The Green House Supermarket

We got an impromptu tour around the amazing complex behind Sharjah’s Green House Supermarket recently. The old supermarket, which used to be off Gamal Abdel Nasser Street, has now been closed down and moved to the front of the Green House Warehouse in the Sharjah Industrial Area. It's not a million miles from the London Dairy Ice Cream factory, in fact.

What do you mean, you thought it came from London? Next you'll be telling me you didn't know it was made with palm oil - cheap saturated vegetable fat used as a substitute for the more expensive cow-derived cream.

The Green House Supermarket is an occasional pleasure for me, a wander around this eclectic collection preparatory to a night's mega-Thai cookup and a freezer-packing session. The Green House stocks the strangest and most amazing variety of things, from extension leads through to mothballs as well as a brilliant array of Asian foods and utensils. From heavy granite pestles and mortars through blue-patterned Thai ceramics, woks and dim-sum steamers to black sticky rice, Thai curry pastes, bean curds, fresh lotus root and frozen frogs, the Green House has got the lot.

But the fresh vegetable section is where this place really wins out – Thai hot basil, peppercorns, chilis, kaffir limes, garlic flowers, pandan leaves, Thai coriander root and crisp, succulent pak choi and banana flowers are laid out in boxes, all air-freighted from Thailand. And they’re all draw-droppingly fresh, vibrant green and crunchy. The pak choi alone is worth the trip.

The Green House is actually the front end of a high quality food distribution organisation that not only supplies the UAE’s Thai restaurants with speciality ingredients, but also supplies supermarkets and hotels with a range of French and European foodstuffs. I hadn’t realised how extensive this side of the business was until we swung by and Sarah got spotted by the lady in the supermarket – who turned out to be the mother of a child Sarah had taught and half of the the husband and wife team (he’s Greek, she’s Thai) behind the operation.

As a consequence, we got treated to an unintended (and delightful) whistle-stop tour ‘round the back’, huge freezer rooms packed with boxes of food, cool rooms stacked with French cheeses, pallets of extra virgin olive oil, yoghurts and creams, milks and sauces, specialty flours and salts in a maze-like succession of rooms, walk-ins, cold stores and freezers.

It’s an impressive operation – but the most impressive bit for me remains the amazing fresh Thai vegetables, herbs and spices. Spinneys can barely manage to keep the fresh local herbs it sells from being a wilted mess and yet Green House brings them in from Thailand and manages to keep them so fresh you could just close your eyes and be in the street markets of Asia.

So if you want to create a Thai dinner party that has everyone gasping at your brilliance, buy great fresh ingredients - and you'll not find fresher than here. People travel from as far away as Al Ain to shop at this odd, poky little emporium of all things Thai.

You can find the Green House Supermarket by driving up Sharjah’s ‘main drag’, Al Wahda Street and turning right directly after the Crystal Palace Showroom – it’s down the road 100 yards or so, just in front of the Alena Warehouse. Alternatively, follow this handy Google Map link or find it here on Wikimapia! If, after all that, you're still lost, call 'em on 06 5332218.

The author asserts he has received no emolument from the proprietors of the establishment eulogised in this piece. Honest.

To Profit or not to Profit; that is the question.

This is the second in an occasional posts about wine from our very own resident expert Alasdair.



I’m sure many of you have heard about some people making lots of profit from buying and selling fine wine. The music and theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of many examples. Here was a very rich and successful amateur wine collector, who one day decided that he should sell part of, and in the end most of, his vast wine collection. I remember reading all about it in the Evening Standard, how he had spent many years building up his collection, to the point that it became more than he could ever possibly consume, even with regal-like and daily and frivolous entertaining.

Of course Lord Lloyd Webber had not amassed this cellar himself. Oh no, he was far too busy making another 20 million quid writing Cats. He had a full-time wine buyer, who for 60-odd thousand quid a year, (a goodly wage at that time), made offers on Lloyd Webber’s behalf for highly sought after parcels of super-rare wine, attended all the important Sotheby and Christie wine auctions, and buttered-up sales directors at all the various wine companies who imported the best kit. What a job! Until of course LW decided to stop buying and starting selling.

When I started out in the wine business it seemed as though most people bought wine to drink. Of course, I hear you say – that’s what you’re supposed to do. The only people I knew who at that time during the late 80’s purchased fine wine with the intention of keeping it for 3-5 years and selling it for a much higher price were the wine traders themselves – it was like a badly kept secret with more and more people finding out and doing the same.

I clearly recall the founder and buying director of Bibendum Wine, Simon Farr, diligently buying up all the stock of Le Pin 1982 that he could get his hands on. There was a pallet of the stuff, 50-odd cases, stored in the Bibendum duty-paid warehouse above their Primrose Hill offices.



Simon figured that here was an extraordinary wine, made in tiny quantities, no more than 500 cases at that time, that was positively cheap given the reports circulating the trade that it was the next Chateaux Petrus. Whenever a case came up for sale Simon would contact the owner and buy it. After storing the stock for some years he sold the lot for a handsome profit. But the best way to buy the world’s best wines is to buy them as soon as they become available, and in the case of Bordeaux wines, that means buying them ‘en primeur’.

This basically involves buying the wine before it has actually been bottled and packed into cartons. The vintage 2008 en primeur campaign is currently underway now, with buyers and merchants frantically communicating the ‘opening’ prices for the Grand Cru Classe Bordeaux wines. The best Bordeaux wines, the Premier Grand Cru Classe, inevitably rise in price immediately as buyers all over the world scramble to secure some stock of these half dozen or so wines. To give you an idea back in April 1985 a case of 1985 Le Pin was offered for sale during the early stages of the en primeur campaign for only 500 quid – 10 years later it was changing hands for 12K quid.

Nowadays, with wine investing becoming more widespread and seen as a relatively safe investment vehicle it has become necessary to hold the wines for at least 5 years to hopefully realise a healthy profit. Even better though, to keep it for up to 10 years if you can – this will inevitably result in your stock becoming rarer, and therefore valuable, as consumers around the world drink the limited stock available.

So there is money to be made through wine investment, especially with red Bordeaux, and there are many private collectors all around the world holding ‘investment’ stock. I can assure you from personal experience that this is the case. But in order to maximise your chances for robust profits and as a way of lowering your risk, here are some useful tips:


Always try to buy ‘en primeur’, or as soon as the wine is released by the Chateau or producer. Opening or ‘release’ prices are always the lowest.

Always buy the best wine you can afford, ideally Premier Cru.

Always have it stored by a reputable and established wine-storage specialist.

If you feel the need to take some advice from a wine trader, then do so.


And of course, let’s not forget two more excellent reasons to ‘invest’ in some fine wine – it’s free of UK capital gains and inheritance taxation, and, in the happy knowledge that you may have become so rich while your wine has been aging in the cellar and consequently you do not feel like you need to sell and release the profit, you can drink it! What can be better than that?


posted by Alasdair.

Ginarek or Geranak

It’s typical of Arabic accents that this fruit has two names depending on who you speak to, and at least three spellings. We shall stick to genarek or jinarek. Don’t worry too much about the Latin spellings: this is, after all, phonetic transliteration of a non-Romance language!

Ginarak (pronounced jenarek) is much loved in the Arab world. It looks like a wee green apple, almost like a crab apple – and has a slightly sour flavour, although by no means as bitter or astringent as a crab apple. It has a light, delicate taste that somehow reminds me a little of gooseberries and yet it has a most satisfyingly crunchy quality. All in all, it’s one of the Middle East’s best kept secrets.

It’s in season right now and you’ll find it in little trays in all the supermarkets – it’s traditionally eaten raw with, at the most, salt. Ginarak’s got a stone in the middle that’s pretty much stuck to the fruit, so it’s almost impossible to pit: you have to cut around the stone to remove the flesh. Although most people snack on jinarek raw, it stews well (you have to do it gently to avoid burning the fruit and then press it through a sieve: the resulting pulp can be used as a fruit puree - you'll need quite a bit of sugar but I've tried stewing it in sweet wine which is just diviiine and very Levantine Roman) and there are pickle recipes out there, buried deep in Levantine Mums' treasure chests. When I find one, I’ll share.

In the meantime, here’s a recipe for ginarek shots, an application for the refreshing, crunchy quality of the fruit that hit me just before a dinner party...

Ginarek Shots

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Hail Puliniacus! Getting emotional with one of Burgundy’s great wines.

This post submitted by Alasdair.





Think of your absolute favorite food, and feel the sensation of desire and anticipation. It’s a thought process that leaves you wishing you could eat those dishes more often and your thoughts might tale off wondering when the next time might be.

The same can be said when your thoughts turn to your favorite wines. These are the wine names that bring back memories of perfect food and beverage occasions, when the company was the best, and the food was delicious and the wine was ideally matched and singing from the glass. I have many such memories and at the risk of over-generalizing a few wine names keep popping-up more regularly than others. In the world of dry white wine, one of those is the much sought after Puligny Montrachet. What is it about Puligny? What makes drinking it so memorable? Most people agree that some of the most highly respected white wine-makers in France, indeed in the world, hail from this beautiful little village. They are famous for making superlative wines, and even in difficult vintages when the weather is not kind these few producers invariably craft stunning wines – they have the best vineyard sites, the oldest vines, the most dynamic soil and then they have generations of tried and tested vineyard management systems, normally certified as organic, and also often certified as bio-dynamic. They have brilliant winemakers, who have all the resources they need, including the finest oak barrels and centuries old underground storage cellars.



One of the very first full cases of white wine I purchased was a case of 6 magnums of Domaine Leflaive Puligny Montrachet 1er Cru Le Clavoillon 1990. I still remember it all vividly. I bought the case in 1992 from a cash-strapped friend, who, a year or two later, was to take a job with Unilever Arabia, as a junior Wine Manager with their Dubai-based importer and distributor African and Eastern. (He’s still here, but now with MMI). I felt very grown up to be buying such a grand wine and although he let it go on the cheap, it was a lot of money to me – even as a free-spending young bachelor. The reputation of Domaine Leflaive had me suckered and, convinced I had bought a great wine, I stuck it in a friend’s underground cellar and promised myself to leave it there for at least 5 more years.

Domaine Leflaive’s history goes back to 1717 when Claude Leflaive arrived in the region, previously established in the Gallo-Roman era by a certain Puliniacus. Since then 10 generations of the Leflaive family have nurtured vineyards in this prestigious appellation. Today the Domaine is managed by Anne-Claude Leflaive and the wines are still made in very small quantities and sell for hundreds of pounds per case. Here is a wine producer whose wine, every single bottle, is sold before it is packed into the distinctive Domaine Leflaive cartons. There is no official UAE distributor, although both MMI and A&E have managed to access a few cases of various 1er Cru wines and even a few bottles of the Grand Cru wines. There is no exclusive UK importer and agent. Instead Anne-Cluade allocates stock to a handful of highly-respected fine wine importers and distributors including Richards Walford, Justerini & Brooks and Corney and Barrow.

These allocations could be as few as 80 cases, made up of all the various different wines, and generally it’s the long-standing private customers who have a good record for paying their bills on time and for buying lots of other more ordinary wines who get offered the wines first. The only other way to buy Domaine Leflaive wines is to go to a reputable auction house and hope to bid for it. One tip I can give you is to look out for the Domaine Leflaive Bourgogne Blanc. This wine can be as good as most other local producer’s Puligny wines. I have some Bourgogne Blanc from the excellent 2001 vintage which I hope to drink over in the UK this summer. Back in 2002 it cost me GBP70 for 12 bottles, and it’s worth every penny. This wine may be a fraction of the price of the more illustrious Puligny appellation, but it’s made from superb 28 year old vines, following the same Biodynamic viticulture practices and given the same tender loving care in the cellar.

So what of my precious magnums? Not surprisingly, given the super-high quality of corks used at Domaine Leflaive, every one of them was utterly delicious. They were consumed over a period of a year or so, the first was opened at Christmas time 1997, and the last one late Autumn time 1998, shared with groups of family and close winy friends. This is when it all becomes clear. Suddenly we can understand why people try to buy Leflaive wines whenever they see them for sale, why people tuck them away in storage space for years, and why they finally open the bottles on very special occasions. The wines from Leflaive have the capacity to evolve into truly great wines, elegant and complex with gorgeous notes of honeysuckle and almonds, and delicate white flowers. They have the capacity to make things emotional, an ingredient which makes for such special memories. The wines make us savour every mouthful, banishing all other dry white wines to relative obscurity. All this and organic too. If money were no issue I would have a cellar full of Domaine Leflaive wines, with a special place for the 4 hectare vineyard 1er Cru Clavoillon wine, and I would drink some bottles of 10 year-old 1er Cru and 15 year-old Grand Cru Leflaive wines with anyone who says they don’t know what all the fuss is about.



If you are ever lucky enough to visit the lovely village of Puligny Montrachet, (and when in Burgundy you must), one place to eat at is the hotel Le Montrachet, a handsome stone manor house sitting proudly in the village square, Place des Marronniers. Here you will find elegant surroundings and an interior recently refurbished using fine local materials. The wine list is outstanding and is bulging, not surprisingly, with all the great wines and vintages of all the best Puligny and Chassagne producers, including a stunning range of Domaine Leflaive wines. Check out www.le-montrachet.com for more details.

I last visited a few weeks ago on a chilly February morning for lunch with Sebastien Roux whose family has been making superb wine in the village of Saint-Aubin for generations. We had a long and delicious lunch, served by staff that made the whole experience even better. We drank lots of wine, including an outstanding Roux-crafted Corton Charlemagne 2001. Once again I found myself thinking of those first few magnums of 1990 Leflaive Puligny, and how they had cast their spell over me, showing for the first time how extraordinary these wines can be.


This post submitted by Alasdair.

And Then There Were Four........

We are delighted to announce that at The Fat Expat we have managed to recruit a Master Wino (err, should that be Winey?) who has very kindly agreed to write some pieces for TFE all about that most wondrous and absorbing drink, wine.

Alaisdair’s short bio is on the right and his first piece will be on these very pages very shortly.

Food for the Fireside

The HMHB family do quite a bit of this ‘ere camping malarkey and I reckon I have got the food side of the evening honed to a fine art.

The key is simplicity, long gone are the days of trying to assemble stuff out in the desert, everything has to be prepared at home and all that is required is to fire up the Barbie, open a blizzard cold can of beer and throw a couple of steaks on the fire.

For the children I boil up a pile of penne pasta and once cooked I stir through a couple of heaped teaspoons of pesto sauce. Give it a good mix, throw some grated parmesan on and stick in a sealable freezer bag. In the desert I grill some sausages and, hey presto, children’s food done. Pasta, sausages and ketchup, perfect!



For the grown-ups I prepare a yummy potato salad and stick it in a freezer bag. In another freezer bag I put some roughly chopped romaine lettuce, roasted pine nuts, shavings of parmesan, chopped fresh parsley and, if I can be arsed, some garlicky croutons. In a small Tupperware jar I mix 3 tbsp of my classic vinaigrette with 1 tbsp natural yoghurt as the dressing. Before eating this dressing gets poured into the freezer bag with the salad and that’s it.

I take with me a boerewors and a rib-eye steak per adult. I usually marinade the steaks in Mama Sita’s BBQ marinade which is one of the best I have ever tried (available in Spinneys and Choitrams). I start off by grilling the boerewors, cutting it into bite sized pieces and then passing it around with toothpicks stuck in them for nibbles.

Next up grill the steaks and once done serve them with the potato salad and the green salad.

Dessert in the desert is usually Lovely Wife’s amazing chocolate brownies which always go down a treat.

What a strange thing to put in your mouth.

My brother sent me a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph which is all about bollocks, and specifically about eating them.

How can you not love an article that provides its readers with a recipe for “Goulash with Stallion Testicles”?

If you have the balls you can read all about it here:

What a load of bollocks


Anyway, it got me thinking about all the weird and wonderful things that I have eaten and I thought I would excite and delight you all with a sample.

I am from the school of thought that I’ll pretty much try anything once, however seemingly grim, and have usually ended up being pleasantly surprised that things don’t tend to be quite as disgusting as you first thought.

There are, of course, a few exceptions.





Snake – The Chinese believe that certain foods are warming and others cooling, so at certain times of year, depending on the weather, seasonally-in-tune food will appear. Snake is a ‘warming’ food apparently and is served mainly as a soup dish. However, I have also had it stir-fired so presumably it comes in other guises. The meat itself is quite bland, noting too exciting really, I had it quite a few times and don’t mind it at all. I have witnessed only once the gall bladder extraction and the skinning of the poor unfortunate creature and actually once is really enough thankyouverymuch.



Locusts / Grasshoppers – These are popular in the Golden Triangle area of Asia and I had them in Burma. They are deep fried and I think have sugar or honey put on them because they are pretty sweet. They are sold as a little street stall snack out of paper bags. They look grim, are crunchy and sweet, pretty inoffensive overall but I wouldn’t rush back to buy a bag.



Frogs – It seems that both the Chinese and the French like these little chaps. And interesting enough both are cooked in a pretty similar fashion with heaps of garlic. When frog season was upon us it was always interesting walking through the ‘wet markets’ in Hong Kong and seeing nets full of frogs squirming and jumping. I quite like these but probably because I like pretty much anything covered in garlic.

Spinal Column – There is a saying that the Chinese will eat anything with four legs apart from a table, anything that flies apart from a plane and anything that goes in the water apart from a boat. And, you know something, there is a whole lot of truth in that saying. I had a braised dish in Asia the main ingredient of which was the spinal cord of a cow. As is usually the case, the sauce was yummy but the spinal cord (which looked like squid) was skiddy and completely tasteless as far as I could tell.




Chickens Feet – These are hugely popular as a dim sum snack. The main problem with these by my reckoning is you absolutely cannot disguise what they are; they arrive to great fanfare looking just like chickens feet, right down to the little nail at the end of each ‘toe’. Now I have seen what chickens tend to walk around in and it is not pleasant. I could never understand just why they are so ridiculously popular. There is no meat on them, eating them involves spitting out a big pile of metatarsals, or whatever the avian equivalent is, and a lot of sucking on tiny little bones. They are not unpleasant to eat just very, very odd.

Ducks Web – pretty much as per chickens feet above except that chickens feet come in a sort of BBQ type sauce whereas ducks webs come with a soy glaze. Anyway, still can’t disguise what it is and very difficult to see the attraction of them.



Ducks tongue – now I used to quite like these but really only because of the sauce they were cooked in. They are a bit rubbery, have a little bit of tendon or ligament in the middle and definitely go into the pile marked ‘don’t really see the point’.

Fish Maw – I never really got to the bottom of what this dim sum dish was all about but it was always just described as ‘fish maw’. It is pale yellow, honeycombed in appearance and overall pretty inoffensive really, I really should ‘google’ it and find out what it is.

Pigs Blood – basically congealed blood, steamed, and cut into little cubes. Usually added to dishes like congee (a sort of rice gruel) but occasionally served just as is. No weirder than eating black pudding though I much prefer the spiciness of pudding.



1000 year old eggs – Disgusting, foul and fetid. Avoid at all costs. Should carry a serious health warning. These little bastards are either duck or goose eggs which have been buried in a mix of soot / charcoal, lime, straw or hay, some wood ash and tea. They are kept that way for about 100 days and arrive at your table sliced into 8 pieces. Eight pieces of pure evilness I might add. The ‘white’ has turned black, the yolk has turned a sort of dark olive green colour, and surprise, surprise, surprise, it tastes just like you think it will. Like an egg that has turned totally ferkin rancid.

Horse – quite widely available in France, I had it once without being aware of what it was. It was pretty good I seem to recall.




Drunken Prawns – what a way to go! This has to be the easiest dish in the world to prepare. Put a handful of small freshwater shrimps into a glass flameproof bowl. Add a good measure of maotai, a strong spirit made from fermented sorghum, leave for 30 secs or so until the shrimp look completed pissed. Set fire to alcohol. Watch as shrimp leap around like, well like their tails are on fire, and turn a lovely pale pink colour. Extinguish flames, eat shrimp. Yum, yum yum.

Civet cat – there is a market in Shenzen near Macau which has stalls upon stalls of frightened looking exotic animals in cages all destined for the pot. It is almost enough to turn you vegetarian. Actually that it is total lie it would take a lot more than that! You name the animal and I reckon they have it somewhere in that market. Anyway that evening civet cat was on the menu and pretty good it was too. The eating of civet cat was what was believed to have started the SARS outbreak in 2003, luckily I had left by then!

Some unknown dish in Bali – we were staying with some friends in Ubud in the middle of the island and they had very kindly arranged for us to enjoy a typical Balinese-style wedding banquet. It took days to prepare, and even now I am embarrassed about how little of it we actually managed to finish off. There were just piles and piles of food. Most of it was the pretty recognisable Indonesian staples but there was one dish which we just couldn’t figure out. The Balinese host kept describing it as “fox” but our description of a fox didn’t seem to meet with his. Thinking about it some years later I actually think this might have been civet cat because in Indonesia coffee beans that have been ‘passed through’ a civet cat are known as fox-dung coffee. Anyway, it was delicious, the meat had been minced and was served in a way quite similar to a Thai chicken salad (larp gai) with lemongrass, lime and chilli.



Jellyfish Salad – the idea of eating this was pretty disgusting that it took me a while to give them a go. Guess what? I really liked it and ended up eating it quite often. Basically a jellyfish is chopped up into quite long thin strips, covered in a sesame oil based sauce and served cold. The jellyfish is soft yet sort of crunchy at the same time and is really pretty damn tasty.



Rice Sparrows – now I just cannot tell you how good these are, I am dribbling just thinking about them. They have a very, very short season, usually the first two weeks in October when they are migrating south and pass through the rice fields of the Pearl River delta. They feed on the young green sprouts and then when they get up from the table to leave get all snared up in a very large net that some clever farmer has left hanging around. These little gems are pretty small and some poor bugger has to pluck and gut them, Christ. Whoever it is would make a brilliant micro-surgeon. Anyhow, these birds are deep fried and eaten whole in one gulp; head, beak, bones the whole lot. Crunch, crunch, yum, yum. They are just absolutely divine, they sort of taste like a very rich liver pate. Whenever the season was upon us I would drag my wife and/or friends out for dinner as many times in the two weeks that I was allowed and would devour a plate of twelve of these chaps all to myself. What a glutton.

Water buffalo – had this in Thailand, tastes like very strong, slightly rancid beef. I thought it was okay (especially when covered with prik nam pla) and didn’t mind it but my Lovely Wife absolutely couldn’t stand it.



Sea cucumber – I’m sorry about this but this really is FUCKING DISGUSTING. It is a sea slug, arrives at the table looking like a sea slug and manages to tastes rubbery and gritty at the same time. Filthy, filthy muck, and yet at almost every formal banquet I attended, especially in Beijing, this hideous monstrosity would turn up. This dish has no redeeming qualities at all and I used to absolutely dread its arrival.

Shark’s Fin – Is this weird, I don’t really know? I have had it so many times that it became rather routine I am afraid to say. I would never rush out an order a bowl but always rather enjoyed it whenever we had it. The sharks fin comes in very fine strips, tastes a little gelatinous but is quite pleasant. I never quite understood why this was so popular but a bowl of this was an absolute must at any formal evening out.

A Lighter Ramadan

Ramadan tends to be a time for rich and bountiful Iftar feasts. I admit that as a child, I grew up in a similar tradition, with the table groaning under a large number of dishes either fried or super creamy. Due to certain health and dietary reasons, the last few Ramadans have been of the lighter variety, helping to detox the body and still be wide awake for working or going to evening classes.

That being said, one main dish that is a staple in the family Iftar, regardless of whether we serve everything fried up or not, is chickpeas (or channa as most desis know it). My granny has come up with countless ways of serving them, including having them raw.

One key ingredient in all the channa dishes is chaat masala. This mix is available in most supermarkets in the UAE and quite spicy and tangy. A word of caution: be super careful with the salt as most chaat masala mixes contain liberal doses of salt. The best thing is to add salt just before serving if you feel the sodium content is too low. Oh, and my mom and granny are coriander addicts so don't even think of having these recipes without them.

So, as a guest contributor, I'm sharing three ways of serving the humble chickpea. These dishes are quite easy on the stomach, yet filling:

Chaat


Kachcha Channa


Spicy Chickpea Salad

Fat Expat Guest Contributor Mars is a Dubai-based blogger and foodie.

Ramadan Kareem!

There’s no time in the Muslim calendar where food matters as much as Ramadan, although you’d be forgiven for thinking about it as a food-free occasion. If you’d ever actually tried fasting, you’d start to appreciate quite how much food can matter! The 30-day fast is arguably a hardcore version of the Christian Lenten fast – an annual occasion where devotion to God takes place of all else and where abstinence is a constant reminder that we owe our existence to a greater purpose.

The fast of Ramadan begins at sunrise: formally, at the moment when it is possible to differentiate a black and white thread in the dawn light. Because the Muslim, or Hijri, Calendar is lunar, Ramadan moves ahead compared to the Gregorian calendar each year. That means an advancement of approximately 10 days each year. So we’ll be looking at Ramadan ending at approximately the 1st October and then being followed by Eid Al Fitr at around the 1st - 5th October. The next Eid is Edi Al Adha – some 70 days on from Eid Al Fitr, Eid Al Adha would fall this year at around the 10th December. In the UAE, where National Day falls on the 2nd December, the month is already starting to look somewhat disrupted!

Ramadan eating patterns are pretty different. The fast is broken at dusk, with the maghrib prayer followed by ‘Iftar’. The fast is actually broken by taking a symbolic date and a drink of pure water before going to the mosque and praying. Following this prayer, the family returns from the mosque and iftar, the first meal ending the fast, is taken – literally, break-fast: the origin of the English phrase being, of course, religious.

This perhaps explains the controversy over advertisements that portray people waiting for the prayer before going mad and attacking a piece of chicken: Iftar is supposed to be perhaps a little more.... errr.. spiritual than just guzzling grub on the bell.

The traditional food of Ramadan is heavyweight stuff, though. Iftar, the breaking of the fast, sees a traditional soup starter followed by heavier foods to hit the empty bellies of people that have been waiting 8 hours and more to eat. Traditional fast-breakers include foods such as ‘harees’, a porridge of cracked wheat, stock and spiced shredded chicken. In the Gulf, particularly the Emirates, traditional evening dishes include Matchbous, a heavy stew of lamb, tomatoes and rice flavoured with spices and dried limes (‘loomi’ if you don’t mind). Other versions of this most fundamental Bedouin food include ‘Kebseh’, the Egyptian ‘Kucheri’ (a cousin of the Anglo-Indian dish ‘Kedgree’, incidentally) and the Jordanian ‘Mensaf’. These all translate into the English ‘Mutton grab’.

Following Iftar, Suhour is a social occasion revolving around rich food dishes; meats; heavy, fatty dairy and rice-heavy dishes and then meat, dairy and carbohydrate melanges. Kebbeh in yoghurt, meat-filled spicy dumplings in yoghurt topped with fried bread, stuffed courgettes, stews and biryanis would be the order of the day. These are then followed by rich desserts such as crème caramel – a perennial favourite in the Gulf and a dessert which suits a palate that favours heavy, sweet, rich and creamy puddings.

Although the suhour meal served in the hotels is heavy, many families (particularly from the Levant) would take a social lighter meal with friends around midnight.

But we’re looking, basically, at ‘peasant food’ – big stomach fillers, food to see you through the hard day ahead and fast sustenance with a long, hard day ahead in mind.

Just to start you off, here are a couple of Ramadan menu suggestions!

A Ramadan Menu

Butternut Squash Soup
An Armenian Carrot Soup

Lamb Potato Cakes
Stuffed Aubergines

Matchbous
Chicken Tagine

Créme Caramel

Of course, you can always look through the archives using the tabs to the right of The Fat Expat for more ideas and menu combinations - enjoy!

CHAMPAGNE CHARLIE

Here’s a guide to champagne which we hope most will find useful at some level. It’s the result of a week’s madly obsessive holiday in Champagne, together with a lifetime fondness for the fizzy glass of which Marie Antoinette apparently said, “It is the only drink that makes a lady more attractive once she has taken it”.

It’s been put together in a series of five posts, including this one:

A Champagne Moment

The stuff you really want to know without all the stuff that boring people want to tell you. At least, that’s how it was meant to come across...

Tasting, trying and touring

A review of the tours offered by some of the region’s top champagne houses – useful if you ever decide to go there yourself, but also a glimpse at the operations behind the fizz.

Undiscovered Treasures - the little guys

Some of the champagnes you’ve never heard of, but that are really worth trying!

The Fat Expat Five

The top champagne tips from the widest, most unscientific and maddest taste-test ever! Our team of steely-eyed experts takes a whole load of champagne and drinks it so that you don’t have to! (No, no. Don’t thank us!)

Enjoy!!!

BTW - If you do, for any mad reason, want to get any more champagne fixes, then I heartily commend this most excellent blog - Peter's pretty much on the money as far as I'm concerned, even if he does tend to go further down the 'Pastel shades of morel and hedgehog nostril on the palate' road than I'm perhaps personally comfortable with!! >;0)

BBTW: And if you should find yourself near Epernay and want to get a great grounding in the smaller local producers of the region, visit Comme Champagne at 8, Rue Gambetta in Epernay. It's a great shop with a cellar full of some of the best small producer champagnes - including the excellent Colin and Lamiable. Give it a whirl!

The Fat Expat Five

One of The Fat Expat's expert, and of course deeply refined, tasting team. Note detritus...

After tasting over 50 champagnes from small houses and big name brands, recommended and discovered alike, we came up with the following ‘top five’. Each champagne was tasted by our group of six expert tasters (oops, sorry – Fat Expats) and notes were taken by the Worryingly Precise Josephine. Our group consisted of a journalist, a photographer, a PR, two teachers and an Emirates First Class Purser. As usual with everything that goes on with The Fat Expat, we’re not experts. We’re just the punters with the moolah that the producers want to extract from us. So we think our opinion’s just as valid as the next man’s. If perhaps a little more obsessive than average, at least we're not banging on about touches of peach, straw and perhaps a tapenade rounding into a creosote in the finish...

But we were all amazed at how the experience refined our palates. We all learned to enjoy champagne warmer than we had in the past – this is where the wine starts to truly please. We all had our previous conceptions and preferences totally overturned by the experience. And we all came away from the whole silly week with a definite preference for certain champagnes and a great deal more respect for the drink itself.

And yes, we enjoyed it all just fine, thank you...

TheFat Expat Five

Dom Perignon 2000
Veuve Cliquot Vintage Rich Reserve 2002,
Moet et Chandon Grand Vintage Rose 2000,
Mercier Vendange 2003
Lanson Brut 1997

We broke our 'nothing over 50 Euro' for the DP 2000, which weighed in a over double that. Other than that, these wines are all at roughly comparable prices.

Undiscovered Treasures - the little guys

LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton is the Unilever of champagne. This uber-conglomerate owns a slew of top brands including Moet et Chandon, Castellane, Mercier, Dom Perignon and Veuve Clicquot. In fact, LVMH takes something like 20% of the global champagne market. All of the above are separate houses, however, with the sole exception of Dom Perignon, which is the ‘high end’ brand of Moet et Chandon: the relationship appears to be solely at the holding company level, as each of these houses (as you’ll see later) have a distinctly different heritage, approach and product. And of course from Perrier Jouet, through Bollinger to Ruinart and Gosset, there are a good many great houses that aren’t owned by the LVMH leviathan.

Alongside these ‘great’ houses, Champagne contains thousands of smaller producers as well as co-operatives and a good number of first class family businesses (like the highly recommended Canard-Duchêne). And despite the effort that the ‘posh’ houses put into telling everyone about their hundreds of grands crus, most champagne contains a good wallop of co-operative sourced wines as well as the ‘special stuff’ from those prized chalky, hillside crus. Many people who own crus just as grand as those belonging to the Moets and Jouets also make their own wines, which means there’s actually an amazing variety of champagnes to be had out there - and often at great value and with that added delight of having discovered something closed to the vast majority of people. It's a bit like going back to the days when you got to wander around the sweetshop with your pocket money clasped in a grubby mitt...

There are some great little champagnes to be had outside the beaten brand name path and at prices that provide distinct relief compared to UK high street (let alone MMI!) prices - €16-20 for vintage grand cru wines of quality and distinction from smaller houses is money well spent. Sure, there are some second rate wines on offer out there, but sorting the wheat from the chaff is part of the fun...

These days, you can even buy champagnes from smaller producers online thanks to the wonders of the Internet. After a huge amount of assiduous travel around the region and many tasting sessions, here are some Fat Expat recommendations from some less mainstream producers. Do note that the names are links to websites apart from Clouet, which doesn't seem to have one:


Canard-Duchêne

Among the largest of the small producers, or even possibly one of the smaller large producers, Canard-Duchêne is big enough to have a funky website but small enough to still be family owned and friendly to visitors. It’s a little off the beaten track, nestled in the vineyard-rich vales south of Reims in the village of Ludes, but it’s worth the detour because Canard-Duchêne produces some truly exceptional champagnes. The brut is excellent and the Millésime Vintage 2002 is a little slice of luxury, fruity and aromatic on the palate, fizzy and fresh. The company also produces a blanc de blancs a blanc de noirs and a rosé, the latter having been thoroughly enjoyed when we visited.


Colin

The Colin family enjoy a significant heritage in viticulture and wine and champagne making that stretches back to 1829. But it was only recently that the ‘bloody minded’ owner took the decision to go it completely alone and leave the local co-operative to focus solely on producing his own champagnes. With a relatively recent expansion of the family’s facilities, Champagne Colin produces some remarkable champagnes, including the delicious Blanche de Castille, a blanc de blancs that impressed us so much that we set off to find the house behind the wine. Nestled in the southern, chardonnay-dominated area of Champagne (the cote des blancs, south of Epernay), in the village of Vertus, Colin’s name provided us endless childish amusement (a champagne called ‘Colin’ – it’s like a rabbit called ‘Keith’ or a piece of fine jewellery called ‘George’) but sitting down with Delphine Colin to taste a selection of the cuvées that Colin produces was no laughing matter – they’re excellent value and can be magnificent. The brut and rosé are good stuff, but it’s when you start getting to the Cuvée Coup de Coeur de Vertus Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs Premier Cru Millésimé that you start getting a whole lot of champagne for your money (it’s easier to drink than it is to say!). Colin also produces a delicious ratafia – a fortified sweet wine made by a number of champagne makers.


Lamiable

Just in case you’re interested, Lamiable is one of the few producers to have moved across to a new type of synthetic cork called Mytik Diamant, which binds treated cork to give a corky cork that’s not a cork, but which stops your cork corking your pop. The yeasty ‘on the edge’ taste of corked champagne is something we encountered a couple of times when tasting wines from smaller houses and Lamiable certainly didn’t suffer from that. Their extra brut was a true adventure into excellence, avoiding the trap of being simply sour, but with a dryness that gave way to floral tastes and a depth that was surprising and a delight – it was one of the wines that we ended up taking back home with us. We also tried the Cuvée Meslaines millésime 2004 , a vintage blanc de noirs which didn’t have the same sheer impact on us as the extra brut. If you ever see a Lamiable champagne, however, I can only suggest that you snap it up – particularly the amazing extra brut.


Andre Clouet
Phone: +33 326570082 Fax: +33 326516513

Andre Clouet is a small producer in the village of, wait for it, Bouzy but with a strong and growing international reputation among champagne buffs, snobs, poseurs and nose-wrinklers. We tried the brut rosé and liked it a lot, enjoying a fine champagne with smallish bubbles and a deliciously fruity, dry taste – Clouet produces in the Pinot Noir growing region but we completely failed to find Clouet’s place in Bouzy itself. We’d recommend this wine heartily – Clouet’s labels are instantly recognisable, busy and intricately designed, they’re a remarkable counterpart to the often humdrum labels on small producer Champagnes. Clouet is well known for his ‘1911’ wine, a limited production of 1911 bottles of wine blended from specific years’ production and also for his ‘silver brut’ which has no dosage added. We didn’t get to try those, though!

Tasting, trying and touring

Oddly enough, Champagne is not packed out with tourists and is amazingly unspoilt country for the interested wanderer. Despite this, most champagne producers will hold degustations of their wines on the premises at a pretty nominal charge and a good number will also offer tours of their facilities: ‘visites des caves’. There are also a number of shops in Epernay, Reims and elsewhere that aggregate selections of the big name producers and some of the more distinguished smaller names and offer advice and even degustation, although you’re often starting to approach bar prices for a glass of pop.

The best way to get a good grounding in what’s going on, however, is to visit a couple of the larger houses and ‘do the tour’. Here’s a look at what you might expect from some of the bigger brands around. Do bear in mind we did these throughout a week of pleasing ourselves, wandering around the region, dropping into small producers, sampling wines and generally rooting around. If you did these tour things all one after the other you’d go mad. At the end, I’ll tell you how you can save a few hours and a good few Euro to boot...

Perhaps fascinatingly, we found that the character and nature of each tour was reflected pretty much in the champagne that ended it: from the impeccable uber-corporate style and efficiency of Moet to the appalling FU Taittinger, we found that the wine was like the place, people and public relations. So you can also read these write-ups as tasting notes!!!

Moet - Fancy a quick slurp, sir?

Moet et Chandon

This is the slickest, classiest tour of the lot – an experience that starts as you make your way across the gravel driveway up the grey steps past the decorative bay trees and through into the light, airy and stylish visitors reception at Moet et Chandon's Rue de Champagne megalopolis. You have three options (bare naked, with vintage or vintage aplenty happy ending) and, slightly tackily, get handed a voucher denoting your ‘class’ of degustation. You’re then met by a slick, crisp young thing in a suit (ours was called Rupert) and escorted to the video room: a white and glass cream and black affair with square lines, cream linen drapes and a free-standing plasma screen on a black obelisk and surround sound speakers mounted on the walls. There you are drawn cleverly into a corporate video that is slicker than Slick McSlick the Turkish oil wrestling champion, all calligraphy on vellum, fat grapes, oaken barrels and fine bubbly moments in iridescent glass: classical music and a deep, calming voice-over talking with authority and gravitas. From there, it’s down to the cellars and a walk around the cleverly lit and arranged stacks of bottles that one suspects are set aside just for the tours. Rupert is arch, starched, coldly amused (and amusing) and has definitely been fitted out with a high quality rectally inserted glass rod.

The trip around the cellars is informative, impressive and impeccably conducted. There’s barely a glimpse of the industrial scale operation that must power the output of some 60 million bottles a year from the LVMH cellars – and that’s precisely because we’re being subjected (having paid our €25 for the pleasure) to a totally on-brand experience.

At the end we’re met with Rupert’s three sharp-suited colleagues who pour out trays of the product, each group of voucher holders getting to approach their respective trays. We’re flying at the front and tasting a 2000 vintage brut and a 2000 vintage rosé. Both are spectacular wines, fruity, deep and yet dry and clean, the two providing a delightful contrast and finishing a thoroughly stylish, crisp and enjoyable tour of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s champagne world domination experience.

Castellane - a gloves-off tour of the industrial process and a refreshingly honest experience!

Castellane

There could be no greater counterpoint to Moet’s tour than that offered by Castellane which is, in fact, owned by LVMH anyway. However, the relationship is definitely at the balance sheet level alone as the two houses, their tours and products could hardly be different.

Visitors enter a large hall that has more in common with a slightly dodgy bier keller than a champagne house: tacky barrel bottom tables are scattered around the high-roofed reception area: there are smashing posters on the walls from old Castellane campaigns – but on asking if they were on sale we were directed to a small poster selector which had four or five of the third rate designs in tatty, scratched plastic covering. We gave poster art a miss. Oddly, only Mercier sells any poster art and that a limited range – yet most of these companies have long produced stunning, defining poster art.

One strange bonus at Castellane is the museum at the back of the reception area – you can take a wander around this as you wait for your tour to be called out and it’s got some amazing things in it, including a pristine example of the first ever telegraph, with its original pre-QWERTY keyboard and an old hot metal composition station. Amazing finds for the historically minded geek.

At Castellane, you begin the cellar tour with an introduction to the region and the grapes, led by a young lady with an almost impenetrable French accent. She’s perfectly pleasant, but after Rupert’s Teutonic efficiency, she seems bumbling. The tour proper is commenced by entering the tackiest doorway in champagne: a barrel. Feeling not unlike Bilbo Baggins, you drop down to the first production level, the gigantic steel vats containing the wines, the honest clean-room tiled walls and industrial pumps at least leaving us feeling that champagne was actually being produced here in tenable volumes. From there it’s down again to the cellars, an impressive walk around and the usual introduction to remouage and the like before climbing back up to sample the output of Maison Castellane.

The champagne itself is disappointing, it lacks definition or character, doesn’t surprise or delight. It’s an ordinary old brut, no vintages to be had here. We asked about the ‘Commodore’, the most expensive wine sold in the shop – it had an interesting name and a different bottle shape – was there perhaps some nautical connotation? Our guide didn’t know. We bought a bottle anyway and took it home to try it. Again, not a wine that stood out in any way from the sort of glug you’d expect to be doled out at a corporate day out done on the cheap.

Castellane gets full credit for being a genuine tour around a full production environment, and I would say it was worth doing it for the museum alone, but it didn’t produce any wows or insights. At €8.50, it also didn’t produce a champagne that deserved attention.

Mercier - A great tour for Thomas The Tank Engine fans...

Mercier

This is the Dubai of Epernay’s Avenue de Champagne: Mercier is modern, slick and polished.
Even the toilets are fully automatic, sculpted and mood-lit. Visitors wait for their tour to start in an airy, tiled reception area decorated with the huge champagne barrel that was originally used to cart champagne to the world’s fair in Paris or some such gumpf. Apparently the barrel caused more fuss than the Eiffel Tower, which sounded like a load of old tut to me.

Interestingly, old man Mercier was something of a PR guru – the barrel stunt was followed by other attention-getters, including exclusive tastings held in hot air balloons over Paris.

The Mercier tour starts with a video played across three screens in a darkened room. It’s a bit ‘in your face’ after Moet’s slick plasma screen exclusive preview style experience; the images come too fast and there’s text in English and French as well as a voice over to deal with. It’s all too much information and too little content, the video feels like a sort of multimedia version of a Chinese takeaway: there's a huge rush of intense things going on, but two minutes afterwards you just feel empty and unfulfilled.

And then to the brushed steel lifts (another Dubai moment) and an achingly slow journey down past a series of champagne-themed tableaux that Fodor’s called ‘excruciating’ – an adjective that won Fodor’s my eternal respect (incidentally, we found the Fodor’s Guide pretty much bang on the money throughout and would recommend it heartily). 32 metres (and some awful papier mache tack) later and the multinational group of slightly bewildered-looking tourists were led to a train.

Yes, a train.

It doesn’ t run on rails, but it’s like a ride in a kids’ amusement park: guided by light, our fibreglass cars take us along the cellars as our guide tells us how champagne is made. By now, we’ve sort of heard it all before, but amuse ourselves taking photographs and enjoying the strange majesty of all those bottles laid out over kilometres of cellars (the longest of the lot is Moet at 17 miles of chalk cellars: Mercier sports a 1km stretch at one point. It’s all pretty impressive underground storage, really).

And then we stop and are disgorged into the tasting area cum shop at the end of the ‘experience’. Oddly enough, the champagne’s great – again we opted for the full-on happy ending three-glass experience and sample Mercier’s brut, an excellent vintage rose and the 2004 Vendange, which I was subsequently compelled to buy because it was just, well, plain good. A fine champagne, not particularly heart-stopping or complex, but just fine. The Mercier brut is, however, averagely average. In an average sort of way – a triumph, perhaps, of marketing over content.

Veuve - an excellent experience

Veuve Clicquot

Veuve Clicquot is an appointment-only experience and we have to book two days ahead because
they’re full. So our 10am appointment in Reims becomes something of an issue when we only manage to leave our delightful gite in Baye, 20 minutes south of Epernay, easily an hour away from Reims, at 9.20am. We’re lucky, driving two fast cars and able to make Epernay in a record 20 minutes. Then we hit the red lights, the diversion, the grannies and the Sunday drivers. We get lost and it turns into a running gag, a sitcom race to get to the Holy Grail of champagne on time, a true white-knuckle ride. There’s no second chance – it’s this slot or nothing.

We leave Epernay, finally on the right road, at 9.45. We call ahead – yes, they can delay for us but only a little while as there are other people booked for the same time. They can wait until 10.20am maximum. Recriminations, directions, explosions and frustrations follow. Every lorry in France has decided to drive in front of us. It’s an awful, John Cleese Clockwise trip: we get to Reims and try to find the right road first time: 12 Rue Temple. And then, miraculously, at 10.15am precisely we’re there, driving into the gorgeous paved frontage that is Veuve Clicquot at Reims, sweetie darling. We’re exhilarated, punching the air, dancing up the impressive stairs to reception. We smile at the friendly but efficient-looking receptionist in the light, stylish reception area. She explains that this is head office. The tour takes place ten minutes away at the caves, the other side of Reims.

This is not a good moment.

For the first time, we curse the stupid sods at Fodor’s, who give the wrong address for the tour at Veuve Clicquot. We race out again, imploring the girl at reception to call ahead for us. In an amazing feat of driving and navigation, we make it over to the ‘other’ Veuve Clicqout in less than five minutes.

“Forgive us: we’re English, stupid and late” I gasp in French as we all burst into reception.

The guy at reception grins: “Well, that’s not a bad start, is it?” he says in English, and then sorts everything out like a Bollywood hero dealing with the last minute slew of baddies between him and Jagantha, his childhood love. We join the tour, which has been delayed but eventually gone ahead without us. They all hate us, but we don’t care. We made it.

The guide is gushy, gawky, nervous and giggly, a little like Safi’s Chinese girlfriend in AbFab. She’d be the stuff of pastiche and cruel comedy except you quickly realise that she’s informative, engaging and passionate about her subject. The cellars are marvellous, working cellars but nevertheless lit in ‘on brand’ orange and white mood lighting. The stairs down are a purposefully grand entrance, a marvellous trip down into the cavernous, cool, damp chalk corridors below.
Just in case you didn’t know, veuve is French for widow – the house of Veuve Clicquot was founded by the Widow Clicquot and it was she who invented the process of remouage or riddling that is used to clear champagne of the lees, or sediment from the second fermentation that takes place in the bottle. Prior to her riddling rack, other methods such as turning the bottles upside down in sand were tried, but were unreliable and led to huge burst rates (and no, we’re not talking bandwidth optimisation here) . The Veuve was ahead of the curve in more ways that one – it was she who got the Russian Tsar to break his normal habit of toasting victories and the like with vodka and use champagne instead. The industry never looked back – since that day, champagne has been the drink of celebration of dukes and dustmen, dictators and democrats.

Genuine, passionate and engaged, our guide actually cares about this stuff. And it’s glorious. No question phases her, no technicality wrong-foots her. She’s way on top of her game and desperately helpful, too. It’s a slightly unnerving combination, but a delight all the same. We end the visit on a magnum of Veuve vintage rose, complicated, deep and delicious, floral and berry-laden, brilliant on the tongue and grin-inducing - there’s not a great deal that’s wrong with the world – we all buy a lot of vintage stuff from Veuve Clicquot and all agree we will always have a preference for this finest of champagnes.

Buy the 2002 rose. Buy the 1995 Brut. And if you are feeling utterly wicked, buy the 1990. And if you see a bottle of Veuve Brut rich, give it a try – it’s a slightly sweeter brut, but not a demi-sec and it’s a marvellous wine. We like Veuve.

Bring a bottle would you? Storage at Taittinger.

Taittinger

The girl at reception’s cold as ice, her smile is pure switch-on, switch-off. The tour’s at four, so get your tickets at €10 each and come back then. The usual mish-mash of slightly confused looking Koreans, a few loud Yanks and some shuffling Dutch – they’re all waiting on the sofas, wondering what’s going to happen next, what indignities are going to be heaped on their dumb, sheep-like heads in the name of champagne tourism. And then in she glides, our guide: a vision from the makeup counter at Debenhams with a violent slash of pink lipstick splashed across her indifferent features, all hairspray, tight skirt and utterly inappropriate pointy-toed shoes. We all hate her from the start but nobody can remember her name. Even during the tour.

We’re led, shuffling, into a semi-dark room and sat on squeaky seats. Is that a tin of Cyclon B I see in the corner, just before the lights are extinguished? Nothing happens, and then after a squeaky –seated eternity, a crap video plays. It does add the historical footnote that the Chardonnay grape was brought to France from Palestine by the Crusaders, but precious little else. And then the screen suddenly reads PanasonicVideoInput3NoInput and the long, pregnant, silent (punctuated by the occasional squeaky seat) pause ends with the clipclop of expensively shod feet and the neon lights flickering on as our tour guide leads us out of the room.

Baaa.

She drags us down flights of spiral stairs to the cellars where we’re shuffled around before being mumbled at. We shuffle along to another place where we’re mumbled at some more. There’s lots of monotone drone, French-accented lazy language, inprecise enough to be irritating, just on the verge of comprehensible. This is one tour too many for us and we’re inattentive and failing to hang on her every rote word. And she loathes us for it, throwing us the odd dirty look and getting grins back.

We will none of us forgive Taittinger for this awful drag around their lacklustre cellars, some photogenic bottle stacks interspersed by the drone of mademoiselle indifferente – a secretary turned PR gimp, a begrudging guide to something she doesn’t care a flying fuck about for people she holds in obvious contempt.

The champagne’s as indifferent as she is – served up for the animals to come and get a gulp in a large, uncomfortable room with no displays, care or character to it whatsoever. There’s a price list up on the wall and a hatchet-faced woman behind a counter taking orders. This isn’t a happy place and we drink up quickly as frog-features stands obviously talking to her friend about us all. We leave without buying a thing. There’s nothing here we want. I will never forgive Taittinger.


Saving money

Save your money. Book an appointment at Veuve Clicquot with plenty of advance warning. If you want to, swing by Moet et Chandon as well. Both are excellent and come highly recommended. If you feel like being a little different, then we’d suggest taking a quick trip off the beaten track and taking a tour at small independent producer Canard Duchane, which you’ll find just south of Reims.

But don’t do more than two champagne tours in total and, ideally, space them a few days apart – do one at the beginning of your time in champagne and one towards the end. In between, drop into the many shops and independent producers in the region and get chatting to people, sampling the drink and asking your questions of the actual producers. Be inquisitive and searching – people tend to respond really well to genuine interest and even the daftest questions are handled politely and with as much gravity as if they came from experienced oenologists.

A Champagne Moment

It’s the stuff of legend, taken by dukes and dustmen; it’s the libation of celebration. Smashed against ships, poured by the gallon down the throats of Hollyood starlets and gangster rappers, it’s drunk warm in girlie joints and ordered in outré bars by self-obsessed nouveau riche flatheads in sparkler-decorated magnums.

It’s pop, fizz, shampoo, bubbly and even champers. And it’s a five billion dollar global multi-brand luxury products industry built chiefly around two cities in France’s Champagne region, Epernay and Riems. Both are nestled in the centre of thousands of acres of sleepy hillside vineyards growing a mixture of pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay grapes. Each vineyard (or Cru) yields a different quality of grape – hence the use of terms such as Premier Cru, Grand Cru and Grand Cru Classé – Grand Cru is the tip-top quality. Each Cru, particularly the tip-top ones, can be pretty small and Champagne’s hillsides are dotted with what are effectively strip farms, each strip carrying a stone marker on behalf of its owner.

Each cru is marked

The grapes are harvested in September and the juice yielded from the first pressing of grapes from each cru is separately fermented to make a wine. It takes, incidentally, some 1.8kg of grapes to make a bottle of champagne. These wines are then blended together – wines from anything up to 200-300 individual crus being combined by oenologists to make a single champagne. The blend will typically contain a mix of previous years’ wines to ensure consistency – but exceptional years allow the production of a champagne made from that years’ crop alone, a vintage, which carries the year on the bottle.

Champagnes can be made out of a blend of the three grapes (the pinot noir and pinot meunier are black grapes and so only the first pressing of white juice is used to make champagne), out of pure chardonnay (blanc de blancs), or out of pure black grape (blanc de noir). Rosé, incidentally, is typically made by leaving the wine in contact with the red skins for two days or so.

Once the first fermentation is completed, the wines are blended and then bottled in especially strong, thick-walled bottles with the addition of a little yeast to spark a second fermentation – this is where the bubbles come into it.

Capped like lemonade...

The bottles are capped with metal caps and then stored in cellars so that the second fermentation can run its course. As a ‘live’ wine, these bottles can happily spend years down in the cellars ‘on their lees’ – the lees is the sedimentary by-product of the fermentation process. Once the sediment is removed, the wine has only got so long to live – it’s pretty pointless keeping champagne because it doesn’t change its character one jot with age and, in fact, is slowly and inexorably going down the road to vinegar city.

Riddling racks - the bottles are twisted to force the sediment into the neck

Getting rid of that sediment is something of a mission – a process ‘invented’ by a certain madame Clicquot, a widow, who, along with Dom Perignon, is one of the great ‘names’ of champagne. She eventually solved the problem of safely getting rid of the lees by angling the bottles in racks and twisting them to encourage the lees to move down the bottle to the neck. This process, which takes place when the champagne has matured, is called ‘riddling’ or ‘remouage’ and can take months, each bottle turned one quarter turn a day by specialist riddlers, who can do the twist anything up to 50-60,000 bottles a day. Don’t ever, ever ask them how the day went at work. Although modern ‘vibro-pallets’ automate the process and cut down the time it takes to a little over one week, many producers still riddle their premier products manually.

At the end of the process, there’s a little plug of sediment left in the neck of the bottle. This is dipped into a freezing cold solution so that the plug freezes: the cap is knocked off, the plug pops out under the natural pressure of the gas in the bottle and a little slug of sugar and wine, the ‘dosage’, is added before the bottle is corked with the distinctive champagne cork and then secured using a wire mesh ‘basket’. The bottle’s returned to the cellars for six months or so to allow the dosage to mix in and settle and then it’s cleaned, labelled and packed for shipment. From this point, you’ve got from 5 (brut) to 15 (vintage) years to get it poured and away before it starts to go downhill. The market for multi-thousand dollar bottles of ancient vintage champagne is, by the way, a matter of pure vanity – the contents of those old bottles are undrinkable.

Brutal

The sweetness of the champagne is set by the dosage: you’ll typically find Extra Brut, Brut and Demi-Sec on offer. The majority of the natural sugar in the champagne has already been consumed by the yeast, so a little extra sugar does rather help the medicine to go down. The amount of sugar sets the character of the champagne: extra brut is a brave move – few of the large houses make an extra brut, in which a minimal amount of sugar is added. If you love the absolute dryness of champagne, extra brut is worth a try but it’s gotta be good stuff - like the little girl with the little curl, when it’s good it’s very, very good – the true flavour of the wine comes through unmasked by added sugars. But when it’s bad... well, an extra brut can easily slip over the wall into sourness, scouring your taste buds like battery acid.

The most common variety of champagne offered is brut – more sugar is added than in an extra brut but the wine is still a dry one – originally designed as such for the British market, apparently. Demi-sec is a sweeter wine altogether, not quite as soft and rich as, say, a viognier but certainly taking a trip down that path. A purely subjective view is that demi-sec can be more accessible, but sacrifices complexity and depth for that accessibility. Everyone who writes about champagne gives figures for the amount of sugar in each class of champagne and its dosage, but I can’t for the life of me see why. If this type of geek information is critical to you, don’t hesitate to take a peek at Wikipedia!

To be served cooled but not frozen...

Service

Champagne should ideally be served at 6 degrees, not fresh out of the freezer. It should be cool, but not chilled to the point where the glass is frosted. It’s only as the wine warms a little that you’ll get the fullness of the bouquet, the floral notes and the other stuff that will allow you to pontificate like a proper pretentious jerk. A curved flute is ideal, the lip closing in from the bowl to concentrate the bouquet of the wine. Everyone who’s anyone in Champagne is a little sniffy about coupes, which is a shame as I’m a great fan of them and it’s certain that they’ve long been a favourite receptacle for the old fizz – in fact, it’s rumoured that a standard coupe is modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breasts. I did go to the Palace of Versailles to verify this but, tragically, didn’t find any ‘gear out’ statues that would provide a proper comparison.

Great

Champagne must be the most abused luxury item of the lot. Sloshed down in beery toasts, sat warming as a trophy accessory in night clubs, smashed against ships or sprayed over crowds, it seems as if very few people actually stop for a second to enjoy the drink itself. Which is a shame, as good champagne is a wonderful thing indeed: complex, characterful and beguiling, its effervescence charms and invariably lifts the mood. Behind the fizz comes the wine itself, the fruits and flavours that cut through the dryness. Save the good champagne for a quiet moment, for when the crowds have gone home and you can afford to savour a few moments of peaceful, relaxed celebration together...

Cuvee Musar

Gaston Hochar is a genius or, as pal Massoud likes to call him, a 'weasel'. It is through Gaston's genius that we have Chateau Musar, the daddy of all Lebanese wines, the result of a tradition of viticulture that goes back thousands of years in that sun-kissed mediterranean coast.

Chateau Musar is pretty natural as wines go: it's still produced in the 'old' way, isn't fined (and so should really be decanted) and produces an amazing, strong-tasting and complex wine that I happen to be a huge fan of. The 1999 is the year to go for unless you have deep pockets indeed.

So when pal Ammouni came back from Beirut recently hefting not one but two bottles of 1997 with my name on them (the 'best ever fermentation' according to Serge Musar), I was a delighted chap. I mean, what a girl! But then, treat heaped on treat, nestled in between them was a bottle of 2004 Cuvee Musar, the 'second wine' of Musar. And what a delight it was! All the complexity and old woody tones of Musar, all of the strength of flavour - a truly great wine in itself and a wonderful discovery.