Champagne the food wine?

Champagne is often thought of as the wine for celebrations, but have you thought about its suitability to match food? There is one very good reason for this and it has to do with the way the bubbly is made. The wine gets its bubbles from having a second fermentation in the bottle, then it is aged for 12-18 months on the dead yeasts, during which time the yeasts autolyse and release amino acids into the wine. The riddling and disgorgement comes later.

Now the food industry uses a flavour enhancer MSG to make foods a little more delicious but many would rather avoid the dreaded 3 letters (of its E-number) on the food label. There are many ways of adding MSG and similar substances to food without resort to the purified chemical (which we can make in our bodies). These include mushroom (as in mushroom ketchup), anchovies (think Worcestershire sauce) and partially hydrolysed yeast extract (anyone for Marmite or Vegemite). Now the aging process of champagne means that the wine has a certain level of these flavour enhancing amino acids in the glass. This is one reason why champagne can easily be matched with a large number of foods.

BTW, the original MSG from Japan is also a natural product, being extracted from salted kelp.