Charlotte Metcalf gets more than a kick from champagne

Champagne is the ideal cure for gloom, bereavement and divorce. Above all, it injects laughs into our serious age, says Charlotte Metcalf

Iam drinking champagne at Soho’s Academy Club with my friend of forty years, Johnny Ray. I’d arrived admitting to a slight hangover, at which point Johnny dismissed the bread and ordered two glasses of Pol Roger.

I’m feeling better and he’s now persuading me that that, despite all the dull health warnings to the contrary, all oldies should drink more champagne – or good sparkling wine.

‘As we grow old, nothing lifts the spirits like it,’ he says, a stripling oldie himself at fifty-seven. ‘I used to have two lovely children but now they’re grunting adolescent boys who hardly talk to me; I’m always disappointing my wife; I’ve got hair growing where it’s not meant to and none where it once was on my head; my friends are dying or divorcing.

‘But look, here we are and I feel ten times better than I did when I walked in. The sun’s shining, I’m in delightful company and, after two sips of Pol, I feel like a hirsute twenty-five-year-old again.’

We’re both happily back in our old stomping ground because, just a stone’s throw away is Albany on Piccadilly, where Johnny and I both grew up in neighbouring flats or ‘sets’.

Johnny, who wrote his PHD on the place, describes Albany – an 18thcentury apartment block concealed behind a Palladian façade – as a ‘haven for the louche’.

Our fathers were certainly louche and drank prodigious amounts. My father was a literary critic who became an ad man.

Johnny’s father, Cyril Ray, wrote books about drink and Johnny has swayed gently along in his footsteps, writing and editing drinks columns for the Daily Telegraph, GQ, Spectator, The Field and Spear’s. His latest book, Drink More Fizz!, is an exuberant account of Johnny’s love affair with champagne and sparkling wine. It is the perfect Christmas present because it combines wit, fun and jollity, with top insider tips based on decades of writing about and quaffing the world’s best – and worst – wines.

Johnny insists that the hundred wines profiled in the book are those that he enjoys best (‘You can never go wrong with Pol or Bol’). It’s a subjective matter after all, and Johnny scoffs at the idea that champagne needs to be expensive.

‘Some people collect fine wines like scalps,’ he says. ‘Why? Where’s the joy in that? We’re meant to enjoy wine, not fawn over it and tick it off a collector’s list. Anyway, you don’t always need a brow-furrowing, complex, break-thebank champagne. Imagine, as old friends, we’re chatting away on a river bank, our feet dangling in the water on a hot summer day – the occasion calls for something charming and fun. A glug of Asti Spumante out of a plastic mug wouldn’t fail to lift our spirits!’

And he’s off leafing through his book to find the limerick his late father wrote about Asti.

‘Asti’s so fresh, sweet and light in alcohol that you can drink it at 11am,’ says Johnny.

Before anyone is shocked by the idea of mid-morning drinking, Johnny quotes WC Fields – ‘Meet me down at the bar and we’ll drink breakfast together.’

‘At 11, you could have a Bloody Mary or a Martini,’ continues Johnny, ‘but bone-dry champagne is too acidic. What you need is a gorgeous demi-sec champagne or sparkling wine – one of life’s great underrated pleasures and the perfect pick-me-up.

‘Sweet champagne’s unappreciated. People drink claret with cheese but, as the man from the great cheese shop, Paxton’s, says, “The tannins in the wine fight the acids in cheese and you get an explosion of manure.”

‘At a Spectator lunch, I served Pol Roger Rich Demi-sec with Stilton. Everyone asked for more, demanding why no one had told them about demisec. They were positively purring.’

Johnny is telling me all sorts of things I don’t know, and now he’s praising English sparkling wines, notably Ambriel English Reserve Demi-sec; though he also recommends Breaky Bottom, Herbert Hall, Nyetimber and Chapel Down.

‘We’re much nearer France than anyone thinks – the chalky soil of the south-east goes under the Channel,’ he explains. ‘They say the climate in southern England is as warm as it was in Champagne twenty years ago.’

The most exciting knowledge I glean is about Franciacorta, the sparkling wine from the shores of Lake Iseo in Lombardy. It’s made using the champagne method, whereas prosecco uses the cheaper tank method.

Over a fine lunch we conclude that, as we catapult towards oldie-ness, we are abandoning the values of our youth in favour of fun. I tell him about Andrew Neil who, on learning alcohol had been banned from the offices of the Telegraph, was so incensed that he heroically insisted two bottles of champagne were on ice, day or night, at the Spectator.

‘I couldn’t agree more; fun’s my number one value,’ says Johnny. ‘And that’s where the fizz comes in. As we get older, we need little props to embolden us. Just for this brief, shining moment, I’m leading the good life.’

What more can an oldie ask for?

‘ Oldie’ readers can buy Johnny Ray’s ‘Drink More Fizz!’ for the special price of £12.99 (rrp £14.99) with free p&p. To order, please call 01256 302 699 and quote code MZ4