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Secrets of Champagne and Strength
Welcome to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And this is your intrepid host, Michele McAloon. If you want to find out anything more about me, go to bookclues. com and if you would be so kind to rate, review, subscribe, opine all of that good stuff. It helps the algorithms and I hope you enjoy listening to this show and pour yourself a glass of champagne. God bless All right folks. Today we have a very special treat. I like to think of it as a cocktail, almost, of a wonderful book. It is the Champagne Tales by Kate McIntosh, and this is a little bit off the usual genre you hear during crossword, but I thought this would be a great Valentine story, a great Valentine book for any of you guys listening out here, out there looking for a gift for your wife. And to start this book off, to start this interview off, I'm going to pour myself a little glass of champagne. There we go. Hopefully you can hear that in the background. It's unfortunately it's not Vuv Clicquot. It is because I couldn't find it here in Germany. It is because I couldn't find it here in Germany.
Michele McAloon:I'd like to welcome the author, kate McIntosh, who has written this wonderful, charming book, the Champagne Letters put out by Simon Schuster. Kate McIntosh, I love her biography. She's always in search of the perfect bottle of wine, a good book and a swoon-worthy period costume drama. I love it. You'll find her in Vancouver where in her free time, she enjoys spending time with friends, teaching, writing and listening to true crime podcasts. And Kate, welcome to the show. And I have to ask you do you drink champagne?
Kate McIntosh:Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and I've enjoyed listening to your podcast and I know I'm not the usual fit, but I'm glad to kind of sneak in for this conversation.
Michele McAloon:Oh well, this is a great book because there's actually you have a lot of history in your book. One of the things I really enjoy about your book are the details you have about Parisian life. You've obviously well-researched how champagne is made. You talk about food, you talk about method and you set it against the backdrop of Napoleonic history where Madame Clicquot, the Veuve Clicquot, actually made her champagne. So why don't we start from the very beginning? Why this kind of book?
Kate McIntosh:Well, I think you put your finger on one thing, which is I've always been a bit of a history nut and I grew up loving it, and I read a lot of nonfiction as well. But I find for a lot of people and myself included sometimes you also kind of want to sink into a story. People and myself included, sometimes you also kind of want to sink into a story. So for me, historical fiction has always been that lovely blend of a chance to learn a lot of things at the same time of getting a great story that sort of surrounds it. So for me, it was a fun way to share all these details, versus pinning you in a corner at a cocktail party and being like did you know the history of champagne? This lets you do it in perhaps a more socially acceptable way. South, it actually started. I had the chance.
Kate McIntosh:I lived abroad, so I lived in Belgium for a couple of years and during that time, as anyone who's lived in Europe is aware, everything is so gosh darn travelable. Anyone who's lived in Europe is aware everything is so gosh darn travelable. You know you could go from Brussels to Paris within just a few hours on the Eurotrain, so we had a chance to travel down to Epernay and to France and I just I fell in love with the area and I took a tour of the Veuve Clicquot Champagne House and in that at the time it's actually rather funny because while I was a huge reader, I wasn't a writer at that time. I wanted to be, but I wasn't yet sort of fully writing my own books.
Michele McAloon:But I wrote in my travel journal at the time this woman would make an incredible character and some 15, 17 years later I would finally write that book 17 years later, I would finally write that book, Describe to our readers who is the Veuve Clicquot and give us a name and a time period so we can kind of picture her.
Kate McIntosh:Oh, I would love to. So, first off, a lot of people may know this champagne. It's a fantastic champagne. It's got a bright yellow label that goes with it, and it's veuve cliquot. What people may not know is veuve means widow, and that's a really good place to start, because at that time in France, as well as in many other places in the world, women were not allowed to own their own business. Now, the exception was if she was a widow.
Kate McIntosh:So one of the things that was, of course, happening during Napoleonic France is there were a lot of widows being unfortunately made at that time. So you started to see more women moving into the vineyards and taking over. Just as you see in other times in history, during war, women step up into occupations that they might not otherwise have done. So World War II had Rosie the Riveter. The Napoleonic War resulted in women moving out into the vineyards and into production and so forth. So, champagne and the widow, she was married. She was married to Francois Quicot. He was a bit of a dreamer, he was a bit of how to describe Francois. He had a lot of big emotions, by all accounts, and she was probably the more practical of the two in the business pair and then when he passed away she stepped up into that role.
Kate McIntosh:Now when we see any pictures of her she's usually pictured the most famous painting. She looks like she's about in her 70s. She's a bit heavy set woman with these big giant sausage curls. But what of course a lot of people realize is that was taken. Obviously that painting was created towards the end of her life, when she was starting the champagne field. She would have been in her 30s. She was a young mother and she was sort of taking this on.
Kate McIntosh:And I think what appealed to me was a little bit of that timeless quality of people stepping up when things are difficult. I have a wonderful aunt who has since passed away and my Aunt, joan, always used to say to me difficult things aren't done by special people. Special people step up to do difficult things, and that always sort of stuck with me. You know, whenever I was going through something she would be like you know you're not the first or the last to deal with something difficult, you just have to do it step by step, just do the next right thing.
Kate McIntosh:And so I think what appealed to me with the widow is there was a woman who very easily could have stepped back. There was a lot of societal and family pressure for her to remarry, but she knew what she wanted to do and she had a very clear vision for her, for her wines. She was a huge innovator in the world of champagne. I can talk, if you like, about some of the changes that she made that significantly improved the product and she took those steps to do what was needed and I found that admirable and I think for other women and for other readers seeing someone tackle that is always an exciting read.
Michele McAloon:It is, and how you structure the story is very interesting because you use a pistolatory kind of format. So you have Madame Clicquot, the Vauve Clicquot, later in her life she's at the very end of her life actually and she is a great-grandmother and she's writing to Anna, her granddaughter, or great-granddaughter, great-granddaughter, okay, great-granddaughter, and this is set against modern times a woman named Natalie Taylor, right Recently off a very fresh divorce and actually when she opens the book she's still sort of going through the divorce and the emotions behind that. Why did you decide to do it like that? Because I think it's really interesting how you do it. You kind of mirror the two women. She draws strength from Veuve Clicquot, from Madame Clicquot.
Kate McIntosh:Well, there's really two reasons. So the first is I love in historical fiction when you see the dual timeline, as they'll call it. So where there is one storyline in the present and one story in the past and how they are in fact connected. So I knew that I wanted to write about Veuve Clicquot and I wanted to tell her story and I knew I wanted to have someone learning from that story. Now, on the other end of that, I actually went through my own divorce. So at that time we had just planned for my 50th birthday and for our 25th anniversary we had planned a trip to France when, in fact, everything came out and our marriage blew up. So, as a result, I went on our 25th anniversary trip on my own. So, unlike the character in the book who also runs off to France, I didn't have nearly quite the adventures that she did. I mostly ate my body, weight and cheese and did a little bit of sniveling and crying as I walked around on my own.
Kate McIntosh:But part of what I found through the process of travel and I am a huge proponent of travel as a way that we can learn and grow, both about other worlds and also about ourselves.
Kate McIntosh:So one of the things that happened while I was on this trip to France for myself was, I reminded myself, like I can do this, I can do things on my own, and I, of course, was drinking a lot of champagne while I was in France, and that reminded me again of the widow. And I think for a lot of people, when you're going through any type of difficulty, we can learn. So, yes, it feels difficult, but we don't have to blaze a brand new trail. There have been people who have bushwhacked through this before and we can learn so much by following in those footsteps or by what we can learn from those people. So for me, the widow was one of those people that I reminded myself. Her life had impact by what she did after she lost her husband, not before, and so for me, it was that reminder of I can do things. I just need to find my own particular path.
Michele McAloon:And you did. You went and wrote a book. I wrote a book, A very good book, A successful, very successful book, a wonderful book. You kind of do a conversation and she in these letters that she is writing to her great granddaughter. There's a lot of wisdom in these letters and now that I know that your experience I see how you drew from that experience and put these in to the letters and it's not hard to imagine. Because of the times that she was in, because of her conditions, she had to be very strong and you portray her as giving the wisdom of strength and it really works well.
Kate McIntosh:One of my favorite quotes in the book is something that wasn't directly told to me, but it's something I believe very strongly, which is strength is not a fixed state, that is, they're not strong people and weak people. Strength is a series of decisions that people make and that comes to me. You know, I have a very dear friend who unfortunately lost her son in this past year, and one of the things that she talked about is how many people came to her and said, oh, you're so strong, I don't think that I could get through that. And she said to me like I don't have a choice, like this is the situation that I am faced with.
Kate McIntosh:And when you look at someone like the widow Clicquot, she was dealing with several different things. There was the death of her husband. There was a business that was on the financial brink for a very long time. She was eventually extraordinarily successful, one of the most successful entrepreneurs probably still, but certainly in the initial days it wasn't smooth sailing. Then you kind of layer in there's the Napoleonic War that's going on at the same time and all of the challenges that were happening with winemaking.
Kate McIntosh:It's difficult to make wine when there are troops moving in and out of the fields where you grow wine, where there are tariffs and challenges that are presented with exporting or importing different products. So she was having to problem solve during all of that and it was a series of decisions and I think what's important is not all of those went well. She took a big gamble at one point and smuggled a bunch of her wine out into Amsterdam with the idea that they would get it out into the market and just with the timing with the ships, almost all of that exploded on the dock. So wine bottles at the time were under a lot of pressure, champagne is still under a lot of pressure, glassmaking certainly wasn't as refined as it is now and they had massive explosions and basically the entire shipment was destroyed. But it was almost the end of the Champagne House.
Michele McAloon:And doing some research about her too, and a little bit more about champagne. I didn't realize what she came up with. What is that called? The yeast out of it, yes, okay, the yeast out to the remouage, the shelves that you put the champagne in. I didn't realize that she was one of the first to come up with rosé champagne too, and she came up with a they call it a millésime. A single vintage, a single grape. This was a woman on the move.
Kate McIntosh:She was an amazing entrepreneur. And when I went to France for the very first time, when I lived back there and we toured the Champagne region and you try Champagne and we think of it as such a fixed product that this is, of course, the way Champagne looks, this is the way that Champagne tastes, this is is the way that champagne is made. And when you go down into the cellars they're delightful cellars, so they're carved into this limestone that is throughout the region they have this wonderful sort of sweet musky aroma. When you go down it almost makes you hungry. And you see these racks and racks of wine and they look like sort of Egyptian pyramids, so they're sort of tilted towards the center, all the bottles with the bottom sticking out, and under the traditional champagne method. You see fellows they're called riddlers who go along and they turn the champagne each bottle a slight amount each day, and by turning that just ever so slightly, it moves the yeast down into the neck of the bottle where it's eventually disgorged. And we just think of that as well. Isn't that so sweet and old-fashioned, of course?
Kate McIntosh:And now in many places that's done with machines, and any sparkling wine will have that yeast in the bottle because it's the second fermentation that makes the wine bubbly. But of course, what a lot of people don't know is if you don't get that yeast completely out, you run the risk that the wine can go what they call ropy, and that's a very nice term for what it is. It's about the consistency of sort of a loose egg white. It looks a bit like pond water. You'll see these long almost like algae-like strings that come up from the bottom of the bottle. It's completely vile, it's completely undrinkable. And this happened a lot in early champagne. Because before she came up with this process of turning the bottles upside down and doing what they call disgorgement to get it all out, the only way that you could get the yeast out was from pouring from bottle to bottle.
Michele McAloon:So they would try to just sort of ever.
Kate McIntosh:If you've ever had a bottle of wine that had a little bit of so in red wine, sometimes you'll see that sort of jammy scent and you're sort of ever so carefully trying to keep that from coming out. Imagine doing that on a large scale as part of production.
Kate McIntosh:It was a mess and it cost certainly bubbles and it cost product and it was very expensive and it often didn't work. So this was a huge step forward in terms of quality control, in terms of quality control, and she was never satisfied. I mean, this was a woman who was constantly looking at the different blend of grapes that could be done. She was looking at whether or not you could do a single year vintage. She was looking at how to constantly improve the bottles that were used, the shipping methods that were used, anything to sort of do this. And it was really under her that champagne became this hugely popular drink. And you would hear in England in the early 1900s people would be yelling out give us the widow, give us a bottle of the widow. And it was because her shame was so ubiquitous and so many people just knew it as this high quality product. Certainly, now that you know there are many and I of course, tragically had to do an in-depth study of all the different campaigns- Of course you did, Of course you poor thing.
Kate McIntosh:It was a difficult thing. It was tax deductible, no less, but I did my part so that you don't have to. Where I tried to multiple art. It was difficult and I was very lucky. There's a wonderful store here called Everything Wine, where they have a sommelier on staff who teaches various classes and did a class, actually, on different sparkling wines. Champagne is made in the Champagne region of France, but there are multiple sparkling wines, many of which are made in the same methods of Champagne. They just can't call themselves Champagne and I think a lot of them owe the debt of their gratitude to entrepreneurs and innovators such as the widow.
Michele McAloon:Absolutely. And I was recently in Epernay on a wine tour and you know, it's something that kind of thunderstruck me. I've always thought of champagne, and then wine, and the vintner that I was talking to said, no, michelle, this is wine, we're making wine, we're not. You know the method makes champagne, but we're making wine. And I thought, huh, I never, I never really thought of that. And what's interesting? Now thought, huh, I never really thought of that. And what's interesting? Now, I just did a tour and there were a lot of women owners, especially of your small house champagnes, lot of women owners. And one of your characters wants to open up a wine store, a women's owned or in the story evolves but a wine store. And I've seen a couple of those now come through Epernay and through Ron's. So I thought that was really interesting.
Kate McIntosh:Well, and certainly it's a very exciting time in general for wine and for women-owned businesses, and I think you're seeing that there's some wonderful things happening. In California I read an article and ended up trying a bunch of wines with women entrepreneurs in the sort of region in Napa and Sonoma Valley sort of doing that. In Canada, where I live, you're also seeing the growth of more and more women either taking over businesses so family-run businesses or striking out on their own, and there's just some really exciting things that are happening in wine. I think one of the things that's so enjoyable about wine is it is you know, if you're going to choose to learn about anything, why not choose to learn about something as much fun as wine? If you're going to go down a rabbit hole, this is a lovely rabbit hole to be in. That's great, and if you really do it, I mean yes, of course, and there are people who are wine snobs and are very persnickety about wine, but the truth is that wine is very accessible and people who are really passionate about wine will always tell you it's what you love, it's what you enjoy.
Kate McIntosh:My dad always jokes my dad's in his 80s and he always says his favorite vintage is Tuesday box wine and that's what he likes. Right, it works, it works. And if that's what he likes, that's what he should drink. And one of the rabbit holes that I went down for the book was the fact that it can be very easy to fool people who get ideas about wine. There's a wonderful nonfiction book called the Billionaire's Vinegar. That is all about wine fraud. So there is a whole element of people who will buy and trade in wine that is actually counterfeit. And I think that happens because people kind of get set up. You know, you have someone who's swirling a glass and saying things like I get honeysuckle, I get this, and someone else I smell grape juice. I don't understand what I'm missing.
Kate McIntosh:It smells like wine, and so they feel intimidated, and so it can be very easy for people to be convinced that something is something that it isn't, and so that for me was another very interesting and fun sort of research rabbit hole to go down, and the character in the present day learns a lot about sort of wine fraud and what can happen in those areas and how easy it is to be convinced something is something that it is not.
Michele McAloon:Absolutely, and you do a great job showing that through the story. It is juxtaposed against the widow who is. She takes risks, but she kind of, and she learns her place but she always has a sense of confidence about her. I just, even when times are bad, of just that faith in the future, of just plowing forward and wherever she's being challenged, I think persistent would be the word right.
Kate McIntosh:I think she is comfortable with the idea of failure, and I think that is, again, you know, one of the things I enjoy about your podcast is the idea of when you really look at a lot of these figures in history that we admire or that we, you know, look to, we always tend to think of their high point, so we think of this time when they excelled in something or when they triumphed over something, and we forget the series of failures that led to that triumph.
Michele McAloon:Yeah absolutely.
Kate McIntosh:We just tend to, we gloss over it because, of course, the real story, the real, the fun part of the story is, and then they triumphed over all and so it's the winning battle. It's when the country gets founded, it's when the business becomes a success, it's when the battle turns. But we forget that there were all these series of things where things did not go well, and I think what I enjoy and admired in the Widow, as well as what I've enjoyed in other historical figures that I've looked to over the times, is there are people who fail but then get back up.
Kate McIntosh:Certainly one of the classic stories that comes up every so often is when they talk about Abraham Lincoln and the amount.
Kate McIntosh:I knew you were going to say Abraham Lincoln, yeah yeah, yeah, he's impossible not to think of you know where it was like, and then that didn't go well, and then he lost that election, and then that didn't go well, and realizing, of course, that what made him Abraham Lincoln wasn't what he accomplished, that what made him Abraham Lincoln wasn't what he accomplished, it is that he kept getting up to accomplish those things. And you know, if there was something that I could impart to other people, or certainly something that I wanted to come through in the book, is that you will get knocked down, and I think sometimes we think we're special. I know, you know, for example, when my divorce happened, I was sort of gobsmacked, of like but this shouldn't have happened to me, like it's not that I didn't know, other people got it, I just didn't think it would happen to me. And coming to realize, like well, there's nothing special about me, there was nothing special about the widow, there's nothing special about anyone who has to face a difficult time.
Kate McIntosh:The challenge is will you get back up when life knocks you down? Not whether or not life will knock you down, it almost certainly will. The question is are you going to get back up? And the present day character, that is the lesson that she is taking from the widow and certainly, I believe, at the end of the book. What you see is someone who has learned to have confidence in herself, not that she will do everything right because she won't, not that she won't make mistakes because she will, but that, when she makes mistakes, that she will be competent and capable to face the outcome of those. And.
Michele McAloon:Kate, magnificent, absolutely magnificent. I have to ask you, how did you do this research? And you in your epilogue you give several kind of resources, but I mean you really there's some great research here, besides taking the wine tours what? How did you do your research?
Kate McIntosh:research. Well, you know, it's interesting because I was quite daunted for a very long time. I was trying to write various different things and I loved the idea of writing historical fiction, but I found it very intimidating. And I have read historical fiction and I also read a large amount of historical nonfiction or narrative nonfiction, and I was terrified and I decided to do basically what the widow would say, which is like just give it a start. And so I actually started.
Kate McIntosh:There's an absolutely remarkable biography called the Widow Clicquot by Tilly Armazio, which is an excellent book. That is the biography of the Widow Clicquot. So I started with that. If you see my copy, you'll see there's a million different post-it notes and various things sticking out of that book and I started with very simple things. So I just created a timeline of her life.
Kate McIntosh:I used to work as a therapist. So I worked for over 20 years as a therapist and one of the things you learn as a therapist is it's not what happens to you in your life, it's the story that you tell yourself about what happens. So I first started with what are the major events that we know happened in her life that are part of sort of her biographical record. And then I started to think what is the story that I believe she told herself about, what those events meant? I was very lucky in that I wrote a letter off to the Champagne House and indicated that I wanted to write this book, and while they would have been very appropriate to just say, well, that's lovely for you, good luck, right, appropriate to just say, well, that's lovely for you, good luck.
Kate McIntosh:Someone who reached out to me from there, a woman named Isabel, who's in charge of sort of their heritage foundation, and she was an endless source of a point person, so I would call her up and ask her questions for things that I couldn't find. And then we live in such a remarkable time. I'm old enough that I remember card catalogs and I remember chasing through the stacks of libraries to find information out. And now we live in this remarkable time where you can just literally start, you know, while still in your pajamas, sitting on the sofa, and stick something into your Google search bar and start the process and figuring out.
Kate McIntosh:I'm always amazed at what people are willing to share, and I'm sure you find this in your podcast because you have this opportunity to talk to all these fascinating people, but one of you know the rabbit holes that I went down at one point is I was writing a scene and I was like you know, she strode down the vineyard and then slipped the envelope into her pocket and then I stopped with my finger over the keyboard and I'm like would she have a pocket? Were there pockets? I don't even think that's a great detail. I have no idea. If there are pockets, is it only women in present day who are like behold, it has pockets? So I, you know, I ended up reaching out to the local university and there was a person who taught a class in clothing through the 17 and 1800s. And I reached out and this person was endlessly passionate to be like I'm so excited to tell you about the role of pockets and underwear and buttons and how things work.
Kate McIntosh:And for me, the challenge in historical fiction was deciding what details to leave in versus going down the rabbit hole.
Kate McIntosh:So one example that I can give because I couldn't not leave it in the book and I had to kind of work around it is one of the details I came across was, of course, during the Napoleonic War, they had conscription, or basically a draft where they were bringing people in who had to fight in the service and probably much like any other time. Initially there's a huge outpouring of patriotism and you see a lot of people sort of signing up, and as a war slogs on and the realities of war start to really come in, you see a lot of people being like you know, I think I'd rather not go and do that, I'd rather stay here and take care of my home and my family. And so one of the primary ways that people opted out of being conscripted is that they would knock out their front teeth, because at the time, in order to load a weapon, you had to tear the paper cartridge with your teeth and then you would pour the powder into the gun and then that would prime the gun and they would. So you would see all these people who suddenly didn't have front teeth because it became a way to get out of the service.
Kate McIntosh:Wow, I stuck that. There's a line in the book where that she's walking along and she talks about some of the people in her village that are missing teeth and who are claiming oh they're. You know, I slipped and I fell and I unfortunately lost my teeth, but it was a well-known draft dodging sort of way to get around that.
Michele McAloon:Very interesting and the people that you bring in and out of the widow's life and also Natalie Taylor's life. They're very well positioned to tell the story. Margot the mouse, and you've got some great ways about Sabrage, using the sword to open up the champagne bottle, which the French today still think it was Napoleon when the Russians came in to do that. And who is the psychic that Josephine Bonaparte goes to, and they share the psychic. But you also keep your Catholicism and I love that healthy dose of you. Don't dismiss the Catholicism in the Widow's Life and because it was a historical fact for her and at that time it would be weird if it was not.
Kate McIntosh:I love. Well, I think history is fascinated with the bigger, larger-than-life characters, but also the small, everyday characters. And I wonder if you know someone's writing historical fiction about 2025 and the year 2095, and they'll be talking about baristas and someone will be on whatever the equivalent is a podcast saying like, oh, it was so neat, they had these little baristas. Yeah, that's true. Probably it didn't exist. But you know, the widow has all these people in her life. She has Louis Ball, who is the salesperson, who was a true person that was in her life and was very involved with her as sort of a. They weren't partners in business, she was his supervisor, she ran the business, but he was certainly someone that she turned to quite often and was very involved with and very much respected his opinion, turned to quite often and was very involved with and very much respected his opinion.
Kate McIntosh:The psychic, as you mentioned, is a real character and, just like today, I think there's often this blend with what we say and then what our interests are. So we may say that we're a total skeptic, but we still toss the salt over our shoulder, and certainly it seemed to me very reasonable that the widow, who was Catholic, who, by all accounts actually got married in secret, because she got married during the French Revolution, when religion was pretty much verboten. They got married in secret, actually in the cellars beneath the city, so that they could have a Catholic ceremony. I still believe that she would be willing to pray for a good outcome, but also open to finding out whether or not a psychic had any inside information that might also be helpful.
Michele McAloon:Sure, why not? I mean, you know.
Kate McIntosh:Keep that door open, you never know, keep that door open.
Michele McAloon:Okay, I've got to ask you one little Easter egg for the potential reader Do you own a green emerald ring?
Kate McIntosh:I do not, but I do own a sapphire ring.
Michele McAloon:Okay, I just want to leave that one there. Now tell me. You said that this book has been very popular amongst book clubs. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Kate McIntosh:Well, first off, I'm thrilled. I've been in book clubs for years and there are a few things that I enjoy more than a book club, in part because I think we all default to our certain comfort level of what we enjoy reading, and so we want to read more of those types of books. And book clubs are a great way where suddenly someone else in the book club it's their turn to recommend a book and you have a chance to discuss something that you might not otherwise have picked up. And this book has, you know, knock wood, been very popular so far with book clubs, and I think that is for two reasons. One, it gives you a great theme. If you want to throw a party and have some French food and some French wines and some French champagne, why not do it while discussing a book about France and champagne?
Kate McIntosh:Sure, of course, the things that go with it, and I do think there are a lot of things that are resonating probably particularly with women, but with readers in general around starting over and finding strengths at different times, and these are both characters in some ways, that are women of a quote-unquote certain age, and I think there's sort of a resurgence for people wanting to have discussions about that. Now I have, if people are interested, if they reach out on my email, I do have a list of book club or book discussion questions that can be a jumping off point if people like that, and I also did make a list of champagne cocktail recipes, including the history. So I did put the history of. You know where the mimosa comes from, where the French 75 comes from, oh yes, which is lovely because there's some fun little. The French 75 actually comes from the French 75 Horwitzer, which was a gun during World War I because it packed quite a wallop, as does the cocktail, if you're so in love.
Michele McAloon:Yeah, it does, it does.
Kate McIntosh:I've been a victim. I've been a victim of French 75. A victim of a few of those in my path. So it has the history of some of the cocktails as well as some recipes. So hopefully people can have some fun with sort of trying those out.
Michele McAloon:Well, that's great, kate. I thank you so much for taking time, I know, out of probably a very busy schedule. I cannot recommend this book enough. It would be, gentlemen, if you're listening to this, it would be a great gift for the ladies in your life for Valentine's Day and also, I actually think men would enjoy reading it, because it does it is about history.
Kate McIntosh:Who doesn't enjoy reading about champagne? I mean, come on, you know it's hard to go rough. What are you going to do? It's an endless cycle of fun.
Michele McAloon:Absolutely, absolutely. And it's the Champagne Letters by Kate McIntosh, and it's a Simon Schuster publication, and all I have to say is a votre santé.
Kate McIntosh:Merci. Thank you so much for having me, okay.