Category: I Like

This last weekend Rochelle and I went to visit friends who moved to Las Vegas four months ago. While they’re still looking for permanent work so they can apply for home loans, and settle in permanently, they’ve definitely scoped out the lesser-known parts of the city.

One of our evenings included visiting the Double Down, an infamous bar where no one ever gets thrown out. (We have two friends who have managed to do it anyway, including one of our hosts.) They serve a drink with a bad reputation, “ass juice”, which is basically the dregs of all their bottles. $1 a shot, and it’s different (tasting, color, etc.) every night. It’s vile and evil, and I wouldn’t drink anything else when I’m there.

When we awoke the next day, we wanted to burn the clothes we’d worn the night before — the smell of cigarette smoke had penetrated them so deeply we thought we were back in the bar. Rochelle and I have a bet whether it ever comes out.

The best find was Makino, an all-you-can-eat sushi place. Normally these unlimited sushi buffets are horrible, with minimal amounts of the good sushi, which is snapped up in seconds when it’s put out. Not so Makino. We were awed by the quantity, quality, and variety of the sushi. My first plate alone had more than $15 worth of sushi on it. I ate two more after that (those were smaller, though). The photos are up, you can see for yourself.

Most disappointing was the champagne bar in Paris (the casino). You would think they’d be able to get it right — the place cost millions of dollars to build — but no. In reality, most of their customers probably aren’t that discriminating, and the connoisseurs go to a good restaurant. Our tasting flights were not cold enough, and several of the champagnes were somewhat flat. Completely unacceptable, if you care about these things. By way of comparison, in France we almost always were served from freshly opened bottles, and even watched some hosts pour bottles down the sink rather than serve them past their peak.

We decided that if we ever went there again (they did have a nice selection of champagnes by the glass), we would sit at the bar, to supervise the pouring of our glasses and push back the unacceptable ones.

Our first Maison de Champagne, or House of Champagne, was Taittinger. “Maison” is a term generally reserved for the larger champagne producers, and while Taittinger is far from the largest, they’re still huge, producing about 5 million bottles of champagne a year.

Taittinger is one of the many houses to take advantage of the chalk quarries dug by the Romans for building material in and under what became Reims. These quarry pits follow a formula, and are remarkably similar from house to house. The pits are connected by tunnels, and have additional galleries added, where racks upon racks of champagne are stored. The excavations, or caves de champagne, are quite cool (virtually every tour guide had a cloak to wear when visiting the caves) and humid, which creates the perfect conditions for aging champagne.

Champagne is aged in the bottle, for varying lengths of time depending on the house, and while Taittinger produces about 5 million bottles in a single year, at any given time the tunnels, pits, and galleries hold nearly 20 million bottles. Most of the major houses give tours of their extensive tunnels, and take justifiable pride in them. Our tour at Taittinger was fascinating, descending into the tunnels and seeing more champagne than we ever imagined in one place at a time.

In the photos we took you can see some of the features of the caves, and the use to which the maisons now make of them, as well as ancient carvings in the chalk, which pre-date the maisons by centuries (see the photos).

One of the most interesting photos is of the various sized vessels in which champagne is bottled. Rochelle is in the photo for scale, and you can plainly see that the largest bottle is nearly as big as she is!

Here’s an interesting tidbit: the best size bottle to buy champagne in is the magnum (1500 milliliters, or the size of two regular bottles); the volume inside the bottle is larger compared to the area out which the gasses which make champagne sparkling can escape. It stays more sparkly than champagne in smaller bottles.

You would think that would mean that the larger the bottle the better, but no, most houses don’t normally bottle champagne in sizes larger than the magnum, because they are too large and heavy to handle, require special machinery, etc. When they need to fill larger bottles for a special order, they actually decant magnums into the larger vessel, which obviously causes some of the fizz to dissipate.

It’s still pretty damn good; when I worked at Be we opened a giant bottle of Veuve Clicquot at one summer picnic, shortly after we went public, and while I drank my share, others did not, which surfaces another problem with these big damn bottles: what do you do if you don’t finish it? (The answer: don’t open it if your guests won’t finish it, because it’s impossible to preserve.)
Taittinger (Photos)
Champagne Bottles (Photo)

While our trip to France began poorly, fortunately for our sanity, we quickly recovered. Driving from Charles De Gaulle to our hotel just outside of Reims took about two hours, with only one wrong turn, quickly realized and corrected.

And our hotel, L’Assiette Champenoise, was wonderful. We checked in, dragged our bags to our room, and headed straight for the bar (we needed, and deserved, it).

Settling in at a table in the hotel bar, we ordered glasses of (what else?) champagne, and reviewed the hotel restaurant’s menu. We had reservations for dinner there the next night, and had originally not planned to eat there more than once. But it was also much later than we’d planned to get in, and we had no energy for going out to find something else to eat. Plus, the menu looked really good.

So, we decided to eat. We were seated immediately, and had a wonderful meal. Regrettably, in our addled state, we forgot to bring our camera, and so did not photograph our meal. All I can tell you is I started with a wonderful slice of terrine of foie gras, that it was outstanding, and that it was my favorite part of the meal. (Get used to this. My favorite thing is always the foie gras.)

Our dinner was accompanied by a bottle of the same delightful champagne we’d started in the bar with. It had a beautiful ruby hue, a much deeper red than most rosé champagnes usually take. Again regrettably, we neglected to write down the name, and have only the vaguest idea of what it was.

Sated and much more relaxed, we tottered off to bed — and (once again) regrettably forgot to put the Do Not Disturb sign on our door.