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Lands of Red and Gold Interlude #3: A Christmas Beverage

In keeping with the LoRaG tradition of Christmas specials, here is a brief exploration of one allohistorical Christmas tradition...

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From: “Blue Wine, Good Time: The Making of a Christmas Tradition”

Wine that bubbles and sparkles is nowadays considered by most connoisseurs to be the finest and most deserving of wines.

This was not always so. The effervescence of bubbling wines is caused by carbon dioxide dissolved in the wine, making it fizz and sparkle when opened. The properties of some wines to effervesce were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, if not earlier.

For many centuries, this quality of wines was thought a fault, not a blessing. Lacking glass with the strength to withstand the pressure of bubbling wine, effervescing wine created an occupational hazard for medieval winemakers. Bottles that bubbled could explode, and set off a chain reaction amongst neighbouring bottles that could destroy an entire wine cellar. To say nothing of the risks to the winemakers themselves.

Since medieval times, wine from the Champagne region was known for its tendency to lightly bubble. The reason, though local vintners did not know it for centuries, was because the cold winters of Champagne would stop fermentation in the stored wine. When warmed up again in spring, or after transportation to more temperate climes, fermentation would restart inside the bottles, creating the effervescence. And, in some cases, exploding bottles.

Champagne vintners detested bubbling wine, and sought techniques to stop it. In England, though, imported Champagne wines were noted for their effervescence, and became popular for it.

Two men were the catalyst for transforming this desire into the creation of proper bubbling wines. The first, Sir Robert Mansell, was an English admiral and parliamentarian. In the early seventeenth century, he used his political connections to obtain a monopoly on English glass-making, and pioneered the establishment of glass factories which used sea coal rather than wood or charcoal in glass-making. Glass bottles made in this manner were strong enough to withstand the pressure of bubbling wine.

The second man, Christopher Merret, was an English physician, scientist, and industrial pioneer. As well as practicing medicine, Merret studied botany, agriculture, metallurgy, glassmaking, and mining. Despite his varied interests, his most important achievement was his study of the process of effervescence in wine. Merret found that the bubbling quality of wine was caused by the presence of sugar left in the bottle, and that adding sugar to a wine before bottling could turn any wine into a bubbling wine.

These discoveries set the scene for good bubbling wine. This would first, and most famously, be taken up in the Champagne region. During the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, bubbling Champagne wine became a favourite of royalty and aristocracy in France and England alike.

For a long time, the very name Champagne became synonymous with bubbling wine; in some countries it still is. The manufacture of bubbling wine quickly spread beyond the Champagne region, to elsewhere in Europe, and in time to other winemaking regions around the globe. For the story of blue wine, however, what matters is when the craft of effervescent winemaking spread to Spain...

The practice of adding spices to wine was ancient in Europe. Wine – or other alcoholic beverages such as cider or mead – were often heated and mixed with spices or fruit. Anciently called Hipocris after the physician Hippocrates, in England they came to be called mulled wine.

Essential to making mulled wine is the process of heating it. The process which led to blue wine, however, came from another tradition entirely. One which did not rely on heating wine, but rather on adding choice, piquant flavours from spices alone.

In ancient Aururia, grapes were not known, and the alcoholic beverage of choice was ganyu, made from fermented yams. Yam “wine” in itself has little flavour, and the early Aururian brewers added the crushed pulps of local limes to the yams before fermentation, producing the basic flavour of ganyu. Different varieties of ganyu were further flavoured by combinations of the varied spices of the Great Spice Land, leading to a distinctive culture of local spiced beverages which continues in Aururia to the present day.

The road which led to blue wine started when some Aururian brewers adopted another fruit to flavour their wines. Instead of using their local limes, the Aururians turned to a plant which they called yolnu, but which is better known nowadays as the wineberry [1].

Wineberries are sweet, but not cloyingly so. While small as berries go, their distinctive flavour and sweetness proved an excellent accompaniment to regular ganyu, and in some brewing cultures, replaced the local limes entirely. Interestingly, wineberries exist in both red and blue forms, both of which give similar sweetness, but lend different colours to the finished beverage. The early Aururians seem to have chosen the blue variety as much for its colour as for any other reason.

Blue ganyu spread throughout much of the continent, and developed the same local varieties as other beverages. The form which would become most popular, however, developed around the Lower Nyalananga. Using imported spices, the local brewers created a flavour that would be treasured around the world: aniseed verbena and cinnamon verbena in roughly equal proportions, with a small portion of lemon verbena.

While blue ganyu itself became an exported product from Aururia to the world, the tale of blue wine is the story of how wineberries and spiced wine-making knowledge was brought from Aururia to Catalonia...

Medieval Champagne vintners had tried adding elderberries to their wine to improve the flavour. History does not record whether this practice was remembered and gave inspiration to adopt the Aururian practice of flavouring wine with berries. For whatever the reason, in Catalonia the vintners turned to this practice after the importation of wineberries from Aururia.

The first European wineberries were grown in the Penedés region of Catalonia, along the banks of the River Foix. The distinctive colour and flavour of “Penedés blue” became noted throughout Europe by the early eighteenth century, even before the Penedés farmers started using imported Aururian spices to create premium spiced wines.

In 1721, a rich vintner named Bartomeu Gavarró i Berdugo, whose vineyards were near the village of Sant Sadurní d'Anoia [2], successfully imported the first verbena trees, and began their cultivation. The hills of the Alt Penedés region turned out to have sufficient rainfall to sustain production of productive verbena trees, and within a few years Gavarró’s vineyards were producing Penedés blue flavoured by fresh rather than imported spices. The new vintage was still expensive, but did not require the same massive premium demanded by wines flavoured from imported spices.

The culmination of true blue wine production came when knowledge of effervescent Champagne-style wines came together with Aururian-style spiced wine to produce the greatest of modern beverages. The first recorded deliberate creation of bubbling blue wine is in 1786, when vintners in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia are described as adding sugar to blue wine before bottling and exporting the completed bubbling blue to the Algarve. Like spiced blue wines before them, effervescent blue wines soon took Europe by storm...

Only a few favoured locations in the world possess in close proximity the right microclimates needed to produce blue wine. A region must have three locales, the first warm and moist enough to grow the fresh spices needed to flavour the wine, the second warm and moderately humid to grow the grapes, and the third warm and dry enough to produce a good wineberry harvest.

Connoisseurs usually agree that Spanish blue wine from Penedés (Catalan blue) or La Rioja (Castilian blue) is the premier blue wine. The closest competitor is Kuyal Valley [Hunter Valley, NSW] blue wines from Aururia. A few other regions also produce noteworthy blues, with California and the Cape being perhaps the most well-known...

Like knowledge of creating bubbling wine, understanding of the merits of blue wine for Christmas began in England. In mid-nineteenth-century England, the wealthiest technocrats took to imbibing premium Castilian blues as an appropriate toast for the turning of Christ’s Mass. As production of blue wine increased, so the tradition spread throughout the British dominions, and in time to much of the world.

Today, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good Castilian blue will not lack for company over Christmas...

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[1] This plant is the one known historically as ruby saltbush (Enchylaena tomentosa). In its wild form, it is a small shrub that grows in semiarid areas, and like many Aururian plants is tolerant of drought and poor soils. It produces foliage which is readily eaten by grazing animals, and also produces sweet but rather small berries.

Ruby saltbush has different domesticated forms grown either for their agricultural properties or as berry-producing varieties. The berry-producing cultivars have much larger berries than their wild relatives. The agricultural versions have larger leaves, and take advantage of the saltbush’s ability store salt in its leaves, and are thus very useful for desalinating any over-irrigated, salinised soil.

[2] Historically, the village of Sant Sadurní d'Anoia is in the centre of one of the most productive Spanish wine-producing regions, and is the centre of cava (Spanish champagne) production in Catalonia.

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