Champagne info and probably the funnest evening of my life being a pirate!
Vueve Clichot is the hidden gem for pricing on better champagnes IMHO.
Gold Brut, or any of the Brut versions range $40-90+
A much better buy and I prefer over Dom Perignon which is a waste of cash for what you get in my opinion. Here's a tip that is not well known unless you've probably visited France and some vineyards. A green foil top sticker on the top of the bottle is a normal year, while a goldish cap on the top of the bottle indicates a vintage year where the grapes were really good! Remember this when buying French wines. Some retailers don't know this secret and price the good stuff without marking it up. I have no clue if it is true for California wines as I tend not to buy these
Vueve Clicquot also has a neat tour of their vineyard down below the ground if you ever visit Reims area in France. Worth the visit and quite interesting.
And looking at this link below, I dearly wish I had never drunk the stash of La Grand Dame here.
Holy smokes! It's appreciated to $1000 now for the vintage years. The years prior to this bottle were even better and well known. I should have saved them as investments! I seem to recall buying them for about $100 or so.
THE CUVÉE With the exceptionally fine weather conditions in September, the grapes ripened beautifully. Harvesting, which took place from 23 September to 13 October, resulted in some fine, perfectly healthy grapes. The Pinot Noir wines are fruity and full-bodied; the Chardonnay wines have a lot...
thewiseolddog.com
And, if you're fortunate to be invited to a party that someone else is paying for and experience the sword opening of a bottle of champagne, you won't be disappointed with the show.
I have witnessed multiple Grand Magnums opened with huge swords by pirates wearing just loin cloths in a legendary restaurant. FYI, A Grand Magnum is about 3 feet tall. (I think it's called a Grand Magnum. But, I do know the bottle is huge!)
The swords used were the type that Middle Eastern folks behead their citizens with, yet in this instance they were merely beheading the glass top off the huge bottles of high-end bubbly. Quite skilled pirates did the job.
This restaurant in it's former popular format is no longer around but was located on the ocean front just outside of the Nice area on the Mediterranean.
The pirate waitstaff literally burned the place down on certain evenings, throwing the leather clad furniture and tables into the fire pits in the far corners of the restaurant where they cooked the lobster and steaks. On some tosses of furniture thee was still food on the fire cooking!
At the long group tables, when you were done with your food or glass of wine, the pirates would grab your plate on a multi-course meal and just toss it on the floor behind you breaking it. A multi-course meal, means you will have a lot of plates tossed as each course is served on it's own plate. And, iIt was bone china and crystal they were breaking! You could see the shadow of your hand behind the plates and run your finger around the rim of the glass while it's wet and it would sing/hum. After a few breakages I actually checked this to see what they were smashing up behind me! It was the real deal. Crazy expensive.
By the end of the night a Mariachi band would have the entire restaurant chain dancing and singing throughout the restaurant marching up and down the long tables. People would be climbing and hanging from the simulated masts and sails that were strung up in the middle of the restaurant. They extended twenty feet or more into the air on wooden poles over the table where you ate. It gets quite crazy at times with some folks falling! But, nobody got hurt, or they were too inebriated to notice!
And, at this point of the crazy evening even the customers were joining in and burning the furniture in the corner. All encouraged and helped by the pirates!!
By the end of the evening (whatever time that was?????), the entire restaurant was a littered mess of broken glass and dishes and most everyone in the restaurant had ripped and torn pants, wine stains on their clothes and very crazy disheveled hair and looks. It was quite the memorable show and I don't think I have ever encountered such fun craziness in a single night of my life.
If you had to go to the can, it was located at the very back of the building. You had to go out and cross the dark back patio and dodge some of the waves that wash up on the patio at high tide. Get it wrong and you're wet! No building codes back then and it was that close to the ocean!
And lord if I forget to mention when Lady Godiva comes riding into the restaurant sitting side-saddle on a white donkey very late in the evening. The French woman was quite scantily clad indeed and the donkey was a lucky man! Even the donkey joins in on the crazy scene and begins eating off the tables which are now filled with the final course of huge plates of fresh fruit and cheeses. A relative of mine was about knocked out of her chair by this donkey. She was my grandma and that flight to France was her first plane ride in her life! LOL! I still remember her face from that night.
F1 teams used to celebrate World Championships at this venue and it's quite the hidden experience!
What is the name of this mythical restaurant and have I just made all this garbage up? Nope. It was called Le Pirate and located outside of the Nice area off the coast road. They have long shut the doors of this classic restaurant and I understand it has been replaced with a much tamer beast with the same or similar name, but not all the fun. I reckon if you dig deep enough on Google to look for images you may find some of he old school restaurant photos. Here is one below that I found this evening.
And finally here is video describing how you chop the top of a bottle of champagne with a sword. The video is indexed to start at the chop. However, this video is nothing like a huge sword being swung at full tilt boogie by an expert. The big swords and bottles will have the champagne rocketing out of the bottle in a gusher shooting ten or more feet across the room. A total waste of the precious fluid inside, but a jolly impressive show!
View: https://youtu.be/ye28n_aJspA?t=88
And finally, if you've made it this far reading my post, tell your young sons in high school about Beringer White Zinfindal. It was called "Panty Hose Remover" back at my high school. Much cheaper and I believe it lives up to its reputation at that young age.
An example of being a pirate for one evening of your life:
I've found that to be true. But it has to be the good stuff. In a way, champagne is like diamonds. The cheap ones don't fool a girl with discriminating taste.
