Champagne, Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll

So last night we hosted the absolute smallest Champagne class in the history of The Wine Country, I was so bummed about the turnout that I briefly considered canceling the thing….I guess watching the stock market tank all week long made folks a touch blue……I understand, I do but when life hands you lemons I say, “Let’s make Margaritas”, (yes I know it’s lime juice for Margaritas but no one ever says, “if life hands you limes”….but you get where I am going with this right?) if I have to watch all the doom and gloom all day you can bet your ass I am going to find a way to let my hair down and have a little fun! So we sucked it up, went ahead with the class, I felt in a way I would be letting all those other people looking for fun down if I cancelled….I owed to my fellow life-lemon-Margarita friends.


We set up for the 13 guests that had signed up and then Merritt, (who had been working at the shop all day) decided she wanted to stay and taste the bubbles with us so we set for 14, just then I sent a text to my hubby asking if he would like to come to which he responded with an all caps, “YES”! Now my hubby has no love for wine, he has a great palate, knows a great wine when he tastes one but he just is not into it at all, except for Champagne…..man I miss those days of, “Honey would you like a glass of Champagne” while I was pulling one glass from the cabinet knowing full well that he was going to say, “Um, hmmmm no I’ll pass” those were the good old, “the bottle is all mine days” sadly they are long gone, he was bitten by the Champagne bug, he’s got that itch and he’s got it bad.


Now the hard part….how much wine to chill? With still wine you can easily get that many pours from one bottle for an event like this, (not to mention we tend to pour more than 10 wines when we are doing a still wine event) but with my Champagne nights I like to pick 8-10 wines and give everyone a good sized pour, a sip of Champagne is like licking a French fry….cruel and wrong on every level. So with Amy and I we were at 17, way too tight for bubbles so I figured I would be dipping into two bottles….which was going to blow my budget all outta whack since I was only collecting money from 13 people! Not to worry I paid for my husband’s tasting which brought us closer and poured shorter on two flights….now if we had to crack into a second bottle for the other 3 flights just what do you think that means, that is correct.......leftovers!




The class went smooth and the people were having a blast, lots of laughs and no one was in a hurry to leave…..that is a really good feeling I have to tell you. As most of the group made their purchases and headed home we had a trio of folks that were so into their Champagnes that they stayed seated, swirling, sniffing and tasting the last little bits of bubbles in their glasses. They were all sitting together and were locked in conversation…..politics…..oh boy, one of my favorite topics and I will say that all three were in my camp so I was so in my happy space and not in danger of going all, “buzzy girl, you are so wrong” on anyone…..yes I have done it and it is not pretty I assure you…..try and avoid politics in mixed company after 3 glasses of wine now. So we cleaned up around them made our own purchases, (couple of bottles of bubbles) ripped open a bag of potato chips and joined our stragglers. We grabbed the leftover bubbles from the kitchen, plunked them down on the table and there the 7 of us sat, sipping away on some truly amazing Champagne.

(For the record the 1999 Pierre Peters was the show stopper last night….such an unbelievably sexy mouth full of Champagne….makes me all tingly just thinking about it!)




The banter went from politics to sex, to child rearing to drugs, (both medical and recreational) it may have been the remembrance of that “recreational usage” that inspired one of our guests to ask that we turn up the song we had playing in the background….Led Zeppelin. I sat there with the last of the 2002 Agrapart Mineral in my glass thinking, “what an amazingly diverse group of people” this was a group you would never put together in your head….unless you were casting a reality show, so different but what I loved, (other than the fact that everyone was wicked cool) is that something we all love brought us all together….pulled us out on a night that almost didn’t “go” because no one signed up, in the middle of an economic shit storm, in an increasingly ugly election year, we all still came, wanted to taste those wines, feel good if only for a couple of hours……..Champagne is a truly unifying beverage.