“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 store. Yet if you’re inclined to view it as belonging to culture rather than merely to agriculture, wine can do more. I, too, enjoy sharing it with friends over a meal, but occasionally I open a bottle alone and, sometimes, when I’m feeling vituperative and defeated. I’m not talking about obliterating one’s unhappiness by getting plastered. Like a recording, the right wine can focus a mood or contextualize it or even dispel it, the way that in a dismal moment you might listen to Al Green or Shubert’s Winterreise or that early Belle and Sebastian record with the red cover. And on the dankest, most enervating days, nothing makes matters salvageable like champagne. There isn’t a panic attack, rodent invasion or botched friendship that champagne can’t make a little more tractable. In fact, opening a bottle of it to celebrate has come to seem something of a waste—it’s in the midst of a shit storm that champagne shows its utility.

There’s one admittedly subjective caveat: among the legions of cavas, Proseccos, sekts, cremants, and other bubbling wines I’ve found mysterious and delightful bottles, yet none with the grace and medicinal glow of champagne. This is too brief a space to venture into the thickets of its connoisseurship. Wine geeks obsess over some (Selosse) and consider others contemptibly uncool (Veuve Clicquot “yellow label”). Controversies simmer about grower-bottled champagnes versus the Grandes Marques, about the esthetics and ethics of dosage and grape ripeness at harvest, about the politics of corporate winemaking, about the ultimately manipulated way this wine is made. (One of the deepest discussions can be found on Peter Liem’s superb, lamented blog.) The humble observation I’d like to bring to the fray is that nearly every champagne imported into this country is at least palatable, and many are as desirable as the less criminal forms of vice (to misquote Twain writing about pompano). Personally, I’d trade my plasma for Ruinart’s Blanc des Blancs. Nearly as delicious are non-vintage champagnes from Gosset and Bollinger. I still think regularly about the 1995 Laurent-Perrier I opened about a year ago at a dinner party. While I’ve got zero experience with Cristal (or popping it in a stretch Navigator), everything the house of Roederer puts into bottle makes me pleasantly agitated. The excellent choices are nearly limitless: Larmandier-Bernier, Brigandat, Jacquesson, Delamotte, Vouette et Sorbée, Egly-Ouriet, Henriot. I imagine champagnes I haven’t tasted to be my future friends. And, though it may sound clichéd, if I had to drink only one wine for the rest of my life it would be Krug, a category unto itself. (Of course after paying for three or four bottles at retail I’d have to move in with my parents, who’d put an end to it.)

How reactionary, you may think, to advocate sitting at home alone and guzzling champagne in these days of Condé Nast layoffs and epidemic pet abandonment; even a modest non-vintage bottle calls for an outlay of forty bucks. Yet it’s precisely these circumstances that make champagne relevant. Every time I have a glass I feel both a heightened sense of my own dignity and a simultaneous desire to dance. The bubbles build a stairway up my nose while a frigid, chalky squall expands into my head and chest, opening chambers where moments before there were only chagrin and irritation; it feels like ecstatic brain-freeze. Besides, $36.99 plus tax won’t buy much cocaine or a trip to Bali or whatever you do to feel better. If you happen to be rich or simply compulsive, keep in mind that frequent applications of champagne don’t ruin the curative effect. In The Legendary Mizners, Alva Johnston, an originator of the New Yorker profile, wrote about Edward M. (Ned) Greenway, an importer of Mumm’s Extra Dry who in the last decade of the 1800’s boasted of having drunk twenty five bottles of champagne a day, with a beer chaser, and originated the expression “No gentleman ever feels well in the morning.” If that’s too archaic—lamentably, Johnston’s book is out of print—consider a more contemporary pronouncement (Birthdays was the worst days/Now we sip champagne when we’re thirst-ay…). Finally, for those who insist on mucking up champagne with edibles, nothing goes better with sashimi or a fish taco. But don’t. If anything’s more certain than death and taxes, it’s that before long each of us will feel like setting fire to the unfinished novella or walking out on the kids. When that moment inevitably comes, leave the Ativan in the medicine cabinet and walk directly to the fridge.

Photo by Béni Rivière.

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