This post is the final in our Against the Day-Latin American adventure series (see Pulque, Chilean Riesling, Orizaba Beer, and Pox & Comiteco for previous installments). California, I realise, does not qualify as Latin American, but we headed back home to the antipodes via San Francisco, so the Golden State is getting lumped in.

Late in AtD, Lew Basnight’s travels bring him to California too, just down in LA. He’s on the case of a possibly-murdered girl named Encarnacion. Thanks to Merle Rideout’s magical time-travelling photographic development process, he’s tracked her friend Jardine Maraca to a party someplace called “Carefree Court”:

Lew kept a close but sociable eye on Jardine Maraca, passing so smoothly among the guests, smiling, drinking California Champagne from a juice glass, here to visit her father at this reunion of outlaws… yet somehow more than ordinary déjà vu, the old two-places-at-once condition, kicking up again, he couldn’t be sure if he was remembering this now or, worse, foreseeing her in some way, so that he had to worry about the possibility that not only might Jardine Maraca be dead but also that it had not happened yet…

Against the Day, p. 1058.

Bilocated in time, floundering in the always-already and the not-yet-to-have-been, Basnight watches the junior Maraca of the pair flit across the party, her drink itself a bilocation of Champagne and California, of grown-up euro sophistication and kids-table USA juice glass.

Despite sounding to many of us like a contradiction in terms, not to mention an EU protected designation of origin violation, California Champagne is actually a thing. Vinepair has a fascinating rundown of the history that makes it so. Apparently, the Treaty of Versailles contained an article intending to protect the sparkling products of Reims, Epernay, and surrounds from foreign counterfeits. The US never ratified the treaty, meaning they weren’t bound by the Champagne naming-prohibition. A different sort of Prohibition kept the Americans out of the sparkling wine business for a few years there, but by the ’80s, they were punching out Cali Champers by the jeroboam. The French hated it of course. Finally, in 2006, the US reached an agreement decades in the making ending the use of the term Champagne in California—except by producers who were already using it, who were allowed to continue.

More recently, it seems that it’s become a bit daggy to call your All American sparkling wine Champagne. I couldn’t find anything actually bearing that label in my brief San Franciscan search. The bottled I grabbed though is still labelled “Méthode Champenoise”, itself a protected term for the process used to make Champagne with a secondary fermentation in the bottle. In the rest of the world, this gets called “méthode traditionnelle.” The French call dibs. But the Californians are sticking with Champenoise.

The bottle in question is the Decoy Brut Cuvée. It does smell a bit like real Champagne—it’s got that toasty, nutty note, with an undercurrent of peach and orange blossom. The flavour’s pretty fresh and zippy, moderately vanilla oaky, and more of that toasty, peachy stuff. Broadly Champagne-like, not the most complex thing ever, but very pleasant. Could be well enjoyed from a juice glass.

Jardine of the juice glass and the two-places-at-once is soon to be in another place altogether. By the very next page, she’s stolen a plane and soared away, vanishing over the desert into a “powerfully shaped silence,” (p. 1059). Let’s raise our transatlantic glasses to her now!