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December 26, 2024 23 mins

Eva and Maite ring in the new year by popping open a bottle of sparkling and diving into the history of Champagne, Prosecco, and Cava!

Happy New Year, ya’ll. See ya in 2025. - Eva and Maite

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We are about to open a moway chando champagne champagne.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
How do you open a bottle champagne safe?

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Me?

Speaker 3 (00:09):
I usually let's see.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hold on, Oh I use a towel.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Yeah, I don't like it shooting across the room. Yes,
that's the way you. Oh, it's rose.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
So we're going to be talking about now that we've
popped open our champagne, we're going to talk about the
three sparkling wines. The main sparkling wines, which is prosecco, champagne.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
And caba exactly perfect.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Celebrating the New Year is something people have been doing
for many, many years.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
The oldest recorded New Year's has to bees date back
to around two thousand BC in ancient Mesopotamia, and the
celebration lasted for up to twelve days.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
My god, I can't even do it one night. What
are they doing for twelve days?

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
I think there's no better way to ring in the
new year than with a little bubbles tears. My name
is Evil Longoria and I am Maraon and Welcome to
Hungry for History, a podcast that explores our past and
present through food. On every episode, we'll talk about the
history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients and beverages

(01:15):
from our.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Culture, So make yourself at home.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Even the outstecks celebrated New Year's huh.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well for them, the last five days of the year
were considered dead days because there was no guarantee that
the gods would grant another year, so everyone feasted. And
Signora has got plastered?

Speaker 4 (01:35):
Why Senora, because they weren't if you were over a
certain age.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Oh, the older ladies, older get plaster older ladies.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Well, obviously they had a great calendar, even though it
may be different than the one we followed today.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
But there was always a celebration at the end of
a cycle.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Which we now consider the end of the year. That
is so interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Do you make your New Year's resolutions? Do I make
New Year's resolutions? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
I'm a goal writing person and I write them down
all the time. Same but I think, like if you
zoom out and try to do a macro, like what
do I want to accomplish this year?

Speaker 3 (02:12):
You know?

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I guess I could be a resolution, but I'm not
the traditional of like I'm gonna lose weight, I'm gonna exercise,
because I do those things and I try to do
them all the time, like I'm gonna eat better, I'm
gonna drink less, although no, I don't ever say I'm
gonna drink less, but but you know what I mean,
Like I'm not a big like I must have this
resolution on January first.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
I usually am pretty good with that throughout the year.
Throughout the year, yeah, yeah, do you make resolutions. I do, like.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Goals, like you say, yeah, the goals, but I also
I do it throughout the year. But at the end
of the year, I definitely I think. You know, one
year was really interesting. I read something, you know, write
something down like at the end of the week, like
something that you're grateful for that happened y this week,
and I started doing it that one year. My husband

(03:01):
and I started doing it, and then we read and
it was twenty twenty, yes, the year of COVID. So
at the beginning, it was like, oh, I want to
do this and I want to do that.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
You did nothing, no accomplish nothing, but you know, it
was so interesting.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Every Sunday we would write it and we continue doing
it the whole year, and it was we're healthy, everyone's healthy,
everyone's healthy.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Yeah, but do you know what because I go by
the moon cycle.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
So every time there's a full moon every month, I manifest,
I write down, goals, I write down but you write
it as if it's happened. You know, I am healthy,
I have a great marriage. You write it as if
it's already done. So I do that with like the
new moons, but resolutions.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
I'm going to start doing that.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yes, you have to, because there's power and the moon. Also,
when did champagne.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Become associated with New Year's Yeah, that's really interesting. So
wealthy French citizens began drinking champagne in the seventeenth century
as a symbol of prosperity, and during the nineteenth centre,
this rising middle class began drinking it to emulate the
taste of the aristocracy, and it's been a staple of celebrations.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
You know what I do. I collect vintage coops, really coops.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah, yeah, I love the well these like these antique
coops for champage. I just love, like the great guts
be and the engraved crystal cruisers.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Huge champagne coops are my Champagne coops are my favorite.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
They are my favorite. They are They're gorgeous.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Well, there's also this like clinking of glasses is a
tradition that I find so interesting, Like where did that
come from? Like when you go salu, why do we
have to bang our cups?

Speaker 2 (04:38):
And yeah, I mean it is such a really it's
a beautiful custom right and engages all of the senses.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
There's a lot of origins to this.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
There is, yes, you toast to life, to health, to happiness.
But there's a great book, The History of the World
in six Glasses. Oh, it's a great book. Wow, the
author top Standard. She traces the toast the invention of
beer in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and he suggests that
the clinking of individual glasses symbolizes the original shared vessel

(05:10):
that ancient humans drank beer from. So this is his
sort of theory. But there is this ancient Greeks has
been signed in as a possible orange for the tradition
of toasting as a praise to gods and the hope
of long health.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Well, the one that I'm most aware of is in
the Middle Ages. Like I this is the one I
heard that you would you would like smash your glass
so hard that it would spill in the into the
other one's cup or wine glass. Or whatever they were drinking,
and it would show confidence that one person wasn't being poisoned.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
And that's the one I've always heard.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
That's like the medieval drinkers, you know, would pour like
a little wine into each other's glasses just to ensure
everything was poisoned fruit.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
And that's definitely a big theory, but you know, in reality,
some of these medieval poisonings were soiated with the fact
that there was a lot of lead glazes on pottery
drinking cups.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
So they were accidental poisonings.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Accidental poisons, not your enemy necessarily, sometimes maybe, but often
there was lead.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
I love sparkling wine, and they're all made with like
different great varieties, flavors, different processes. Some are protected under
geographic indication, which is like a set of regulations that
limits the naming of food and drink to like the
specific region, which is Champagne. Also tequila is one of
those as well, which that's all often referred to as

(06:40):
a appellation. So I think we should start with, like
what makes wine sparkle? Like where does this bubble come from?

Speaker 2 (06:47):
So sparkling wine is basically a wine which bubbles when
poured into a glass and in a nutshell, because there's
all of this science behind it. But in a nutshell.
To turn a still wine into sparkling wine, the base
wine is put into a champagne bottle with some priming
sugar and yeast.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
A cap is put on the.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Bottle and it's allowed to ferment, and the fermentation produces
carbon dioxide, and because this trapped carbon dioxide can't escape,
it creates bubbles.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
So in a nutshell. And so who made Who was
the first to make sparkling wine? It must have been French?

Speaker 2 (07:25):
There, well, yes, and no, okay, So the French monk don't.
Pignon is thought to have been a vegetana.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
Marion was a monk. He was a monk. What yes, No, he.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
Was a monk, so he knew he would the monks
man they were making beers and they were making you.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Know, nobody who knew this would be like the you know,
for being a monk and lives simply Who knew that
today in today's society would be such a similar luxury,
luxury and opulence totally.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
So he is thought to have invented champagne in sixteen
ninety seven. One of his was to prevent the wine
from becoming bubbly, which at the time was had to.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Ruin the wine. Oh if it was bubbly.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Oh yeah, So due to the cold temperatures in France
at the time, it was just too cool to leave
wine in barrels, who was often bottled before full fermentation
could be completed. And so the these bubbles, you know,
ruined the flavor of the wine. But he tasted it,
and he said to have said, come quickly, I'm tasting

(08:28):
the stars. But in reality, yeah, in sixteen sixty two,
so a few decades before Dunpignon, an English scientist named
Christopher Merritt. He published a paper in the Royal Society
that described how adding sugar to wine made it bubbly.
And his paper said, our wine coopers of recent times

(08:49):
use vast quantities of sugar and molasses to all sorts
of wines to make them drink brisk and sparkling, and
to give them spirit. And so he was the first
person to use the word sparkling to describe the results.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
But they also said that English winemakers had been adding
sugar to wine for a long time, even before this
man's discovery.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Exactly exactly, So, hey, who the Brits were the first
ones to make sparkling.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
Sparkling wine.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Let's talk about Champagne, and that's specifically France because you
have to be you know, it has to be produced
in the northeast of France, in five wine producing districts
within the historical province of Champagne. People don't realize, like
it's an actual place and it's a blend of pino noir,
pino mouniere and chardonnay, and it's it's fresh and.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Fruity and bubbly.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
And this is probably the most famous sparkling wine, right.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Definitely the most famous. I would say, yes, it's the
one that people associate with bubbles with this. Champagne wines
were being cultivated in the region of Champagne going back
to the Romans in the fifth century, but it wasn't
until the.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
Last half of the seventeenth century.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
It wasn't until the last half of the seventeenth century
that wines of Champagne began to sparkle. Originally, Champagne was
just a pale, pinkish wine made from pino nora grapes
used in coronations throughout the Middle Ages, and the sparkle
was discovered by accident in the seventeenth century.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
And yeah, because everybody thought the bubbles were like a fault,
like the bottles exploded or the quarks popped because of
the pressure. And because of that, it was called the
devil's wine.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
Isn't that funny?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
The Devil's wine because it was like breaking. Yeah, and
that quark, that moussilee, this sort of.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
The wire that goes on top of the cork.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, because you know when you open a bottle you
have to twist the thing that was invented in France
in eighteen forty four to prevent the quarks from just
popping from the pressure.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
But then, I mean it quickly became a favorite of
the French quark because as far back as you can
read in art in books, you see the French court
with champagne in their hands, and how it was always
served for royal festivities at the Palais in Paris, and
you can see all these guests that loved seeing the
court jump out of the bottle.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
Who's Madame Pompadour.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Madame Pompadour Louis, the fifteenth Mistress is said to have
ordered champagne by the gallon for her extravagant parties, and
they said that one of her parties in seventeen thirty two,
she served over eighteen hundred bottles of champagne in a
single evening, in a single evening, in a single evening,

(11:36):
that's a lot of chanatau champagne.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
Wow, chage.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
I want to talk about the type of bubbly I love,
which is prosecco.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Is that your favorite?

Speaker 3 (11:44):
It is, well, cava and prosecco.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Yeah, I love proscco. That's usually what I have at
home is I usually have to sected out. It's just
it's easy drinking.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
It's easy drinking, and for me, it's like a lighter
bodied grape that offers like I don't know, more floral aromas,
the grapes that they use for prosecco, or like chardonnay,
pino grease, pino noir. It's just light and fruity or
it's a little sweeter than champagne and cava. But I

(12:14):
just I love it. And prosecco is produced also in
the northeast of the country, northeast of Italy and four provinces.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
And it's I love it too, and it's it's affordable
and it's consistently good.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
It's just always good.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Wines in this area were also produced during the Roman Empire.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
But what did the name prosecco come from.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
The name prosecc or proseccum has roots in the thirteenth century,
but it wasn't applied to this sparkling wine in the
area as prosecco until the late nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
They've improved it so much since the thirteenth century. Their
production methods have really shifted prosecco to like a dryer,
more elegant style. That is, like you said, it's pretty
easy to drink it to enjoy throughout the world. And
it's been synonymous with Italian lifestyle as well.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
And who doesn't love that Italian lifestyle? I know. But
here's my new My new obsession has been cava. Is it?

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Well?

Speaker 3 (13:09):
We were just there. You spent so much time there.
I was.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
I was in the cava fields, in the harvest, in
the Filix Serra festival.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
How was that?

Speaker 2 (13:18):
This is what inspired this episode? Tell me about that?

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Oh my god, it was so so fun. Most of it,
most of cava is ninety five percent.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Of covas produced in Catalunya and it's like a blend
of cherello, barayada, masabeo grapes.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
It's fresh, it's floral.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
I like it because it's not as sweet as prosecco
and it's not as dry as champagne. It is fantastic,
and it's also Cava's process is exactly like champagnes, where
Prosecco's is not.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Proscco's process is a little different.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Right, But the term cava was adopted by the Spanish
in nineteen seventy because they wanted to abandon the use
of potentially misleading jumpine yeah from champagne, and so the.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
Word cava actually means cellar.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
So the cava is most all most but not all
is in catal.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
The kava designation it sort of has an unrestricted set
of laws. So sometimes, you know, it's very easy to
get the kava designation, and it's not that easy to
get a prosecco or a champagne designation. So some of
the best producers don't want their name associated with this
sort of anything goes but Appalachian.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
So there are a lot of.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Really interesting women making sparkling wines that are not necessarily cavas,
but but not not to say that there are some.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Really great, great cava in the town of Sanduni. That's
where I went, Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the town I was.

Speaker 4 (14:45):
So, I know it's a Sanva sounds Italian. I guess
it's yeah, which is like a language unto itself.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
This is the town of San Sandi Danova. That was.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
It's a very very important town in Cataluna. And this
is where the Felix Soa festival was. And Felix Sara
was this bug that affected all the vineyards in the
eighteen eighties and everything. All the vineyards that had been
there for centuries had to be uprooted and had to
be replanted with Masaveo, Pariaa and sharello grape varieties. So

(15:29):
that's what the kava industry is using to date. They
were really affected by Felixerra because it's Catalunia's borders France,
and so France was devastated also by this bug.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
And it made its way. Did you go to the
festival and did this? Did people dressed they dressed like
the bugs? I sent you the video, No you did it,
I did not. You have to send it. It is
the craziest festival. And because the whole town of this
San so Danova. They are all in the wine business.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
There are their growers, picked planters, they're all part of
the industry of kava, and so they're all in the
street and they just celebrate like the rebirth of the
town and the rebirth of cava. So cool, it was
so fun to what how fun they're sparkling wine in
Latin America.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Yes, where, Well, there's sparkling wines really good, with sparkling
wines being made in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil and
also Mois Chandon, which is what we had today. Their
very first winery outside of France was in Argentina in
nineteen fifty nine, and Chile's been making sparkling wine since

(16:39):
eighteen seventy nine. Mexico is making really interesting sparkling wines.

Speaker 3 (16:44):
But they're called venos espomosos.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
Venos espomosos. Yeah, they don't have like a name, and
they don't.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Have an Appalachian based Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mexico.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
And I was just reading that they're doing a lot
of champagne in the sort of pet natch, you know,
the pet this sort of natural way sort of when
you think of pet nats.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
There's like a trendy like organic.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah it's sped, but it's the original way to produce
sparkling wins, the ancestral, you know way, and they're doing
a lot of these. Some of the sparkling wines are
kind of cloudy, and so there's there's people in actually
all over the Latin America there that are making these
pet nats. But there's this woman, Fernanda Barra of Winer
called Boua. She worked in France and in Italy. Her

(17:30):
great grandfather was a French scientist who fell in love
with Bacha and she's been making sparkling wines since twenty eighteen,
so not that long. And she's making these these wines
and these these artisanal sparkling wins.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
By then, Waterlupe in Mexico is still very new.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Area. Wines in Mexico is very new. I actually like
the whites.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
They have some really good minerally white wines that I like.
After the break, we're going to get into the modern
history of Champagne.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
And the women that made it happen.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
Don't go anywhere.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
The champagne business as we know today was born because
of women. Yes, I'm just saying no, it is I
did not know. So when I drink champagne, I don't
drink a lot of champagne.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
But when I do, it's woof.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Clico, wolf clicke, I didn't know, madam, that was a woman.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Wolf means widow. What yes, let me see this wolf
clicko means widow.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
Here's this scrape book, the Widow clicko woof Clico.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
The story of a Champagne empire and the woman who
ruled it.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
It's a great book.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
Barb Nicole Pon Sardine Clico, better known as Madame vuf Clico.
She's the granddame of the champagne world. She was born
to a famous textile family, and she married into a
famous textile you know, manufacturer, And he decided that he
wanted to try his luck in the in the wine business.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yes, and so he did.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
They did with her at his side, and then the
wine business wasn't going well, and then he died unexpectedly.
So here's this twenty seven year old widow with this
failing wine business. And she was very entrepreneurial. So she
became the first international businesswoman. She saved She basically created

(19:27):
the champagne industry.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
In France. Wow, I didn't know vuv Plico did that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
So Don Perion was a monk and move Plico is
a widow. Yes, I am learning some stuff to day.
She was interesting.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
She tapped into the Russian czars really wanted French champagne.
They wanted champagne, and she after the Napoleonic Wars, she
was able to sort of she found this market and
she got in there and she created this incredible, you know,
wine business, and she created this process known as riddling.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
You I don't know if you've seen Oh, yes I have.
I did this in Coba. You did how you rotate
the bottle? Bottle? Yeah, so the fermentation.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
So legend has it that in eighteen eighteen she took
a kitchen table, she drilled holes in them at an angle,
and she stuck the bottles in there so that the
bottles are stacked on their sides, and then.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
You gradually rotate until the bottles are facing downwards.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
Right. But that process consolidates the yeast at.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
The neck of the bottle, and that allows it to
be removed quickly and easily with uh not losing so
much product.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Right, because you have to remove some of them to
do the second fermentation. So it's this this process that's
a mainstain in champagne, in the nat of a champagne.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
But it's something that she developed. Wow, And she.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Wasn't the only one. There were other ones Louise Pomeri,
So Pomeri is also a big champagne. What did she
do and so she's responsible for the flavor that most
of us associate with champagne. She also she was also
a voves lots of widows.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
She was a widow too. She was a widow too, so.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
She married this prominent textile family, so lots of textile
and champagne connections.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
When she was thirty eight pregnant.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
With her second child, her husband died. Her husband died,
and then she you know, transitioned away from So basically
she created champagnes for the British, and she knew that
the British loved these hard ciders, and she decided to
create champagnes for them.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
But the English preferred their drinks dry. So she was
the first one to create a champagne with a dry
profile exactly.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
And the ones that Plicode was doing were a little sweeter,
which is what the Russians liked. So the ones that
Louise Pomeriy developed are really basically she developed the brute champagne,
which is the standard of sales worldwide. It's like this
dry champagne.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
And then another widow Bollinger. Yeah, that's another famous champagne house.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
That's another one. So she co founded the Bollinger Champagne House.
In eighteen twenty nine, at the height of the Second
World War, she lost her husband and she stepped up
to become the head of the champagne house at forty
two years old. She was famously quoted in The Daily
Mail in nineteen sixty one saying.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
I drink champagne when I'm happy and when I'm sad.
Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone or when I
have company. I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it
if I'm not hungry, and I drink it when i
am Otherwise, I never touch it unless I'm thirsty.

Speaker 3 (22:43):
Oh my god, she was just constantly drinking it. I
love these pioneering women.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Yes, me, me too, Me too.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Well.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Cheers to our cava prosecco, sparkling wine paigne episode.

Speaker 3 (23:03):
Thank you everyone, have a great New Year's Eve.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Thank you so much everyone, Thanks for listening. See you
in twenty twenty bye, see you next year.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Hungary for History is a hyphenit media production in partnership
with Iheart'smichaeltura podcast network.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
For more of your favorite shows, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts
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Hosts And Creators

MAITE GOMEZ-REJÓN

MAITE GOMEZ-REJÓN

Eva Longoria

Eva Longoria

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