A collaboration that is aimed at pondering the future Champagne

Richard Geoffrey, cellar master of Dom Pérignon Champagne, recently released its coveted new vintage, the 2005. He did so in Barcelona, hand in hand with Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, whose restaurant, elBulli, was also known as the World’s Best Restaurant for five years. Adrià’s new venture, the research-centric elBulli Foundation, will now  apply itself to imagining the future of this legendary  French Champagne. 

The two clearly enjoy a symbiotic affinity, one that French company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey, owners of the Dom Pérignon brand, hope will rub off on their already sublime Champagne. Adrià’s elBulli Foundation, his next step after closing the restaurant four years ago, will now be working alongside 
Geoffrey, applying their considerable expertise to the study of Dom Pérignon. The point? To ask ‘what if...?’ questions, the same intellectual technique that Adrià has applied to basic ingredients during his restaurant career, with magnificent success.

Through careful manipulation of their chemical properties, he and his team made a name for themselves by managing to intensify the intrinsic flavour of basic foods, and project any diners lucky enough to eat them into a hitherto unexperienced level of edible sensuality. Along the way the stern, ebullient (and probably slightly eccentric) Adrià cooked up new culinary techniques: the foams, dusts, powders, spheres and gels that have cropped up with varying success on restaurant menus worldwide.

In so doing, he deftly transferred the laurels worn by those at the pinnacle of culinary expertise from the French, and placed them on his own head. And, by expanding what we knew of culinary techniques, he transformed the culinary 
landscape by altering the shape, texture and flavours we expect our foods to have.  

During the launch, guests were offered a quick peek inside the new elBulli Foundation, described by the cook as a “laboratory” in which he can literally  feed his creativity (and expand his knowledge). There is not a stove in sight, however. Instead there are desks and computers. The unassuming all-white office space is divided by a number of flimsy wooden walls on to which are stuck computer-generated diagrams, handwritten notes, Post-its and other bits, very much like someone trying to gather their thoughts at the beginning of writing a thesis.

There are bookshelves housing cook books; photocopies of books published in the 1700s and 1800s; as well as contemporary editions, in all languages, also with bits of paper marking certain pages. Adrià, a long-time friend of Geoffrey (unsurprisingly since elBulli sold prodigious quantities of the Champagne), has evolved a specific research methodology named Sapiens. The plan for Dom 
Pérignon is that for the next three years Adrià and his team, using the Sapiens method, will devote themselves to its study.

Open bottles of Dom Pérignon, corks beside them, lie about, and gigantic posters (written in Adrià’s native Catalan) ask “What does creativity stand for in Dom Pérignon?’ and “I drink Dom Pérignon because...” More obvious are key words jotted down and big enough to read at a distance, such as “luxury’ and “identity”.  

Geoffrey later explained that the purpose of the collaboration was to ponder the Champagne’s future, which at the same time alludes to the brand’s 
collaboration with other artists, such as Jeff Koons, director/photographer David Lynch and industrial designer Marc Newson. The answers to the future of Dom Pérignon, says Geoffrey, do not lie in the world of wine. The idea is to imagine a future in which the Champagne is even better (if that’s possible), which requires constant searching for new avenues of growth, sparked by the creativity of artists such as these.  

The Champagne itself is probably the most tangible part of this intriguing project. At a later dinner, titled “This is not a Dinner”, guests from around the world gathered to experience the 2005 for the first time. Adrià himself was in the kitchen.On the menu were the ephemera that made elBulli famous. But first, the unveiling of the vintage, at a private tasting in a darkened room that could have been a set designed by Gucci. Guests were separated into individual cubicles and in each monastic division was a black chest-high plinth on which stood a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a glass.

The only light came from beneath the bottle itself, where a circle had been cut administering a light from a bulb below and illuminating the bottle only. Guests were left alone for a full 15 minutes, with nothing more than a wildly sensual 
electronic soundtrack, to sample the wine, itself wildly sensual. Later, still in the almost dark, guests were  moved to tables where they dined, no, experienced, 29  fascinating and delicious courses of “luxury snacks”. 

Strictly speaking they were described as snacks but actually they were little more than vapour: minute, exquisite, intensely flavourful, delicate mouthfuls that married sweet and savoury; came in a blaze of glory and evaporated from sight and taste within seconds. Especially when followed with a glug of Dom Pérignon – as was the point – and poof! they were gone. Guests marvelled at their intricacy; the potency of the imagination that spawned them; the unfathomable skill that went into their making; often wondered what on earth it was they were about to eat and then, when they did, were gently blown away. 

Standout were a bubble-thin glassy and perfect mould of a leaf which tasted intensely of pure mango; a sphere the shape and colour of a green queen olive, made of a thin film of olive oil gel so delicate that it popped on impact with your tongue, releasing a tiny burst of tomato-ey vinaigrette and a crisp slither of ginger, as fine as a piece of paper, on which had been parked tiny flowers and a perfumed cream.

All were designed to go with the Champagne, of course, but for me the most transcendent of unions in that regard were a breadstick around which had been wrapped a strip of salted and cured ham, for which Spain is famous; and a tiny, wobbly infinitesimally delicate marsh-mallow confection made of Parmesan cheese the size of a 50c piece, housing a Parmesan cream in the middle, like a savoury macaroon.

These, among all the snacks, were exultant with the Champagne, never overshadowing or diverting it, but enhancing it deliciously. They showed  me that you don’t have to travel to the ends of the earth  to experience Champagne nirvana. It’s right here. Invest in a hunk of good Italian Parmesan and some carefully made cured and salted ham and you’ve got it.

And the Champagne itself?

It was exquisite. Champagne like this is not just a wine you taste, it is something you feel. It’s an ephemeral product at once extremely subtle, but at the same time with a complex texture that engages and seduces. Burgundy, the area in which the grapes are grown, is defined by its limestone soils which impart a mineral, stony character to Chardonnay especially. This gives it zest and a slightly savoury layer, still tenuously present in the final product.

Flavours in the 2005 are so dense with complexity, juxtaposing rich creaminess with an almost salty smack, that each time you revisit the  glass, you find something new to excite you. It’s a fleeting sensory experience, which emulates Adria’s food exactly.  The 2005 has extraordinary finesse, infinite simally fine bubbles the envy of winemakers the world over and offers a bright freshness, alarming only because the wine is already 10 years old, a number of which were spent on the lees, imparting said richness.

This is a wine clearly intended to evolve very slowly, and go very far. If you’ve got the patience for it, lay some bottles down. The composition varies with each vintage, at times equal portions of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and at others with a higher proportion of Chardonnay. No matter the vintage, the wine that subtly effervesces in your glass can be relied upon to be succulent, vivacious and utterly precise.

It makes sense to serve it with Adria’s food, as both are a truly luxurious experience.  The skill embedded in each of Adria’s mouthfuls is a twin of the skill and profound depth of analysis that brings you each sip of champers. The two creators exist on a similar focused, wacky wavelength. 

Behind the romance of the sublime Champagne and the equally extraordinary food, both are at pains to point out that little happens by chance, and what you experience is the result of careful attention, experimentation and a relentless goal to keep trying to make it better...  My guess is that these two, in one another, relish a symbiotic affinity, both blend poetry and science in their creations and that distinctly left-of-centre take that Adria has on any ingredient – in this case grapes  and Champagne – in which he seeks through careful  manipulation to make it taste even more of itself, but also to surprise and enchant with weird and unknown presentation formats.

Who is Ferran Adrià?

Ferran Adria is a Spanish chef, living and working in the city of Barcelona. In 1984, he received a posting as chef de partie at a small restaurant on the Spanish coast named elBulli (Spanish for bull dog). By 1986 he was head chef and the culinary world as we know it suddenly became a lot brighter. His particular way of understanding cuisine and what exactly constitutes cooking have made him quite possibly the most famous, if not influential chef, of the past 15 years.

Under his command, elBulli had achieved and maintained a coveted 3 Michelin stars – the highest accolade that can be awarded a restaurant. In 1997 it dealt the French restaurant industry a blow and shot to global fame as the world’s best restaurant, a title it held five times. Suddenly everyone wanted to eat at elBulli (myself included) and in 2009 Adria was named Chef of the Decade.  

What makes his food so fantastic? It’s hard to say, because the food itself is ethereal. Adria has evolved sophisticated techniques in which he manipulates 
the molecular structure of any ingredient to make it taste more purely and intensely of itself (from whence comes the term “molecular cuisine”), while 
deliberately seeking ways in which to present these ingredients in totally unconventional formats.

The point is to surprise and to challenge what we expect. Adria lives by the mantra that “Creativity means not copying”. In this case, he left the cook books behind and threw himself into dedicated trial and error research to see not only if his ideas were possible but also to see what came up along the way.

In the process he procured a scientific understanding of the chemical composition of foods – animal, vegetable and mineral – and how they could be manipulated to delicious ends.  From him emanate the new concepts of foams, spheres, dusts and gels of modern haute cuisine, procured with techniques using calcium alginate, liquid nitrogen, extractions, juicing, dehydration, freeze-drying and gasification.

And from them we get an interplay of entirely new textures, temperatures and forms. Liquid that should be solid; flesh that should  be liquid; wet that should be dry. Sweet that should be savoury and savoury that should be sweet. Savoury andsweet bound together. But never is there a false note. All hangs together in perfect, picturesque balance.

Where can you still eat Ferran Adrià’s food?

While elBulli has closed, you can still taste food inspired by Adria. He and his brother Albert have embarked on numerous other slightly less esoteric culinary projects, in which they don’t personally do the cooking, but are integrally involved in concept and menu creation. Some are:

en.bcn50.org

Run by brother Albert, BCN50 consists of five dining concepts, the last, Enigma, to open next year. All located in Barcelona, they are Tickets, a theatrical tapas bar; Pakta, which serves food of Japanese Peruvian origin called Nikkei cuisine; Hoja Santa and Nino Viejo, both serving gourmet Mexican and Enigma, which remains, well, an enigma. All are worth a shot when next in Barcelona – book ahead and pad your wallet

Heart

A collaboration with Cirque du Soleil in Ibiza, featuring finely curated food by the Adria brothers, plus art and music. Visit cirquedusoleil.com for details on venues.

New York

Word has it that the snacks experienced at the dinner that wasn’t will also soon become available at Le Bernardin, Daniel and the restaurant at NoMad Hotel, all in New York, presumably with a glass of Dom P.