Hectic weekend... delicious Champagne!

October is done and dusted (well, not really, hopefully November lends itself more to free time to dust...). Months of effort, planning and hard work all culminated in a frantic couple of days. 

Don't mind me in the mirror there...
Ooops, clearly not paying attention

We started the weekend off with a Blind Whisky Tasting. Shane, Drew and my dad all participated by purchasing 2 bottles of whisky, and I organized the blind tasting. Shane made fancy flight boards and placemats with fun facts. I made tasting note sheets, and we ordered some brandy snifters so everyone had the same glass. Not to forget my mom, who doesn't drink straight whisky, we set up 4 cream-based liqueurs for her to play along!

The evening resulted in some hilarious revelations (more expensive is not always better), and some great conversations. It was well worth the efforts, and definitely going to happen again. Next time, maybe we could focus on a particular region, or move away from whisky all together, and do beer or wine... It was a lot of fun. 

The next night was another big one for us. My sister is pregnant, and Shane and I have known for about a month what the gender of the baby is (no one else, not even my sister knew). So when Jake and Daryl came down, we organized a small gender reveal party. I even wore equal amounts of blue and pink to throw them off the scent. We had pink and blue chocolates and cupcakes, and old wives tales that we worked our way through to "predict" the gender. The wives tales ended up being split, if we take out what Jake and Daryl thought it was going to be, it was 8 "girl" results and 6 "boy" results. (If you're curious of the wives tales we used, let me know and I'll upload a better picture)

The only result that mattered though was in this box. 

Yup, that's right, we're getting a
NEPHEW!!

The rest of the week was full, but certainly less hectic than we had been. 


November 3, 2016

Can you tell that Shane took this picture?
Priorities are all wrong: Tyson is out of focus
and the bubbly is in focus... Almost like we
were making a Champagne blog... Silly man. 

This week we were on our own, our Champagne Guy is vacationing in the Dominican (JEALOUS!!). We saw a really cool bottle that we wanted to try, Blue Nun or something, which had little flecks of gold in it, but after an exhaustive search online and then eventually in the LCBO Employee's database, we found out it had 40g/L of sugar. I'm feeling the cavities followed by the sugar coma just thinking about it... 

We ended up with a bottle from France: Simonnet-Febvre's Crémant de Bourgogne Brut. It was a very bubbly bottle, when we popped the top, it sounded like fireworks were exploding in the bottle, and had a sweet-yeasty smell. 

In the glass, it was a lovely pale yellow. It was very fruit forward, with a sweet-tart flavour. We got hints of peach, with a citrusy thing going on, more lime than lemon... With that being said, it had a very nice acid balance, even with the citrus flavours, it didn't have an acidic mouth feel. It had lots of sharp bubbles (as we would have guessed by the bottle noises), but also resulted in a creamy mouth feel... maybe just because there were so many bubbles? Not sure. Usually sharp bubbles do not equal a creamy mouth feel... 

Ahh, that's better. Look at those
gorgeous eyes... :)

Shane said that his mouth was watering for quite a while after taking a few sips, so it was drier than it tasted. It was really good. A bit later on, we thought we got notes of pears? Or a hard stone fruit, like white peach?

We would definitely get this one again, it was quite nice. 

~S

• Brand: Simonnet-Febvre
• Type of Grape: Chardonnay and Pinot Noir
• Sweetness: 8g/L
• Price: $23.95
• Tasting Notes: Sweet fruity flavours lead to a nicely dry finish. Notes of stone fruit, pears, and lime. Would pair nicely with a spicy chicken or fish taco.