Happy B-day to Us!

Not that I celebrate it or anything, but I wanted to send a b-day shout out to my pal Jeff, the regional director for the fabulous Champagne Henriot. We met at a wine dinner at Addison at the Grand Del Mar last year and discovered that not only did we share a love of bubbly, but that we were both born on January 3 in the same year. (No, I didn't say what year.)

It turns out Jan. 3 was also an auspicious day for the champagne house now known as Veuve Clicquot. That was the day in 1772, when the ambitious young Philippe Clicquot first placed an ad in the Gazette de France announcing the launch of a little wine business under the Clicquot name. The czars of Russia loved the stuff, and they've been golden ever since.

Other cool happenings on Jan. 3 according to the site www.history.com :
1841 Herman Melville headed to the South Seas
1987 Aretha Frankling inducted into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
1990 The last daily Peanuts comic strip is published
1999 Chicago and the Midwest digs out from the Great Blizzard

And on this day in 2007, the erudite food scientist Harold McGee wrote a Curious Cook column for the New York Times on whether any good can come from mixing absinthe and champagne. It's a cocktail known as "Death in the Afternoon" that Ernest Hemingway conributed to a book of celebrity potions published in 1935.

I stuck to Prosecco during my delicious lunch at Cafe Chloe, but now that absinthe is again legal in the U.S. perhaps I'll have to sample Hemingway's tipple next January 3.