{"id":720,"date":"2015-11-30T18:04:16","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T18:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=720"},"modified":"2016-03-25T02:42:19","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T02:42:19","slug":"behind-settles-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=720","title":{"rendered":"Behind: “What Settles After the Stars”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0953\"<\/a>One fated French night in 1700 or thereabouts, so the story goes, Dom Pierre P\u00e9rignon<\/a> was stalking his Hautevillers cellar, turning his bottles, and the great monk decided then was as good a time as any to have a taste. And what he tasted went down crisp and bright and bubbly, the first modern champagne. and he cried out, his voice echoing through the chalk caverns, \u201cBrothers, come quickly! I am drinking the stars!\u201d<\/p>\n

A great story,\u00a0if total hokum. Yep, it never happened, but you kind of wish it did, and man, the legend sure sells bottles. Most importantly, a bit of license doesn\u2019t mean champagne caves<\/a>\u00a0aren\u2019t magical places. In white-noise silence meters below the region\u2019s great houses, racks of the stuff sit in the near-dark and sleeps itself into being. Whispers get channeled crystal-clear through the tunnels. There\u2019s a feeling of method and mysticism at work–and that the strange and wonderful are possible down there.<\/p>\n

That was my first inspiration for \u201cStars.\u201d Last year I was touring the tunnels below Reims<\/a> and figured, hey, if other folks can uncork that hype into a good story, so could I. But as champagne needs a second fermentation, so did my idea. Good moments and magically creepy places alone do not stories make.\u00a0Eventually I had it: if champagne was stars, and if stars can be born, then stars can die. What would be left in the aftermath? Ash, darkness, cold. And memories, for those still condemned to live on anyway. Somebody not quite coming to grips that the party was over.<\/p>\n

Enter our POV Carl Haplinger.<\/p>\n

Poor Carl thinks he\u2019s cursed. Before our tale begins he has made his wine-writing bones accidentally,\u00a0as a freelancer who\u00a0offhandedly suggested champagne\u2019s mystique is just that\u2014mystique. Hype. Hokum. Not for the savvy buyer. The French are not amused. Enterprising Carl stokes the controversy and his bankroll by going full-on acerbic, with a turn-of-phrase that makes him a must-read columnist. In time he\u2019s got the French up in arms and the ghosts of P\u00e9rignon and his Benedictines out for revenge from beyond the grave. You and I are likely to call hokum on that last part too, but as the story opens, there\u2019s no telling Carl otherwise. He\u2019s out of non-dead monk explanations why he\u2019s lost his sense of taste.<\/p>\n

Burned-out taste buds. For Carl, that\u2019s a bland existence and doom for his wine reviews and monthly column. A fine dual prison sentence to inflict upon a semi-disingenuous wine writer.\u00a0 So off I went to explore Carl stuck in the early stages of post-fame.<\/p>\n

And it stank. Sure, all early drafts do, but rewriting it simply put air freshener over the stink. It took putting it aside for months to sort through the reasons\u2014I\u2019d written Carl\u2019s premise (wine writer has lost taste) and not his story<\/em>. His descent into tragic hero. I\u2019d run afoul of another dead icon likely not above cursing the foolhardy\u2014Ernest Hemingway, who said that a writer can leave out known story elements\u2026but only if they\u2019re known. Good advice, clean and true and well-lit. My not knowing Carl well enough doomed him worse than any pissed-off Benedictine.<\/p>\n

An easy fix! all I had to do was chronicle Carl\u2019s life-and-times, completely rewrite the first 80%, spend lunches inventing his ascerbic writing style and highlights, change the POV from third to first-person, add the whole Volpeque angle, and switch the setting from Epernay to Reims. Yeah, easy.<\/p>\n

For all that, \u201cStars\u201d got a lot right from its first draft, stink notwithstanding. I worried throughout the story risked highfalutinism and general hoity-toityness. Like a wine snob, a story focused on tasting adjectives and this or that aspect of terroir could fairly be criticized as arch. Fortunately, I have ignorance on my side. Most of what I know about sparkling wine can be summarized like so: it tastes wonderful going down and leaves a distinctive behind-the-brow headache in the morning. Carl\u2019s voice and his making light of the very situation helped puncture the snootiness balloon and steer him (I hope) where a story belongs: the human angle of a guy\u2019s life turned inside-out. We\u2019ve all lost things hardwon; we\u2019ve all had chapters of our lives close behind us for keeps. Carl taps into that universal, even if hundred-buck a bottle wine doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0962\"<\/a>I\u2019m proud of \u201cStars\u201d and for how Carl\u2019s journey took hold and ended itself\u00a0in a most unexpected way. Seriously, I jolted in my chair when the story told me its truth. Finding that kind of magic down in the tunnels is what kept me working at \u201cStars\u201d until it was blended and aged and ready to serve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One fated French night in 1700 or thereabouts, so the story goes, Dom Pierre P\u00e9rignon was stalking his Hautevillers cellar, turning his bottles, and the great monk decided then was as good a time as any to have a taste. And what he tasted went down crisp and bright and bubbly, the first modern champagne.… Continue reading Behind: “What Settles After the Stars”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[92,6,7],"tags":[65,105,97,104,98,5],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-this-whole-writing-thing","category-travel","tag-behind-the-story","tag-champagne","tag-france","tag-lowestoft-chronicle","tag-travel","tag-writing","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3CG0W-bC","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2378,"url":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=2378","url_meta":{"origin":720,"position":0},"title":"Snack and Snack Again: Behind “Vinny Two Snacks”","author":"rtmcontrol","date":"April 13, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"I eat lunch early. That started as a work necessity that became a habit that became a daily rule. Eat lunch early and you're secure against or at least fed for mid-day surprises. Of course, if you eat lunch early, there might come a major afternoon fade. One such two\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Awards and Honors"","block_context":{"text":"Awards and Honors","link":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?cat=14"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/robertmangeot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/P1011897-1024x768.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":247,"url":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=247","url_meta":{"origin":720,"position":1},"title":"Behind: “Uprisings at Cap d’Antibes”","author":"rtmcontrol","date":"March 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"There\u2019s nothing like a good, old-school\u00a0revolution to get a story going. Great or small, a lightning coup or decades in the making, needed change or epic tragedy. 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And I liked it.\u00a0In\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Crime, Mystery & Suspense"","block_context":{"text":"Crime, Mystery & Suspense","link":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?cat=10"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":72,"url":"https:\/\/robertmangeot.com\/?p=72","url_meta":{"origin":720,"position":4},"title":"Behind: “The Carcassonne Dream”","author":"rtmcontrol","date":"October 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"It is winter. Christmas Eve 2011, and Writer Guy rides the train to Arles. Second class. The South of France trundles by outside, salt flats and olive\u00a0trees,\u00a0the mountainside and harbor towns of the Mediterranean coast. I sip my Coca-Cola Lite and return to my laptop. 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