The Devil's Larder

44

BEWARE THE chilling phrase ‘This calls for some champagne!’ Resist that weighty bottle if you can. Champagne will spoil the day.

Champagne is tolerable at times, equal to a glass of lemonade for sweetening dry throats, superior even to a can of beer for brisk inebriation, preferable to homemade wine or cider. But otherwise obey the warning on the label: ‘Open with care.’ The drink is rarely equal to its task or to its reputation. How could it be? Nothing is that heavenly or transcendent. We should hold champagne in contempt. It lets us down.

I HAVE COLLECTED two bottles of Moët & Chandon, Brut Impérial, from the cold pantry, to celebrate my husband’s success at work. The Director at last. Bravo! I carry them like liquid luck down to the summer house. His mother’s there, three colleagues, his two best friends, our daughter and her current partner, a neighbour and (reluctantly) his wife. With us that’s twelve. One bottle wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be enough to spoil the day.

What — apart from my husband — could be more well mannered and more sociable than two bottles of champagne? Placed at the centre of the trellis table, they strike, like him, a solid attitude. They’re dignified. But they’re light in disposition, smartly presented, aspiring. Their pedigrees are on display. Their rising gases promise both energy and levity. Expense has not been spared.

My husband likes to open bottles of champagne himself. He feels I lack respect. The bubbly is too finely and too patiently blended, too lovingly matured to handle with anything other than finesse, he says. We should not allow a pressure spill to waste any. He stands at his end of the table, tears back the gold, loosens the wire and shows us how to pull and twist the cork. The finest waiter could not better him. A flying cork might add some drama but is, in his opinion, unnecessary and vulgar. Everybody laughs and sighs at the muted popping of the corks, the barest frothing of the champagne.

We hold our glasses out and watch the tumbling liquid and the fizz. We lift our glasses. Trembling hands. We have to drink at once. The bubble reputation will not last. Our disappointments and our jealousies will soon be heavy in the glass.

‘Congratulations,’ someone says. ‘To your success.’

We all stand up to toast my husband and his good fortune. He has a smile for everyone. He would not understand how chilled we feel and vexed. He’s sparkling now. He is grand cru. He does not know that he has let us down.