Oct. 10, 2008
Fact Check: 'Brie and Chablis'
Whoever Came Up With This Slam on Liberal Voters Never Tasted the Pairing
By DOROTHY J. GAITER AND JOHN BRECHER
The Wall St. Journal
At a recent rally in Fairfax, Va., former Sen. Fred Thompson was defending Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin against journalists. "They are now parachuting in dozens of warriors and investigators and scandal-mongerers and representatives of cable networks, all into Alaska to turn over every rock they can find," he thundered. "I hope they brought their own Brie and Chablis with them!" The crowd went wild. We don't know how "Brie and Chablis" became synonymous with "Eastern Establishment," though we must admit that our daughter Media left for a liberal Eastern college having never tasted Brie and came back the next summer declaring that she loved it. So, OK, maybe there is some sort of secret indoctrination that probably also includes an elaborate handshake (Media won't say). At the same time, Hoyt Hill, the owner of Village Wines in Nashville, in Sen. Thompson's home state, says he carries a wide variety of Chablis and sells every bottle he can get his hands on. "I think Chablis is the best bargain in white Burgundy," he told us. When we asked him if everyone who buys Chablis from him is an Eastern Establishment Liberal, he laughed and laughed. When he stopped, he said, "Most people who buy Chablis from me are probably very conservative because they're rich and probably Republicans."
But all this talk about Brie and Chablis did make us wonder: How do they taste together? Would a tasting of Brie and Chablis together turn John into a Democrat and make Dottie forget her Southern roots? We conducted an experiment to find out. Truth is, while we like cheese and we love wine, we aren't big fans of cheese and wine together. Sure, there are some exceptions -- we can't imagine Port without Stilton or Stilton without Port, for instance. And when we do think of wine and cheese together, we prefer white wine to red because we find that its lively acidity makes the cheese more flavorful. It's also true that we'll use just about any excuse to drink Chablis, which is one of the world's most underappreciated wines. Real Chablis, from the northern part of France, is made from the Chardonnay grape and tastes like nothing else, with crisp acidity, bell-ringing clarity, a kind of lemon-lime liveliness and great minerals that can sometimes lean toward an attractive sourness.
The amazing thing is that Chablis continues to be a great bargain because it's not popular. Too many people still confuse it with cheap American white wine called "Chablis," a generic term that drives the French crazy but is allowed in the U.S. among grandfathered companies after longstanding practice. In addition, its focused tastes can seem sharp to Chardonnay drinkers who are used to more approachable, rounder wines. Finally, as Mr. Hill pointed out, most people drink Chablis young, when it can be particularly aggressive, and haven't experienced a well-aged bottle. Chablis is one of those whites that ages beautifully, getting richer and more soulful and showing even more minerality and character.
(snip)
How did the two ever get linked? We don't know for sure. Dottie feels it has something to do with Leonard Bernstein's famous party to raise legal-defense money from rich white liberals for a group of Black Panthers accused in 1969 of conspiracy to kill police officers and blow up buildings in New York City. However, according to Tom Wolfe's famous, liberal-lampooning, satirical account of the party, the cheese served that night was Roquefort... The catchphrase "Brie and Chablis" to mean snooty liberal seems to have really caught fire during the third-party presidential campaign of John Anderson in 1980. It's amazing that it still has such resonance, aside from the fact that it sounds great. After all, in terms of wine, America is very different today from what it was in 1980, with more people drinking better wine all the time.
(snip)
Mr. Wabnig of the cheese shop says that he prefers Brie with Champagne and we can understand that -- the acidity of good Champagne and its hints of nuts and mushrooms could be very nice with some of the cheeses. So we think it's time to put "Brie and Chablis" to rest, since they don't work together very well anyway. Still, giving the combination one last chance, and thinking that perhaps the Chablis needed some age, we visited Crabtree's Kittle House in Chappaqua, N.Y., a restaurant known for its well-tended old Burgundies. We ordered a 1994 Chablis (Dauvissat Grand Cru "Les Clos") and asked the waiter to bring us some Brie. The wine was interesting and complex and the cheese was rich and buttery, but, once again, they really didn't speak to each other. We asked the waiter what kind of Brie he had brought us. He left and came back and explained that it was a Brie from the U.S., and when he told us the name, we laughed. It's called Président.
Eat your heart out, Fred.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122360101133121633.html?mod=todays_us_weekend_journal (subscription)
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