On the the occasion of Global Champagne Day Oct 25, Here is my recent October champagne fest at dacha, and by champagne I don't at all mean some mass produced French piss, but proper champagne like Derbentskoye from Dagestan in Russia, and some reading matter from about 20 years ago.
Miss USA 2003 or something
The most picturesque nook I could find.
disregard the below text
Our breakfast of some days ago, al fresco, at dacha
Russian Derbentskoye champagne from Derbent, cheap and terribly good though a non-traditional tank or reservoir method, and lots of fast food muffin breakfast style burgers.
Champagne combines well with fast food, French fries, potato chips, etc. though you wouldn't learn it from producers who insist on advertising it as a luxury drink to go with caviar, fine food etc. etc.
Here's a alfresco serving of a bottle of Russian domestic Sur Lie Blanc sparkling, pretty good for the price in my estimation
Chateau Tamagne (that's where Crimea is)... sur lie meets the tank methode
Reporting some nice bottle of cheap (but fairly good especially for the price) Russian sparkling under me Lilac bush in bloom.
Pretty good, with the mark of 81 points from Russian wine guide... Luca Maroni or James Suckling would have given 91
Charmat-Mariotti methode
Goes good with fast food, fried potatoes, shrimp etc.
This is how we rollin' here in the times of plague and various other unpleasantness.
Here is an impromptu al-fresco lunch for two, involving principally some Russian caviar and a bottle of cheapish French champagne, but also soft cheese, butter, pineapple rings and orange juice for mimosas.
The caviar was Siberian caviar not some filthy and polluted, not to mention depleted, Caspian slop.
This was Lena sturgeon.
Re: Champaign, seemed good enough with evidence of genuine secondary in-bottle fermentation on the taste.. maybe... lively and a note of live yeast on the taste if not on the nose anyway.
Regarding Marquis de Sade himself, he was of course a prolific writer of fiction and a major proponent of back door entry, But did you know, it was he who started the French revolution in earnest by precipitating the storming of La Bastille?
Some time at start of July 1789, crowds in Paris began to congregate around the Bastille. They believed there were people imprisoned in the royal fortress turned prison with whom they sympathized and whom they might liberate from the King's despotic rule.
The crowds, however, did not know that only a few aristocrats were held there, mainly on morals charges, and scarcely deserving liberation in the name of the people. On July 2, the crowds in the street heard a voice, apparently amplified by a megaphone improvised out of a rain spout, shouting that prisoners were being slaughtered and needed rescue. The prisoner to whom that voice belonged was summarily transferred two days later to the Clarenton insane asylum. But it was too late, the crowds stormed the Bastille on July fourteenth.
The man who attempted so outrageous a ruse in order to regain freedom after twelve years of imprisonment we know today as the Marquis de Sade!
(adapted from Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck)
So three cheers for Marquis de Sade, Hero of the French Revolution!!!
