I could not drink a brutish Balthazar. Beyond the brutish part, a Balthazar is just too much for me in one sitting: 16 bottles.
This blog is about the nomenclature of champagne and wine. It comes from Bixology, a clever little book from the team that created Bix in San Francisco. There’s a town where alcohol is even more important than food. Bixology is filled with facts and figures that any imbiber should read about, at least once.
First some champagne definitions. You’ve seen “Brut” on a label, but what does it mean. “Brut” means “dry” and that means low sweetness. I would put a bottle of Brut back on the shelf and go for Demi-Sec or distinctly sweet. Here is the full gamut of terms that are now part of champagne lore:
- Brut Very dry [which happens to be the most popular style]
- Extra Sec Extra dry
- Sec Moderately sweet
- Demi-Sec Distinctly sweet
- Doux Very sweet
I like my champagne sweeter because I find it blends more smoothly with the fruits and other adornments I put into my champagne cocktails. Yes, I know, fruits are sweet so why am I adding sweet with sweet? As I said, I find a sweeter champagne does blend better with fruit. A very dry champagne and fruit clash on my palette. That’s a personal issue and I know my palette has been warped by years of sugar overuse. Since Brut is the preferred style, you may very well prefer it. That said, for a “champagne” cocktail I often use Cava or Proseco which come from warmer growing areas and are inherently sweet anyway. I am an addict.
And now some size definitions. You are used to the standard 750ml bottles and you may have ordered a half bottle or split. Working the other way, larger sizes have been given the names of Biblical kings to, as the Bix folks say, “refer to quantities of grander scale.” Now who can argue with something grand:
- Split Half bottle
- Magnum 2 bottles
- Jeroboam 4 bottles
- Rehoboam 6 bottles
- Methuselah 10 or 12 bottles
- Balthazar 16 bottles
- Nebuchadnezzar 20 bottles
Okay. You are reading this post and you see the ragged edge for the second column of the bulleted lists. I have not been drinking. You try to get HTML to work easily inside the WordPress editor. Sorry, I don’t mean to be crabby. I need a Rehoboam.
Source: Bixology by Eve O’Neill and Doug “Bix” Biederbeck