Gueux

Les Béguines from Jérôme Prévost is made entirely of pinot meunier grown at his estate, La Closerie, in the village of Gueux in the Montagne de Reims.

D’Israeli noticed that sometimes, politicos hijacked a “contemptuous name,” making it their own: The “first revolutionists of Holland” — known as Les Gueux or the Beggars — “accepted the name as much in defiance as with indignation, and acted up to it.”

In the preparation for this prose epic of the gueux he spent some ten years.

GUEUX, LES, or “The Beggars,” a name assumed by the confederacy of nobles and other malcontents, who in 1566 opposed Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands.

The words caught on, and the hall resounded with loud cries of “Vivent les gueux!”