“Too much of anything is bad,” wrote Mark Twain, “but too much champagne is just right.” Drinking champagne is like finding money or listening to an early Ramones record—there isn’t really a down side. I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like it. So I’m puzzled that a great many passionate wine drinkers find so much champagne so contemptible. Take a look through blogs, books and other written matter from folks who admire natural winemaking and the notion of terroir—the ones I’m most likely to be reading these days—and you’ll find pages of animated discussion about farmer-sourced bottles, especially from obscure and fashionable producers like Anselme Selosse and Cedric Bouchard. What you won’t find is hardly any mention of champagnes bottled by the grandes…

Nobody dreams about Sylvaner. Mentioning it in a group of wine people is akin to professing an interest in the finer points of cardboard fabrication. The grape bums people out. Writers of encyclopedic works have little good to write about it, when they write anything at all. “Usually turns into bland wine,” Karen MacNeil grumps in a chapter on Alsace. “Makes for dull wines,” The Oxford Companion to Wine concurs, referring ominously to a “curse of the coarse, thick mid-palate.” Sylvaner is the kind of wine people drink while wishing they were having burgundy or Riesling; they drink it because it happens to be some combination of available, cold and cheap. The title of the Hank Cochran country standard, “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad),” sums up the way many people…

“It’s the one thing that gives me some zest when I feel tired,” Brigitte Bardot once told a journalist. She was speaking about champagne. Over the years she’s uttered unhinged things about animals and Islam, to name just two subjects, but when it comes to drinking Bardot makes an astute point. Most of us open wine with dinner and occasionally with brunch. As an accessory to a certain kind of lifestyle—the kind idealized, say, in the pages of Martha Stewart Living and Bon Appétit—wine is something to drink with company behind a table laid with good china, an accompaniment to dinner-party talk and general conviviality. Everyone knows that wine can enhance a meal; “What do I pair with borscht?” I overheard a concerned-looking woman ask the other day at a Brooklyn liquor…