which isn’t static, but can be sparked, as well as built.
What does Champagne remind me of now? It’s the basement chill of the wine caves. The delicate electricity of the bubbles. And the two of us, holding wine glasses in the rain, just a couple of months into marriage, wavy hillsides all around.