Foam, Moss, Or Cabin Boy
TASTING NOTES:
Gruet Demi Sec Sweet Jolie Sparkling Wine - A fresh and delicate style, our Demi-Sec opens with aromas of fresh apples, pears and peaches that continue to the palate. Flavors of honeysuckle and pineapple emerge on the well-balanced finish.
Varietal: 80% Chardonnay & 20% Pinot Noir
Gruet Brut Nature Blanc de Blancs Sparkling - bone-dry and crisp. Pale straw in color with a delicate but persistent mousse, this Blanc de Blancs boasts a pleasant minerality on the nose and bright citrus on the palate.
Varietal: 100% Chardonnay
BARRELS: Aged sur lees for a minimum of 18 months
PAIRS WITH: oysters, sushi, and cream sauce pasta dishes
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Mousse — as in the “delicate but persistent mousse” on this Blanc de Blancs.
That’s the technical term for the foam and bead in sparkling wine, and it’s doing at least its third job under the same five letters. In French, mousse also just means moss — the plant, the stuff carpeting a shaded rock — which makes sense once you picture a good sparkling wine’s foam: fine, soft, clinging to the surface instead of blasting off it. But the real curveball is that mousse, in French nautical vocabulary, also means “cabin boy” — the lowest-ranked apprentice sailor on a ship, the kid swabbing decks and untangling rigging before he’s trusted with anything that matters. Three completely unconnected meanings, one word, and French speakers apparently just vibe-check which one you mean from context.
I’d love to know which sense came first, but etymologists mostly shrug and point to a shared Latin root, mulsa or mulsus (“sweetened”), that may or may not actually connect all three. Which means there’s a real chance the foam, the moss, and the cabin boy are just squatters who happened to move into the same spelling by coincidence. English does this too, obviously (a “bank” holds your money and also a river’s edge), but there’s something extra chaotic about a word that can mean either “delicious dessert” or “unpaid teenage deckhand” depending entirely on which sentence you’re standing in.
