Friday Night Bubbles

NV Julien Frémont Cidre Pays d'Auge Brut par Nature, $12, Louis/Dressner Selections. The recession has officially hit Brooklynguy's blog folks - it just doesn't feel right to drink a bottle of Champagne every week - I need to be a bit more conservative with the family finances. But there are sparkling wines made all over the world, many of them inexpensive, and some of them interesting and delicious. I'll share them here as I find them.

Found one for this week, and it's not even made from grapes. Normandy is France's apple country. Calvados, the potent apple brandy, is the most well known drink to emerge from the region, but the ciders (French spelling - cidre) can be delicious too. They can also be quite sweet and lacking in character, often enough so that I've given up on trying random bottles. But this year the Dressners decided to import Julien Frémont's two cidres, and that makes them anything but random.

Frémont farms cows and apples on 45 hectares of land. The drawing on the label depicts the eternal struggle between apple and cow. I don't know the apple varieties used, but I doubt we're talking about Red Delicious and MacIntosh. Dressner's site says "the trees are a mix of old local varieties of acidic, late ripening apples." Frémont makes two cidres - a non-vintage Brut and a single-orchard cidre (yes, you read that right) from particularly old trees. The single-orchard cidre is sweet - the apples undergo passerillage, the process by which the fruit dries out and the sugars concentrate.

The cidre we drank, the NV Brut, is absolutely bone-dry, with a round and generous nose of fresh apples. There is a hint of the ocean underneath, BrooklynLady says. The palate is shockingly dry, although it rounds out a bit and shows a sweeter character with a half hour open. See if you can make it last that long. The overall effect is the purest essence of fresh apple, and that's a lovely thing. The texture is super smooth, with the barest spritz of a mousse. This is only 5.5% alcohol, less than half that of most wine, so drink away - open two bottles.

We drank ours on its own, but in December Eric Asimov wrote about drinking one of his favorite ciders with dosas, the Southern Indian fermented rice and lentil flour wraps. An inspired combination! Drinking this cider we imagined eating take-out Chinese food, specifically moo-shoo pork. I can think of only a couple sparkling wines at this price point that I think are as good a drink as this cider. It's worth a try, if your shoppe carries the Dressner goods.

What about you...do you like the ciders?