Food Fables – a fizzy start to the New Year

“The nuisance of the tropics is/ the sheer necessity of fizz,” wrote the British writer Hilaire Belloc in his poem The Modern Traveller, and he wasn’t referring to soda water. Fizz for the British during the Raj was only ice-cold champagne, such a necessity to surviving the long, hot, dreary months that Belloc warned: “Beneath an equatorial sky/ You must consume it or you die.”

New Year’s night is the other time when there’s an absolute necessity for champagne, or some other kind of sparkling wine (prosecco, cava or any of the other types of bubbly which the French bloody-mindedly refuse to allow to be called champagne). You need something more uplifting than regular wine to get you through those last late hours, but stronger spirits might get you too drunk by the time the countdown begins and beer could have you desperately searching for a toilet by midnight.

Sparkling wine is perfect. The bubbles seem to go straight to your brain, but miraculously you don’t get too sozzled. And the pop of the cork echoes the crackers let off at midnight. But letting the wine spurt out like sportsmen after a big win is just stupid, and only topped by the Swedish practice of ‘sinking’ which was a reaction to a ban on spraying champagne. Instead defiant wealthy people paid bartenders to pour expensive bottles of champagne down the sink.

That’s just awful, though mitigated a bit by one fact – sparkling wine is, in general, not quite the rare, precious commodity that the wine industry likes to have us think. That heavy bottle and wired down cork might seem like they are guarding something very exclusive, but are simply a practical necessity to keep the pressurised contents inside (before the final cork is put in, a crown cap like a soft-drink bottle is what’s used).

And unlike other fine wine, which depends on the quality of special wine grapes, it’s perfectly possible to make decent sparkling wine even with regular table grapes like Thompson’s Seedless. Of course, the best sparkling wine uses better varietals, but the real cost in making it is the laborious process by which a second fermentation is induced inside the bottle, without resulting in off-tasting sediments.

Most of this still has to be done by hand, which hugely inflates the costs in places like France. But labour is cheap in India and this is why sparkling wine was what the modern Indian wine industry started with. This was in a Maharashtra village called Pimpalgaon and its maker, quite wonderfully, called it Pimpagne.

Legal hassles prevented most Pimpagne being sold, but after it came Indage, Sula and others, including Chandon, from LVMH, the big daddy of the champagne world. A lot of it is too sweet, but this makes it widely acceptable, even to those who don’t often drink, and is also easily remedied by adding bitters to make a champagne cocktail. The bitters balance the sweetness and the bubbles bring it all together, making it the perfect way to get 2015 off to a fizzy start.

vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com