Champagne Revolution

Around the 1-year anniversary of this blog I posted about the History of Champagne, and in complete coincidence my best friend gave me for Christmas, a book called The Widow Cliquot, which is the story of how a woman founded one of the great Champagne empires of world, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In reading it I have come across some very interesting facts about champagne (the beverage) in the late 18th century.

- For one thing it was not the light gold, taupe, or ever-so-slightly pink color we know today, but was much more of what we would call a Rose; even as dark as a puce and was refered to as "eye of the partridge".
- It was also extremely sweet, even more so than our sweetest dessert wines today. Compare our common sweet champagnes today with 20 grams of residual sugar to their 200 grams, and in Russia at the time something with up to 300 grams of sugar was prefered!
- Lastly, we like our champagne to be chilled, but they typically enjoyed it frosty to the point of having a slushy-like consistency. Sounds like a delightful way to end a dinner to me!