Champagne… is PERFECT.
Champagne as mentioned previously, is perfection. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, morning, noon, or night, from appetizers to entrees to dessert, with just a bit of basic guidance, Champagne is the ultimate all-purpose desert island wine. We literally couldn’t wait to feature the infinitely pairable sparkling wines of Champagne in an S&L Wine and Food Pairing article. These sparkling wines have an often overlooked food-friendliness and a penchant for salt, yet are seldom found on the dinner table save for holidays and celebrations. One of our missions at Spencer & Lynn is to share the knowledge that Champagne is a wine for everyday life. It is not only special for occasions; and once you fall in love as we have the bottle of bubbles serves as the occasion itself. So yes, this is a Public Service Announcement and please, tell all your friends!
With a wide range of Grower Champagne below $50, plus an assortment of the world’s renditions of this quintessential sparkling style (it’s called Method Champenoise for a reason), a similar experience could be yours for even less than $15!
All kidding aside, there are several factors that make Champers a great table wine. Most will have quite a high acidity (coming from one of the most Northernly regions in the wine world), and will therefore refresh your palate from even the most rich and flavorful dinners. This mouthwatering effect is also the reason Champagne loves salt, so anything fried or salty will positively sing when paired with a bottle of Champagne. Go crazy with experimenting here - dress it up with caviar, or dress it down with french fries! It’s kind of hard to go wrong. Likewise, a wide range of Asian cuisines are known to famously get along with the dry sparkling wines of Champagne. The driest Champs are great with seafood and oysters, especially the leaner Blanc de Blancs from the chalk and limestone of the Côte des Blancs. Today’s best Champagne producers are bottling more and more site-specific, single-vintage wines, and the spectrum of possible flavors is greater than ever before. If you want to go deep down that rabbit hole, you can certainly find a Champagne with particular attributes that compliment whatever it is you’re serving for dinner.
Would certainly pass the breakfast test with some French breakfast radishes and cultured butter!
In our latest pairing, we chose eccentric occultist (takes one to know one clearly) Benoît Marguet’s January 2020 disgorgement of his Shaman 16, a blend of 86% Pinot Noir and 14% Chardonnay based on the very small 2016 harvest which was drastically minimized by mildew and late season frost, unfortunately not at all uncommon in the wet, cold, continental region of Champagne. Like his entire lineup of wines today, Shaman is a bone dry Brut Nature, with zero grams dosage, or added sugar. Biodynamic farming, minimal intervention in the winery, and all sorts of *good vibes* [stay tuned for an upcoming producer profile on the mystical Benoît] synergistically combine to create the trademark Marguet magic that make his wines nearly impossible to put into words. You may have heard the metaphor before that a wine is “alive,” but here, that seems to be the only explanation. These wines have entire personalities!! Each time you try one of these extraordinary Champagnes you’d swear the wine is in a different mood, and most recently our bottle was a bit shy at first, then coyly revealed a plethora of intriguing aromas and flavors and a pleasant finish that lingered for minutes on end. Few wines are at once fruity, salty, creamy, spicy, savory, and herbal, but people, that’s Champagne for ya! One minute we were tasting bright red berries, another salted apricots, then licking our lips with the idea of clover honey drizzled buttered toast. Despite its incredible and amazing depth and complexity, the Shaman is truly not too over-the-top. With its soft yet high acidity and only a medium body and alcohol level, the overlying theme here is BALANCE. We imagine a wine like this could play nicely with just about anything.
Champagne and Oysters. Classic!
We in our special corner of Connecticut are incredibly blessed to have the super unique, exquisitely beautiful Mystic oysters pulled out of the local water just minutes away. Sustainably farmed just down the hill from our Noank shop, where the nutrient-rich waters of the Mystic River meet the salt of the Atlantic, Mystic Oysters are quite plump and creamy, with a barely medium brine and a balancing sweetness. You can recognize them by their three-and-a-half-inch gorgeous green shells. They’d match perfectly with a wide range of dry white wines, and this Champagne certainly didn’t disappoint!
Dinner was a few slices of fresh sourdough toasted with a little butter, topped with whipped ricotta, and a medley of king trumpets, lion’s mane, and shiitakes, as well as raw shaved fennel and nasturtium leaves and petals. Since Champagne often positively compliments flavors of Asian cuisine, we chose gochugaru (the not-especially-spicy Korean coarse red pepper, typically used in Kimchi) to add a little excitement, and as usual, a finishing touch of Maldon sea salt enlivened the dish even more. This dish was simple to assemble but was just as creamy, toasty, buttery, salty, spicy, herbaceous, and layered as this mystical Champagne!
There’s a lot going on in this dish, but everything works together, just like the layered, complex wine that we drank with it!
Overall, normal wine vocabulary falls a bit short when trying to aptly describe even one of Marguet’s entry level wines, and the words that naturally come to mind are a bit more conceptual than usual: balance, harmony, purity, elegance, energy, depth, mystery, complexity… But like all Champagnes, the dry, minerally Shaman 16 was an indisputable star on the dinner table, all the while elevating everything from the neighborhood oysters and the local mushroom toast, to even after the meal was finished, where we slowly savored and contemplated it on its own. As you can tell, we think Champagne and food pairings are an almost unparalleled joy of life, and we hope that you visit our shop and let us help you find one for your next unforgettable dinner.
— Kim