Eat in

We opted to pair five grower champagnes—selected by Tom Bjornsen, sales manager at Roanoke Valley Wine Company—with an elegant five-course meal prepared by Executive Chef Frits Huntjens, owner of 1 North Belmont Restaurant, and his wife Andrea Huntjens, owner of Sophisticated Soirées Catering. Frits and Andrea cooked with the home chef in mind, designing dishes that showcase the wines using mainly common ingredients and methods. A French-inspired Dutchman with a penchant for bubbly, Frits was a 2008 nominee for the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic, and Andrea is a Maître Rôtisseur Traiteur in Confrérie de la Chaîne Des Rôtisseurs, the oldest gastronomical society. As you might’ve guessed, we had no problem finding three hungry/thirsty couples happy to take part in our champagne-only wine dinner.

Nowadays, when it comes to the provenance of meat, cheese, produce and herbs, localism is heralded. Yet why stop with food? Virginia wines are improving, to be sure, but you don’t have to sacrifice artisanal quality just because you’re not drinking domestic vino. The utmost expression of this idea is grower champagne—that is, “champagnes made by individual growers exclusively from fruit they grow themselves,” explains Bjornsen, whose company distributes hand-crafted wines and imports seven grower champagnes.

France currently counts 84,016 acres in the wine-growing areas of Champagne. To generalize about the region as a whole, however, pays short shrift to the many tiny villages where gems hail from one side of the road but not the other. Napa Valley is barely half the size of Champagne, but it’s parceled into ever smaller AVAs (American Viticultural Areas: St. Helena, Yountville and Carneros, to name three) that denote a more specific sense of terroir. Likewise, Champagne is not one giant wash bin of fruit but a collective of discrete domains. Of the 324 vine-growing crus in Champagne, 43 are designated ‘Premier Cru’ and only 17 are ‘Grand Cru.’ Thus, while the grapes are indeed culled from the same trio of varietals—Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay—from whence and whom they came are far more important.