Real Food / Fake Food

Author:Larry Olmsted
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 2016-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

7. Champagne and Scotch: The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Generic? Really? Saying Champagne means any sparkling wine is like saying Rolls Royce means any car. You have to be an idiot to believe that.

—DAN DUNN, The Imbiber (personal communication, summer 2005)

Easy travel by high-speed train is one of the many advantages of a European vacation, and in Paris that convenience begins almost the moment you step off the plane. France’s bullet train, the TGV, is among the fastest on earth with routine speeds of two hundred miles per hour, and there is a station right in Charles de Gaulle airport. After disembarking my transatlantic flight, I cleared customs, followed the signs downstairs, boarded the train, and just thirty-five minutes later—less time than it takes to get from the airport into central Paris—I was in Reims.

The short ride has no stops, but despite the high-tech train, it is very much a journey back in time. The airport’s concrete jungle gives way to the warehouse-laden industrialized area around it, then to a suburban stretch running parallel to a major motorway, and then, about twenty minutes out, modernity yields to thick wooded forest, broken only by the occasional farmer’s field and white stands of birch. This in turn soon opens into hillier agricultural terrain, and as the miles roll by, these hillsides become increasingly dotted with vineyards, the landscape that surrounds Reims.

Founded in 80 BCE, the city has had more than its fair share of ups and downs, and in pure richness of French history, is second only to Paris. In 496 CE, Clovis, leader of the Franks and progenitor of the royal rulers of France, converted to Christianity and was baptized in the cathedral here, giving birth to the concept of French kings ruling by divine right. Right up until the French Revolution, nearly thirteen centuries later, every future king of France would travel to the cathedral in Reims for his coronation. The arrival of democracy curbed the city’s historical importance, but certainly did not end it—it was in a schoolroom in Reims that the Germans unconditionally surrendered to General Dwight Eisenhower on May 7, 1945, effectively ending World War II in Europe.

History aside, Reims is a charming small city, and when I gazed at the elaborate stained glass in the cathedral, sipped coffee in one of its many splendid cafes, and strolled the lively downtown area, lined with hotels, shops, outdoor cafes, and even an ornate antique carousel, it felt unchanged and frozen in time. But this is an illusion, because much of what I saw is relatively new. The entire city center was destroyed by heavy German bombing and artillery fire in World War I, including the cathedral, and pieces of the original structure now occupy a museum next door. The current version, impressive in its Gothic grandeur and seemingly straight out of the Middle Ages, is as much a re-creation as a renovation of its predecessor, in turn a 1218 reconstruction of the badly fire damaged original. The current cathedral

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