Berry Nice

It started a couple of years ago: supermodels were espied at parties sipping champagne in dinky little bottles through a silver straw. (The straw thing, apparently, makes you drunker faster, which if you've only eaten three grapes and a rice cracker that day must be something of a relief.) As trends do, it's worked its way inexorably downmarket, landing with a thud in the supermarket with minibottles of Lindauer Fraise.

It's not as if that's a bad thing. Lindauer is a very nice champagne, sorry sorry sorry methode champenoise, especially considering the amazingly tiny price, and given that even without the straw champagne can flatten me after half a glass the small bottles wouldn't go amiss either.

But it's the fraise bit that's frightening. It says it consists of "100% strawberry essence". At first glance, that's very soothing if you suspect it might contain toad livers or suchlike. But when you look at at a bit more closely, it's a slippery little phrase that could cover a multitude of unsavouriness. An essence made of 100% strawberries? Could be, and very nice too. But you could also interpret it another way: the strawberry essence is 100% ... itself. Complete with whatever horrendous chemicals they use to persuade strawberries to give up their souls. Nasty.

Better to avoid the whole thing and just use real ones instead. Alternatively, you could follow my recipe:

MSCONDUCT'S STRAWBERRY CHAMPAGNE

Ingredients:

1 punnet strawberries
1 bottle champagne

Method:

1. Remove rubber band and crinkly wrapper from strawberries. If you are feeling especially jolly, ping the rubber band at your drinking companion.

2. Scoff strawberries.

3. Drink champagne.