New Year's Eve is For the JV Squad

New Year’s is for the JV team. We Varsity players stay at home. We either indulge in Oyster Pan Roast or Creamy Scrambled Eggs with shaved fresh truffles, or at least we imagine ourselves doing this. Neither one of us has actually shelled out for a truffle yet, but living in the low country the pan roast is well within our grasp, because even the Deans can harvest oysters.

To inflate the oyster meal to New Year’s status the Deans pair the pan roast with a Gougeres hors d'oeuvres, a tart side salad and finish with a chocolate tart. And even if you are a bench warmer and not on any team, everyone drinks champagne on New Year’s Eve.  

The Manliest Men

For the manliest men, the ones most sure of themselves who are elegant, accomplished, debonair, when these men are feeling at their peak only their favorite quaff puts them in the right frame of mind, perfectly chilled champagne.

As most people know, but not everyone, champagne refers only to sparkling wines with grapes grown in the champagne valley. There are some delicious sparkling wines from other parts of the world, but they will never go under the moniker of champagne. And let's face it; there are just no songs with lyrics about sparkling wine.

Ask your local wine shop to pair a different champagne with every course, instead of wine. Dean Pollak’s brother, a former sommelier, sent cases of different champagnes for a multi course dinner in Savannah, Georgia.  For a one-time treat it was effervescent, not overkill.  The hands down favorite that evening was Salon, a singular champagne made by one man with one grape in one region.

Champagne Salon, the original creation by Aime Salon

Charleston’s premier cardiac specialist, Dr. Martin Morad, is a Persian doctor of international fame. Dr. Morad splits his time between his elegant homes in Maine, Washington, D.C. and Charleston, SC. His taste is beyond superb, and so is it any wonder that the first drink he serves whenever he entertains at home, which is often, is champagne? His go to favorite is Phillippe Prie Brut. 

Brilliant men can be found in any profession, and the most brilliant man that Dean Pollak ever knew was The Rev. William Ralston. He had three go to drinks - Old Weller bourbon, Chartreuse, (which he called the Green Eyed Monster), and Veuve Clicquot, the Grande Dame.

But perhaps the most famous champagne loving man of all time is Winston Churchill. Churchill only drank Pol Roget. When he died in 1965 Pol Roger placed a black border around the labels of its white-foil Champagne bound for England.

 As he wrote in 1898:

"A single glass of Champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced: the imagination is agreeably stirred; the wits become more nimble. A bottle produces the opposite effect."