Katherine Cole - Sparkling Wine Anytime: The Best Bottles to Pop for Every Occasion

INTRODUCTION
Life, Bubbly, and the Pursuit of Happiness

CHAPTER 1
Instructions for Achieving Effervescence

CHAPTER 2
Frothing Plot Points in History

CHAPTER 3
Champagne

CHAPTER 4
The Rest of France

CHAPTER 5
Italy

CHAPTER 6
Iberophone Nations

CHAPTER 7
Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East

CHAPTER 8
USA

CHAPTER 9
More Anglophone Nations

Listen up, all you film stars, porn stars, rock stars, and hip-hop stars, collapsing at the Chateau Marmont, lounging on yachts, and chanting lyrics like, Doses and mimosas, Champagne and cocaine.

Enough already.

Yes, we know the story of Marilyn Monroe bathing in a tub filled with three hundred and fifty bottles worth of Champagne. And were aware that $400,000 worth of Perrier-Jout flowed at the wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. We have been alerted to the fact that Harrods department store in London sells jewel-encrusted bottles of Champagne for 115,000 each.

Enough.

Sparkling wines greatest asset may be its image, but sparkling wines biggest liability is... its image.

That image has been, until recently, one of danger and glamour, exclusivity and impossibility. Its time to give that old clich a rest.

As we prepared to send this book out to be printed, that clich was on its deathbed. The coronavirus outbreak had upended the economy, creating massive uncertainty overnight. As families lost jobs and loved ones, bottles of bubbs did not feel apropos for the moment. The mere notion of popping a pricey Champagne seemed absurd. As the author of a forthcoming tome on sparkling wine, I felt like a tone-deaf violinist, fiddling while Rome burned.

Months prior, of course, when I had been researching and writing this book, it had been an entirely different story. Bubbly wine was au courant. It was riding a wave of popularity, having enjoyed sales growth for more than a decade while demand for other styles remained more or less stagnant.

We were drinking fizz from cans at sporting events! We were guzzling it at our book clubs! There was a Prosecco bus motoring around the UK, a 1972 Citron H Van named Celeste proffering white or pink bubbly all over the US of A, and a mobile bar serving Aperol spritzes in the Hamptons. (You cant, of course, make a proper spritz without Prosecco.)

These sassy little vehicles administering liquid decadence made those of us of modest means feel fancy, much like the bubble-icious foot bath at the pedicure spa, or the creamy foam atop a $7 latte. Whether it was Prosecco from Italy, Cava from Spain, or a funky little fizz from Oregon or New York, it was festive, delicious, and within reach.

And before you declare such past pleasures to have been vapid, consider the joy that bubbles can bring. One well-known sparkling wine producer I interviewed for this book told me that he attributed his marked uptick in sales over the previous few years to the legalization of gay marriage. (This ones for you, Cole Porter, in the key of F major: How delightful, how delicious, how de-lovely!)

While everyones second cousin was gleefully guzzling bubbs at PTA meetings and poker nights, sparkling wine was simultaneously establishing a much more serious identity. The next generation of Maker Movement enthusiaststhose twenty-to-thirtysomething purists who knitted their own socks and braided their own beardshad fallen hard for the new wave of Pt-Nats (see Ancestral Method, ).

These fizzy, goofy, affordable, artisanal bubblies taste like cider and come sealed with crown caps (like beer).