Ingredient of the Month: Champagne Vinegar

As one of two hot sauce sponsors for the recent Mid-South Chili Pepper Classic League of Fire Belt Match – Oxford, MS, Wildfire in Wonderland has created a line of Louisiana-style hot sauces while using California Champagne vinegar instead of traditional white vinegar. Wildfire in Wonderland’s Mark Aaron Harris explains the background behind this ingredient and the sourcing challenges surrounding it:

All vinegar comes from alcohol regardless of what type it is. White or distilled vinegar basically comes from distilled grain alcohol. White wine vinegar comes from white wine and apple cider vinegar comes from hard apple cider. You can make vinegar from any kind of alcohol, even beer or malt liquor which are beer vinegar and malt vinegar. The difference between Champagne vinegar and white wine vinegar is simply a another fermentation cycle which adds carbonation to wine before the acetobacter convert the alcohol to acetic acid. Of course we don’t actually ferment genuine French Champagne for hot sauce; that would be prohibitively expensive and honestly disgraceful. Originally we used Roland brand Champagne Vinegar made in France, but the French got understandably upset with Roland and so they renamed it “Special Reserve White Wine Vinegar.” Unfortunately that meant I couldn’t use “Champagne Vinegar” on my ingredients label anymore and be FDA compliant so we had a sit-down with five different Champagne vinegars and had a taste test to see which was the most similar. We ended up with a company out of California that used the term “California Champagne vinegar” which we decided was close enough. Thankfully it only took one email to convince the company to sell it to us in an high enough volume to where it was affordable per bottle and we’ve been with that same supplier since.

Mark Aaron Harris, Wildfire in Wonderland

Disclosure: Wildfire in Wonderland and Heat & Harvest are both partly owned by SeauxS LLC.