Behind the Bubbles

Moët & Chandon don’t usually let people observe their harvest in action, in the same way that magicians don’t want you to know how they did the trick. And magic, really, is the right metaphor here, I think. When old Dom Perignon apparently first concocted this stuff, he wrote to his fellow brothers: “Come quickly: I am tasting stars.” The stars are the bit we all know and feel — it isn’t necessary to observe the nucleosynthesis that forged them (you know, when the hydrogen atoms fuse together into helium nuclei) in order to think they’re really rather lovely with some smoked salmon blinis. And besides, mightn’t some of the joy of the natural, mysterious, near alchemical wine-making process be quashed and lessened by the lifestyle journalist’s rank obsession with facts?