Champagne

Popping corks

Frederick Forsyth

Funny stuff, champagne. A bit like sex really. When it's good it's brilliant; when it's awful you wish you'd stuck to Bisodol, which you probably will.

It was all invented by a monk called Perignon, about 300 years ago. I could never work out how, without any modern technology, he got the bubbles to go in and stay in. Until I started the research for this piece of prose I had presumed that he was tinkering about with some illicit brew in the cellar when he came up with a dry white wine. In an effort to see how much sedi- ment had accrued at the bottom (I thought), he gave it a hard shake and kept on doing so until the cork came out like a bullet and caught the abbot right in the cha- subles. The result was that the abbot lost his cool, the monk lost his place and the world got fizzy wine.

Not so. Apparently old Perignon did indeed invent a singularly fine dry white wine, which was then marketed as such. But it was still. It was we Brits who acci- dentally got the bubbles in, so bad luck Froggies. It came about because the French kept the new vintage in barrels while we imported it in bottles. When, dur- ing the first winter, it quietly underwent a second fermentation, the carbon gas could seep out of the barrels but not the bottles. So when our ancestors decanted the stuff in the spring it came out frothy.

It's probably more technical than that, but never mind. When the French realised that second fermentation was the trick, they took over and have been the home- land of the good stuff ever since. That top- of-the-range bubbly all comes from a series of chalky slopes around Rheims and Eper- nay, and other fizzy, frothy or sparkling jobs are just imitations.

Within 100 years 'bubbly' or `champers' had become the accepted brew for celebra- tions, light-heartedness, any joyful letting down of hair or just trying to pull a bird.

The trouble is — and this is where the critique really starts — having champagne at receptions and cocktail parties has become such a fetish that most of what one is offered is awful. I have never understood why people who want you to look at their client's paintings or celebrate their ghastly offspring's nuptials feel obliged to offer you a flute of warm battery acid when for the same money they could have a first- class dry white wine and some ice.

For that's the trick: it's got to be well chilled, sparkling away like mad, freshly poured (same thing) so that it hits the spot at the first glug. Otherwise the joie de vivre quickly turns into besoin-de-Rennies.

As it happens I was forcing myself to this typewriter, due to the martinet who runs the Speccy these days maundering on about deadlines, when a bottle showed up on the doorstep. I swear I didn't Ask for it. Some- one told Laurent Perrier what I was doing and a charming young lady there thought I might need help.

She said in the accompanying blurb that champagne really is a standing-up drink. Now here I must take issue. The best things in life are always seated or horizon- tal. Good after-dinner conversation beats the hell out of vertical speeches. Whoever took pleasure standing up? I mean sun- bathing, of course.

Standing up is about boxing, queuing, shifting from foot to foot with a rictus smile, backed into a corner, explaining that one isn't doing a novel at the moment, wishing the MC would call one in for tuck. Ice-cold champers is for a silver tankard, a lounger, a parasol, badinage with friends, a world at peace.

So I am sampling the lady's offering as I write, in the garden with the surrounding paddocks alive with lambs. The trouble is, it's pink. Now, according to her blurb, the pink stuff is rarer and pricier because it involves even finer grapes, a different blend and more arcane processes of manu- facture than the normal stuff. Well, maybe but. . . .

My father always reckoned that pink was pretty suspicious. A pink gin was OK but once you let it get into your shirts, ties, pol- itics or sex you could be in serious trouble, definitely in line for a visit from the local Tory chairman or Peter Tatchell, both to be avoided.

That said, I have to admit Miss Camilla's Cuvee Rosé Brut is going down a treat. At least it tastes of champers. And that's another thing I can't fathom. Why do all those exquisites who taste new wines from Ecuador and Mongolia on television rabbit on about how it has the flavour of other fruits like raspberries, cherries, apples and blackcurrants? If I want to swill black- currant juice, I'll go and get a bottle of Ribena.

You may have gathered that I am not really a champagne addict to start with. Claret's my tipple. I hardly ever touch spir- its. Well, maybe a slug of freezing vodka if anyone is offering caviar, which is pretty damn rare. Or a lime daiquiri in the Caribbean. Or a decent port after dinner. Maybe even a snifter of calvados on a win- ter's night by a roaring log fire. But other- wise good, old, reliable bordeaux. Never a burp, never a tablet, never a morning head.

But for the right occasion, before sun- down, in summer, with friends, when it's well chilled, before the echo of the popping cork has died away, I suppose it has to be champagne.