IT'S the loveliest present in creation, the luxury treat that turns any grey day into a grand occasion in five seconds flat, a drink you can sip giddily all night (if you should be so lucky) and still wake up feeling like a saint. Champagne.
The headache of this elixir is not so much hangover (negligible only if you stick to the bubbly), as price. It is fiendishly expensive. You will pay as much for one mediocre bottle of champagne as for a very decent bottle of red or white wine - and good champagne will cost the same as a wine special enough for you to remember right into your dotage.
Worse still, champagne has an ostentatious streak, with Edina in Absolutely Fabulous switching from Bolly to Krug to impress the prospective in-laws, Oasis downing champagne like it was Carlsberg and grand prix drivers spraying Moet in all directions - an unbearably painful sight.
We rarely complain about drinking champagne but we are inclined - understandably - to shrink from buying it. The big question is this. Is it worth it?
As somebody who has grown deft at justifying all sorts of pleasurable extravagance, I maintain the answer is yes. Absolutely. Until recently, I'd have stuck to arguments about the miraculous lift champagne can give; about its lightness and delicious delicacy; about its value as a sort of happy memory tag for special occasions. I might even have dragged in Madame de Pompadour, who announced to the court of Louis XIV that if you wanted to have a few jars and still look sexy, champagne was - so to speak - your only man.
Now there is more to add, in defence of its exorbitant cost. This year I visited the champagne region and began to comprehend the intensity of labour involved in its production. I had not expected such manicured vineyards. I hadn't thought about the inordinate skill of the winemaker, blending up to 150 wines to make even a modest, non-vintage champagne. The cellars of Moet et Chandon, stretching the full length of the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, are a vast underground cathedral dedicated to the rite of turning by hand, every day for 47 weeks, bottles containing the glorious fizz Dom Perignon happened upon in his Benedictine abbey more than three centuries ago.
There is no such thing, in Ireland, as cheap champagne thanks, partly, to excise duty of £3.22 on every sparkling bottle the highest rate by far, I believe, in the civilised world. Our least expensive champagnes cost £14-£18. The non-vintage champagnes produced by the best-known houses are mostly bunched in the £24-£30 bracket. From there you can clamber up to the truly dizzying heights of prestige cuvees such as Krug, Dom Perignon, Roederer Cristal, Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame and the exquisite Salon - priced at anything from £60 upwards. So to the next big question. Is it really worth making that first jump, from around £15 to £25?
Again, I think the answer is yes. Champagne is a luxury and, as with most luxury products, you tend to get what you pay for. Good champagne is all about smoothness and harmony, with tiny bubbles that keep streaming and subtle flavours that linger on and on. It's a high-wire balancing act: too much sugar and it's sickly; not enough acidity and it's so flat-footed it never gets off the ground. Inexpensive champagne can be a bitter disappointment - literally, sometimes, as its sourness betrays the fact it has been made from grapes already well pressed for better stuff. It may be over-sweetened to compensate, or just taste unpleasantly chemical. Often it hasn't much identity at all and fades away to nothing in your mouth after an initial tongue-stripping burst of aggression.
My feeling, if you want to limit your spending, is that it's wiser to pay £15 (or maybe considerably less) for a really good sparkling-wine than for the worst sort off champagne. It will be well made, deliver the same sort of exhilaration, taste better and neatly circumvent that aura of meanness that somehow attaches to budget bubbly.
But if you possibly can, have a splurge on the real thing, concocting good reason as you go. It's like holidays - wouldn't you rather have one unforgettable trip, somewhere blissful and exotic, than three cheap and boring packages?
There are plenty of excellent champagnes under £30, by the way, besides those on the paltry list below. Pommery, Taittinger, Perrier-Jouet, Pol Roger, much-improved Mumm, Billecart Salmon, Delamotte ... any of these will do far more than the lights on the tree to make Christmas sparkle. Not that anybody should feel obliged to buy a full bottle, of course. A snipe fits sweetly, I promise you, into the foot of a stocking.