Page 51 - PROTAGONIST 109

PROTAGONIST / PRECIOUS ENCOUNTERS

HIGH-GRADE
PAIRINGS

The magic of diamonds reflected in the perlage of
Champagne. The nuances of gemstones

mirrored in wines. They are encounters of femmininity
caressing the senses. Let woman be!

BY VALENTINA CERIANI • PHOTOS BY ENRICO SUÀ UMMARINO

Woman is flighty, like a feather in the of Louise Pommery, Madame Clicquot Ponsardin or Lili
wind, fickle of accent and of thought. Al- Bollinger, to whom is attributed the celebrated phrase on
ways a lovely, pretty face, whether she is the eternal relevance of Champagne in the domestic routine.
crying or laughing, it is untrue. So raved And this despite the fact that bubbles show their femininity
the most famous misogynist of all time, in each of the different natures they are expressed in: wheth-

the Duke of Mantua, during the final aria of Giuseppe Ver- er it is bubbly or sparkling wine, Brut, Extrabrut, Dry, even in

di’s Rigoletto, when he detected a certain fickleness in the its most disparate methodological garments: Classic or Cham-

nature of woman. In the history of womankind there have penoise, Martinotti or Charmat, all the way down to the most

been representatives who took this fickleness as their banner, nostalgic experiments with the ‘ancestral’ method, bubbles

to the extent of establishing an authentic mythology around have always been an affair of women, among women. A bar

their femininity. A shining example is the moody and volup- that is set on the scale of the pétillants either for its creamy

tuous Marilyn Monroe - who, however, paid and caressing carbonation, or for its lower

a high price for her efforts to live up to her } Golden flashes light alcohol content, or of course for the charm
myth. And her preferences and her accents up the spirit, giving exerted by its ancient matriarchs, whose
could not have been more consistent with sensuality that should taste for frivolity it restores.
the personality attributed to her. In fact, be relished to the full La Grande Dame, the illustrious cuvée
Monroe did not like cooking, and eschewed launched by Veuve Clicquot in 1972 with

the organizational rigour of recipes for the the 1962 vintage to celebrate the Maison’s

blissful readiness of homelier dishes such as veal chops which, bicentenary and honour the aforementioned Madame Clic-

like everything else, she drowned in Champagne. quot, is a bastion of French femininity. Just as celebratory

It is precisely this accent, above all, that interests us. Be- is Cuvée Louise di Pommery, an extremely classy wine un-

cause, to the female gender, bubbly is species-specific, and veiled to the public in 1986 to honour the memory of Louise

ingrained since the days of the Marquise de Pompadour, Pommery and channel her legendary style, the assemblage

who believed that Champagne was a unique elixir that could of which is still attended by chef de cave Thierry Gasco with

preserve a woman’s beauty. And yet, in hindsight, nobody her great-grandson, prince Alain de Polignac. As regards the

has ever bothered to trot out a science that could show us Italian nobility, then, we cannot fail to mention Anna Maria

the nature of this pairing. And so, perhaps through the fri- Clementi from Ca’ del Bosco, an outstanding wine, complex

volity of bubbles, for the changing nature of their shapes, and representative, exactly like the woman who founded the

for that levity that raises them from the bottom of the glass winery so many years ago. And a heartfelt tribute to the fair

to the surface where, like a slender butterfly touched by sex overall is paid by the glasses of the Millesimati d’Antan, in

a flame they evaporate, throughout history, bubbles have name and in deed, from the La Scolca winery, in Gavi, whose

found their chief spokespersons in women. At times even labels voluptuously recount all the magnanimity and the gen-

their condition of existence, as is shown in the histories tleness of its founder, Chiara Soldati.

51N. 109 / PROTAGONIST