Happy New Year 2025
Raise a glass of sparkling wine to the end of the year 2024! Join City Vino this week, as we feature sparkling wines and a Karaoke New Year’s Eve event with dinner and champagne toast. If you have not experienced a breath of sparking wines before, this is the weekend to get out and figure out for yourself the difference in taste between champagne, prosecco, and moscato. You might surprise yourself as there are a few really complex (not over the top sweet) moscatos out there.
Click HERE for tickets for our very first City Vino New Year’s Eve Party with dinner, karaoke, and a midnight Champagne toast. Champagne because New Year’s Eve just would not be complete without it. Madam Clicquot (circa 1811) and New York’s Café Martin (circa 1903)—the Café Martin would only serve Champagne on New Year’s Eve. The Champagne houses would give a special kickback to the servers for every cork they collocated at the end of the night. But you have to come to the Voices and Vines show on December 27th and 28th to find out more about that. Click here for tickets.
Two everyday Champagnes to consider (if you can call Champagne every day):
The Georges Cartier Brut Traditional brings playfulness with 65 percent Pinot Meunier, 25 percent Pinot Noir and 10 percent chardonnay. Medium-gold in color, with herbally-iris aromas, mixed with toast, cream, and lighter notes of citrus. Continuing to the palate is a creamy delicate effervescence that is backed by dancing acidity, with flavors of strawberry, red clay, jolly rancher, lemon-lime citrus, zest, bread dough, vanilla, and cream. This is an off-dry wine with medium body and medium-plus intensity of flavors. There is some complexity that is backed by the layering and medium-plus intensity of flavors that have a medium-plus finish, and the end product is nicely balanced.
The other is Bauget Jouette Carte Blanche with 60 percent Chardonnay, 30 percent Pinot Meunier and 10 percent Pinot Noir. Its fruity nose reveals hints of fresh apples, grapefruit, plums and hazelnuts. Round and full-bodied yet retains liveliness and strength. This full taste echoes the fruity, aromatic notes of the bouquet, leading us to a long, slightly honeyed finish that develops hints of stewed fruit.
Prosecco is a choice for New Year’s. Beyond the mimosa and bellini wine cocktails, there is a range of prosecco on the market. Sure, the everyday beauty is the Illi Prosecco Extra Dry DOC Treviso from Veneto, Italy, with its straw color, and aromas of green apple, citrus, pear, wisteria, and acacia flowers. Prosecco is a tank-method production, meaning that the wine does not linger long with the dead yeast cells which is why it is such a fruity style wine. But there is a second side of prosecco that can be as complex as Champagnes, which you find that kind of example with the Bisol Prosecco, which is highly appellated as a Valdobbiadene Superiore Di Cartizze DOCG from Veneto, Italy. Here the grapes are hand-harvested and gently pressed, which gives a velvety creaminess to the efflorescence. It’s truly a charmer.
But if you are in the mood for a secret charmer, Moscato is where most of us start out when getting into wines. Here the Del Nido Moscato d’ Asti (AKA Lodali, with new name) is the example, with its targeted sweet aromatic of white flowers, apricot, orange, peach, and honey that flow to the palate. Bursting bubbles take all the sweetness and lifts it to delight the palate. An intriguing Moscato we have on the tasting bar this week is the Innocent Bystander, which is a hardly ever seen true pink Moscato from Victoria, Australia. Muscat Gordo and Black Muscat are the grapes here that bring out cotton candy, black currant, Turkish delight, mandarin peel, passion fruit, guava, sweet strawberry, and sweet cherry aromas and flavors. Hugely fun and divergent from normal Moscatos!
There are many beautiful pairings for wines from Sparkletown. Classical pairings are oysters, shellfish, fried chicken, and potato chips. Never be afraid to pair sparkling wine with steak, as the lively acidity will help cleanse your palate of the fattiness of the meat. Sparkling wine is one that goes with so many diverse flavors and textures of food that it tends to be a safe bet when pairing.
We hope you enjoyed our little journey to Sparkletown to end your year and usher in the new one. Sparkling wines are perfect for celebrations from the opening of the bottle to the tickle of the bubbles on your nose to the brightness in your mouth. Remember the celebration can be simply that you decided to open a bottle of sparkling itself!
Wishing you a sparkling end to 2024 and health and happiness in 2025. Cheers!
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