Champage Shopping? Think Pink

What’s the best Champagne to buy? That’s a subject that requires a lot more space than we have. But I’d like to argue for the idea of serving sparkling wine tinted a delicate pink at your celebrations.

Most functions where lots of guests will be present, especially where they will be milling around and socializing, are not the best sort for sipping high-end Champagne. Vintage Champagne from France is never inexpensive, and buying lots of it to serve to a crowd that won’t pay attention to its subtleties is a waste of money. On the other hand, cheap bulk-process sparkling wine can be sickly sweet and very dull. It’s the stuff headaches are made of.

An alternative to these extremes is to buy a clean, fresh sparkling wine that is totally dry and use it to make the French aperitif called kir royale.

The bubbly should be of good quality but not too expensive. Good quality Spanish cava wines such as Codorniu and Freixenet, selling for $6 or $8 a bottle, work well for kir royale.

After pouring the bubbly into tall champagne flutes, flavor it with a drop or two of creme de cassis from Burgundy (simple blackberry brandy will do as a substitute). Not too much, or the kir will be too sweet. The faint pink tinge that the sparkling wine takes on and the delicate berry aroma given it by the creme de cassis make kir royale every bit as festive as a prestige cuvee Champagne.

For those who don’t want to go to the trouble of making kir royale but like the notion of a fairly dry, slightly pink wine with character, try Mumm Cuvee Napa Blanc de Noirs ($12), a marvelous sparkling wine with deep flavors and a long aftertaste. It’s a perfectly balanced wine with great structure.

Another sparkling wine with equal charm is the Blanc de Noirs from Domaine Chandon ($11). Neither is bone dry, so they work just fine with appetizers. But both are dry enough to go with a wide variety of food, especially salmon.

In the much drier class, and also in a higher price range, try the 1991 Iron Horse Brut Rose ($28), a spectacular and quite dry rose styled after high-end rose Champagne. I also love 1992 Schramsberg Rose ($22), dry, delicate and loaded with fruit. Both of these superb bubblies will go with sophisticated food.

Popping the Cork: A Cautionary Note

There are people who cringe when they hear a Champagne cork pop.

They’re the liability lawyers who work for wineries, and they know the danger posed by a flying cork. Chandeliers have been broken; people have been blinded. And that’s not the only trouble associated with a celebratory beverage that can also be a cannon in the hands of the uninformed.

Producers of sparkling wine would love to put all sorts of warnings on their bottles, spelling out the do’s and don’ts of opening sparkling wine. But such packaging might scare off buyers; at best it looks tacky.

Although the following techniques are well-known to wine lovers, they bear repeating because they are not familiar to the general public. People who buy bubbly stoppered with plastic corks should pay special attention, because those things are a little less reliable than the traditional oak corks.

* All sparkling wine should be well chilled before opening. This reduces the pressure inside the bottle.

* Don’t tempt fate by shaking the bottle before opening. If a bottle gets shaken, let it sit around for a while before opening.

* When you’re about to loosen the wire around the hood of the bottle, place a hand towel over the cork. It will restrain the cork if it pops out suddenly and reduce the force of the blow if it hits anyone, as well as possibly sparing carpets and clothes from splashes.

* Leaving the towel over the cork, wrap the fingers of one hand around the neck of the bottle and put the thumb or forefinger over the cork as you loosen.

* Under no circumstances let go of the cork once the wire hood has been loosened. The wire was put there to keep the cork on. Once it’s loosened, the pressure inside the bottle may well be strong enough to shoot the cork out, no matter how tight it seemed when you first tugged on it.

* When you’ve loosened the wire, leave the towel over the cork (or, even better, replace the towel with a kitchen mitt or large, sturdy potholder) and use this to grasp the cork. Very slowly twist the cork one direction and the bottle the other.

* As the cork starts to move out of the bottle, pull it to one side and allow the pressure to escape slowly. Do not pull the cork entirely out of the bottle until you hear no more hissing.

* If a cork won’t budge, do not use a corkscrew to get it out. A corkscrew lever placed against the neck of the bottle could crack the glass, and the pressure could send shards of glass everywhere. Instead, clamp a pair of heavy pliers onto the cork and begin twisting very slowly.

* If the cork inside the neck of the bottle won’t budge and the head of the cork appears to be tearing off, you have a problem. Place the bottle pointing away from anything that might be damaged if the cork unexpectedly shoots out on its own and return it to the shop where it was purchased.