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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.
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.
4. Giggle uncontrollably.
Re: 4. Giggle uncontrollably.
Re: 4. Giggle uncontrollably.
I’d put together a very basic hoverflute, you see, from bits and pieces they had lying around the hotel. One of the staff handed me a bottle of champagne, so naturally I drank it. well, it would have been rude not to, right? I only found out later I was supposed to crack it over the bow – which in any case a hoverflute doesn’t have, so that would have been a waste.
Anyway, the ‘flute seemed altogether more tricky to handle than my old one back home – dodgy components, I suppose – and it went into a really fun tight spin type thingy that just made me giggle even more. Then for some reason all the hotel staff turned green, which was absolutely hilarious, so I lost control and crashed into one of their heli-whatsit-thingies. That made them turn white and complain that they’d be paying for it out of their beer money, and I haven’t seen champagne – or the hoverflute - since.