The perfect match

It’s not bonkers to break out the bubbly with your Chinese takeaway says Richard Cree

The UK’s love of champagne is well known. For the last decade, the UK has been the biggest export market for France’s most prestigious sparkling wine. In 2005 this affection for the fizzy stuff led us to pop a staggering 37 million corks—that’s just over a bottle a second. Francoise Peretti, director for the Champagne Information Bureau in the UK, says this relationship goes back to French kings and aristocrats in exile. As a result, UK consumers have a deep understanding of champagne as a fine wine—an understanding that Peretti says is rare elsewhere.

This understanding partly explains why more people are drinking champagne with food, rather than just as an aperitif.

Gosset Champagne is about to launch a recipe book with recipes from the winners of its Trophée Celebris—an annual competition to select the establishment with the best champagne list.

According to Stephen Leroux, marketing director for Bollinger, there has been a deliberate move by the “industry” to promote champagne as a suitable accompaniment to food. He says: “Champagne is, of course, the perfect wine for celebration. But that doesn’t stop it being a fine wine—it’s not just bullshit and bubbles.”

It’s perhaps inevitable that a house such as Bollinger, which has a high proportion of more complex, prestige cuvée and vintage champagnes, should emphasise food matching. For example, it has just released it’s RD (recently disgorged) 1996 premium wine, and Leroux makes much of how its complexity and dryness make it a good companion to fillet of turbot or even fillet of duck.

So is the move to match champagne and food just a cynical attempt to get us to quaff more of the stuff? Not according to Peretti, who claims the UK consumer is too savvy to fall for such tactics: “The interest in matching food and champagne is consumer driven, not marketing driven,” she says. “It’s a natural progression—the UK has grown up with champagne, it has become part of British culture.”

Leroux adds that one of the advantages of champagne is that there are so many styles. “Champagne has always suited dining. Because there are so many styles, there is no limit to what you can eat with it. With the exception of very spicy food, whatever you cook, you can find a champagne to match.”

While the notion of guzzling sparkling wine through a meal sets some purists on edge, in the Champagne region, many locals drink it with food. Peretti adds that because the region isn’t well known for a particular food dish, the wine has been able to take priority. “Chefs do what they can to match the food to the wine rather than the other way round,” she says. Champagne’s signature bubbles make it ideal with food because the bubbles pick up the flavours of the food and wine and transport them around the mouth. If you are careful and pick the right champagne for the meal, it’s really worth trying.

The variety of champagne styles means it can accompany lots of foods. There are some obvious combinations, such as salmon and pink champagne, but white meats and cheese also go very well. Peretti adds that goats’ cheese goes especially well, as do the red fruits of late-summer.

But there are also some surprising matches worth trying. While hot Indian and Thai food won’t work, lightly spiced, Indian food, with delicate, mild, creamy sauces can work well. And Japanese food is also a good match, because of the subtlety and complexity of the flavours.

Perhaps the most popular Oriental match is with Chinese food. As Peretti says: “Chinese food goes brilliantly, especially with more structured, older champagnes, where the complexity of the flavours match