Getting in a fizz

While his office bubbles over with bottles, Jonathan Ray offers five observations on the hunt for the perfect fizz

I’m knee deep in bottles of fizz at the moment, doing my best to make sense of them for a book on champagne and sparkling wine I’m writing. Oh, it’s to be published in the autumn by Quadrille, since you ask. If I ever get the damn thing finished, that is.

There must be almost 150 bottles here on and under my desk and ditto the sofa, the chairs, the coffee table and so on. I can’t even get to the telly to watch the cricket or the racing.

Not only do I have to taste all the bottles – I know, it’s a ghastly job – but I’ve got to remember which ones I like and which ones I don’t like; which are worth including and which aren’t; which are too similar and which are too bizarre; which are too cheap and which are too pricy. And so on.

The trouble is, that I keep getting sidetracked. There are some fascinating stories behind the labels that I ache to learn more about and I spend hours on Google. Also, some of the fizzes are just so darn tasty that it’s all I can do not to switch my laptop and phone off, put my feet up, ask the neighbours over and let the day slip away in a happy, effervescent haze.

But, if absolutely nothing else, living and breathing champagne and sparkling wine for the past few weeks has taught me the following five things, which I hope you will allow me to share with you now.

1. Cheap champagne just ain’t worth the money. The word “champagne” on the label is not a guarantee of quality. All it promises is that the wine has been made in Champagne, by the traditional or socalled Champagne method (in which the secondary fermentation takes place in the bottle) and that it’s made from one or all of the following varieties: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot meunier.

Cheap champagne is obliged to follow the above strictures, of course, but all too often they’re made by second-rate producers from the second or third pressing of the leastgood-quality grapes from the least-good sites in the least-good vineyards. The wines are then aged for the bare legal minimum before release and they rarely do anything to add lustre to the good name of Champagne.

2. Expensive champagne ain’t worth the money. One of the bottles lying under my desk, or possibly under the table – I can’t actually find it now I’m looking for it; I bet my wife has nicked it for her book club – is the Armand de Brignac “Ace of Spades” Blanc de Noirs. It’s a spectacular champagne that recently came top of a blind tasting of 250 similar champagnes held by FINE

Champagne Magazine and tastingbook. com. It’s also a spectacular price, yours for £695 a bottle.

Now, is it me or is that just a tad too much to spend on a bottle of fizzy wine? As I say, it’s jolly good but since it’s owned by rapper Jay-z and comes in a flash metallic bottle I can’t help but feel it’s aimed at the nightclubbers rather than the drinkers. Besides, fine though it is, can it really be six times better than the Krug Grande Cuvée? Or nine times better than the astounding 2008 Pol Roger, the best ever vintage I’ve had from that wonderful house?

3. The sky’s the limit for English fizz. One of my biggest problems with the book hasn’t been finding an English fizz good enough to include but finding one bad enough to exclude. English sparkling wine is of an astonishingly high quality at the moment. Producers have finally nailed how to make the best fizz here in Blighty and those of us who like bubbles in our wine should do our damnedest to support them. The very best are creeping up in price: Nyetimber’s 2010 Tillington Single Vineyard is £75 a bottle; Chapel Down’s 2013 Kit’s Coty Coeur de Cuvée is £100; and you can expect to pay £25 to £35 for regular non-vintage fare. But goodness me they’re so good and I’m just so pleased that folk now realise it’s no longer

infra dig to drink English.

4. We shouldn’t be afraid to broaden our horizons. One of the joys of the book has been discovering unfamiliar sparkling-wine regions and styles. I’ve found a couple of crackers from Brazil, for example, as well as from Luxembourg, Greece, Corsica and Russia. I’ve a gorgeous red sparkling Shiraz from Australia and a sparkling muscadet from the Loire. Best of all, however, have been the utterly scrumptious sweet fizzes I’ve found. The sheer joy of sipping the light, delicate, Fratelli Ponte moscato d’asti or the Cavicchioli Lambrusco Rosato Dolce (both from Italy and both less than 7.5%vol), well-chilled at 11am should not be underestimated.

5. I don’t like cava very much. Nuff said.

Besides, fine though it is, can it really be six times better than the Krug Grande Cuvée?