A little bubbly

I like sparkling wine. And the king of sparklers is Champagne. But Champagne is often quite pricey, given its reputation and some masterful marketing. So I've come to enjoy other, more affordable versions of bubbly wines. In California, many producers (whose parent companies are French) made excellent sparkling wines. Here in the Loire Valley region we have Vouvray and Saumur. And right around us, most local winemakers offer what they used to call vin pétillant (sparkling wine) or méthode (named for the Champagne "method" but not allowed anymore because the Champagne people are protective of what they consider to be their proprietary vocabulary). Local sparklers are now called Fines Bulles de Touraine (Tiny Bubbles of Touraine).

A little Champagne to get the holiday meal off to a sparkling start.

Still, once in a while, especially as the end-of-the-year holidays approach, someone will have a sale on actual Champagne, so I stock up. And on Thursday, the US's Thanksgiving holiday, I opened one as our apéritif. It's a brut, or dry, variety, made with the traditional three grapes of Champagne: pinot noir, pinot meunier, and chardonnay. I also drank it with our first course of foie gras and preserved figs.

The glass is one I got in California when we lived in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale. It was 1994 and the twentieth edition of the city's annual Art and Wine Festival. We had two of these, but one of them broke along the way. I'm still using this one twenty-two years later.