The Perfect Bubbly for Lighter Fare

These COVID days have led to some bad habits on my part—I haven’t been getting enough exercise, and I have been eating heavily. Loose clothes are starting to get tight—so it is time to start eating lighter. I am pleased to report that light fair, such as fish and spring vegetables, go exceptionally well with Champagne, and that we have a lot of good value bottles here at K&L from which to choose.

Last weekend, Cinnamon made Dover Sole with a spring vegetable risotto with Clyde’s Half-Moon-Bay-grown fava beans and local green asparagus in it. We opened the Le Brun de Neuville "Authentique Assemblage" Brut Champagne, which we sell for just $34.99 to go with it. It exceeded our high expectations. This Champagne is aged for five years on the lees on a cork, rather than the customary crown cap, and disgorged by hand. They have fitted the bottles with an “agraffe” or staple, to show that this is the way that they age the wine, but the cork that you see is the 2nd to be in the bottle, added after disgorgement. The wine is 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Noir and comes from the village of Bethon, a very chalky terroir in the Sezanne region of Champagne.

While this Champagne has nutty complexity and lovely toast from the extended lees aging, it shows excellent freshness with light food like our fish and spring vegetable risotto. This wine needed the five years it was given; the chalky drive of the Chardonnay is virile and bright in this bottle. It is incredible to me that it can, at the same time, be creamy, and I think a lot of that is down to the excellent texture that the perfect, compact bubbles bring to the wine. It showed very well, and we didn’t need the stopper that I dug out of the drawer.

If you are looking for a treat to make lighter fare go down easy, look no further!

 -Gary Westby