Teach Your Child to Love New Places, One Alcoholic Beverage at a Time
Teach Your Child to Love New Places, One Alcoholic Beverage at a Time
Champagne in Champagne
Once I turned six, my mother insisted that I accompany her every summer to Taissy, a hamlet on the outskirts of Reims, to visit my grandmother Brigitte and her second husband Jacques, as if we needed an annual renewal of our French heritage.
I felt like an idle prisoner counting down the end of a sentence, isolated physically by seven-foot walls around the garden, linguistically by not speaking French, and socially by my mother, who was closest to me there in age.
Time moved slowly, with little to punctuate the day save for meals. Jacques needed ample time to rest or recover from bouts of dizziness. Brigitte never strayed too far from her bed and French TV dramas. To stave off boredom in those long in-betweens, I read or played solitaire or stalked the cat.
But there was one structured activity I could predict with certainty. At 6 pm, the four of us would assemble around the living room table to prendre un verre (literally “take a glass”) of Dumenil Champagne, the same merchant to whom Jacques had exclusively been making château calls for decades. No bell would ring, no announcement would be shouted through the house. We just knew that 6 pm meant it was time to sit and drink.
Jacques would emerge from the kitchen with a plate of potato chips and a log of cured sausage. He would return to the kitchen once more to grab the champagne; then it was sit, drink, and kibitz for an hour, about old family members or how handsome my doting grandmother thought I was becoming.
The summer before my 13th birthday, I went from bystander to participant in the ritual. At my grandmother’s insistence and with her daughter finally relenting, Jacques poured me half a glass. It tasted terrible, coarse enough on the swallow that I grimaced almost to the point of gagging. But I kept drinking. It was what the adults were doing. It occupied my hands. And Brigitte said so.
Over years of returning, I progressed to a full glass at 6 pm, and then, if Mom was either distracted or charmed by the twinkle in my grandmother’s eyes, a second glass. That hour became the gateway to an appreciation for far-off family and a love for France, the initial barriers I had felt now flattened by a drink. I spoke to my grandmother, solidifying the family bond Mom had wanted to see continue to a third generation. I practiced mangled—but inhibition-diminished—French on Jacques. I interacted with champagne stripped of the status-symbolizing treatment it gets in contemporary popular culture. My eventual enthusiasm for the taste of the drink led to lazy drives along the rows of vines and a privileged seat in the car on Jacques’ trips to the Dumenil maison.
Jacques and Brigitte passed away a few years ago. I haven’t returned to Taissy since. But I instinctually look forward to the time when someone brings out champagne. It’s 6 pm somewhere.