Moroccan Roll All Night (and barter every day)

Over the weekend, I ticked off Africa. We (being myself and the Baguette Winner) hopped on a Transavia flight from charming little Orly Airport, straight into the heat of the desert. [Side note: when picking a discount airline, always go for the one that makes you think of vampires.] We didn’t know a lot about Marrakech, so we watched a Jamie Oliver video to get familiar:

It all looked easy enough, but, when we got there, we couldn’t see any little lads running around with their mothers’ bread. Thanks to the lack of little boys to chase, we didn’t have a plan. Luckily, the Moroccans are never short of something to sell, so we spent our time shopping. First, however, I needed to be shorn.

We walked into the first barber we saw, early on the first day. He seemed pleasant, and he kept caged birds (yes, they were singing).

There is little need to provide a play-by-play of the haircut. Where there was once much hair, there was soon less hair. It’s not a complex scenario. At the end of the unhairening, we encountered the first of many bartering techniques we would meet in Marrakech. The friendly and very-hardworking barber simply asked me how much I would like to pay. The trick is to seem very sincere, and to never indicate whether what is offered is a reasonable amount, but rather to repeat that you’ll accept whatever’s offered. We ended up paying 100 dirhams (roughly 10 euros), which seemed fair. That is, until we managed to buy lunch and drinks for two for 80 dirhams. It’s a good technique.

It’s Riadical!

Staying in the Medina (the old town in Jamie’s video) usually means staying in a riad. These are sweet old houses, built around a central courtyard. The courtyards keep them cool, much like when you sit in a rubber ring in a pool and and get a wet bum. In fact, the word riad comes from the Arabic word ryad, which loosely translates to “soggy bottom”. In English, the name Ryan has the same derivation. Both words trace back to the old rubber ring in a pond paradigm. It’s in the Bible or something.

Anyway, our riad was not quite the palace in the photo above, but it was still nice. I do think, however, that the description on their website is a tad misleading:

“Riad Minorisa is a private palace from XVIIIth century with a familial hosting inaugurated in December 2007. Located in the calmness of the medina (old city) declared Universal Human Patrimony by the UNESCO. Situated near of the Jemaâ El Fna square, one of the most famous in the world.

Riad it means garden in arabic language. To be hosted at a riad is the best choice to live Marrakech spirit and beneficed its charms, without renounce vitality’s souks bazaars neither the thousand and one magic nights.

This is a mixture of oriental and occidental decoration that ofers all the comfort, relax, elegance and simplicity.”

That’s a copy-and-paste from their website, and I take issue with a few notes:

• I won’t criticise the use of the word “palace”. If a house can be a castle, I suppose a riad can be a palace. Probably not what you think of when you think “palace”, though.
• “Calmness of the medina”: When I think of calm, I think of peace and quiet, serenity; Bonnie Doon, basically. Inside Riad Minorisa, it was very quiet and calm, so that’s right But the Medina itself is a constant throb of people, motorbikes, donkeys, smaller people (children), cats, some horses, music, yelling and singing. It is always befuddling, and it is never calm.
• I don’t know where they got this “riad means garden” business…
• I really like the last sentence. “This is a mixture of oriental and occidental” is a lovely phrase, and then it all falls apart. Shouldn’t judge though, as it seems that everyone in Morocco speaks dynamite English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, obviously.

If you are earning French, Morocco is a great place to do so. You see, the trouble with the French is that they speak French like they own the place, messing with the words and making them sound different. Then there’s slang, and speaking all fast, and suddenly it doesn’t sound like the nice Irish man on Coffee Break French says it should. The Morrocans, on the other hand, seem to really have listened to Mark (the nice Irish man) from Coffee Break French, because they say the words the way they are meant to sound. So for us, two intermediate French learners (who come across as novices in Paris), Marrakech was great! In fact, between French and English, we didn’t even need to bother with Arabic. In hindsight, they might have liked us more if we did.

ArabiYum Nights

Moroccan food is good. You probably know this, what with it being trendy to not just eat the same thing all the time. Our predominant eating experiences were of tagines, the cool witches’ hat pot lid things above. Tagine is just the name of the dish it’s cooked in, and it usually comes full of a given meat product, spices, a few potatoes and carrots, and some dried fruit or almonds if you pay a bit more. If you watched all of that Jamie Oliver video above (it’s only “work”, after all), you’ll have heard him say that you can just cook it in whatever you’ve got.

Put simply, the tagines were good and the cous cous was less good. Not bad, but tagines were clearly better. In my brain, I had imagined there would be cous cous in the tagines. This is not how they roll. Tagines are actually fairly sparse in their filling: just a couple of good chunks of meat (think chicken legs, lamb chops, etc), with some token potato, carrot, zuchini, etc. They are great, thanks to the slow-cooking of the meat, and the excellence of the gravy. It’s really all about the gravy. This is very important, because all Moroccan food is served with firm - but not unpleasantly so - bread. You put the bread in the gravy, and therein lies the beauty of the tagine.

Cous cous provides far less opportunity to dip bread in gravy (as there isn’t really any), and this is why we don’t order the cous cous. My advice: let someone else order the cous cous, and you get the tagine. Tagines with dried fruit and/or nuts are usually better. You eat the tagine (dip the bread!), and they will hate you for it. They’ll probably trade you some cous cous for the right to dip some bread in your gravy. And then you have the single most important thing in the history of civilisation: leverage (and gravy).

Jemaa el-Fnaar out!

You know how, when you’re a kid and a (trusted) grown up tickles you, and you wriggle and try to make it stop, but then as soon as it stops you miss the attention, so you go back for more? This is what it’s like being at Jemaa el-Fnaa, the big town square in Marrakech. It’s loud, and people are trying to sell you things, and then there’s a monkey on a chain, and then there’s a live cobra, and all the food stalls want you to eat at them, and someone keep an eye on that cobra, and this guy wants to sell me a live turtle, and here’s a wooden snake, and all the food smells amazing, but some of the food looks awful, and WHICH SNAKES ARE WOODEN, AND WHICH ONES ARE THE FUCKING COBRAS?!

It’s a confusing place, and the second we arrived I was thinking about leaving. But here’s the thing: It’s the only place in the Medina which you actually recognise, and which you actually think you can get back to. So every evening, when we were thinking about where to go, it was “back to the square?” Because it was definitely interesting. The good news is there are restaurants all around the square, where you can sit up on the terrace and watch all the goings-on going on. It also makes for a killer sunset:

Plus, there are a couple of bars there, if you know where to look. [Top tip: If a person says they’ll show you a “happy hour”, you can follow them. They are actually taking you to a happy hour. Besides, how unhappy would the hour have to be for you to regret it?]

I guess it could be worse. So then you leave the restaurant and walk back down through the square, and immediately you remember that you hate it there. But you also want to go back tomorrow. I imagine this is exactly what swimming with sharks feels like.

Moroccanclusion

Marrakech is very nice, if a little lacking in actual ‘things to see’. It’s cheap, tasty, and not as dangerous as it might seem (well, we survived, at least). Also, we didn’t get sick, which apparently is a minor miracle.

I do have the following questions, however:

1. Why are they selling live turtles?
2. What are people doing with the turtles they buy?
3. They know we’re tourists. Are people taking the turtles out of the country?
4. How do you get a live turtle on a plane?
5. How much is a turtle in, say, London, anyway? Is it worth smuggling?
6. They also had iguanas...

A Guide To Very Modern Art

Today, I want to talk about very modern art. Like ‘right now’ sort of art. It’s what you would probably call “modern art”, but if you don’t want to be the dumbest kid in your class, don’t call it that.

Technically, “modern art” went on between the 1860s and 1970s, a period that began with a book named “Ragged Dick,” and ended with All That Jazz, a film starring Rob Schneider Roy Sheider. Other significant events during this period were: basically all of the significant events ever. There was also some very important art, but we are not dealing with that art today. Today, we discuss the art after modern art. You might think that this would be “postmodern” art, but unfortunately, universities have ruined the use of “post-“ anything. What we are talking about is now commonly called “contemporary art”.

For fun, here are some of the Wikipedia entries that fall under the umbrella term “contemporary art”: Lowbrow; Plop art; Froissage (sounds filthy); Bad painting. There’s a long, long list, and most of them sound like second year university courses with eight students apiece. For us, the main criterion is that the art we want is found in a “modern/contemporary” museum (not even they know what to call it). Also, we are going to mainly focus on “installations,” because you’re sick of paintings anyway.

WARNING: You may not be ready for contemporary art. You probably won’t get it. Luckily, the following video is just what you need to understand the past, present, and even future of super-modern art. This lesson begins with Tom Green:

Maybe the trouble with Tom Green’s career was that he was too highbrow for us all.

 

Baitagogo by Henrique Oliveira

As you can see, this is a plywood tree coming out of the beams of the Palais de Tokyo. It is meant to resemble a Gordian knot. If you don’t know the story of the Gordian Knot, it goes a bit like this: there was an ox-cart tied to a post with a confounding, twisting knot (it was pre- Girl Guides). This was in Gordium, Phrygia, named after the founder of Motown. The cart remained there ages later, when along came Alexander the Great. Alex cut the knot with his sword, hence solving some sort of problem that had befuddled the Phrygians FOR CENTURIES! I always thought the Trojans had set the bar pretty low, but this is a new kind of stupid.

This is one of those old Greek tales that is meant to celebrate the greatness of a Greek hero (in this case Alexander). Some of them are impressive, and then some of them are pretty crap. For one of Hercules’ “Twelve Tasks”, he just hosed out some stables, which isn’t exactly fun, but is hardly heroic. Anyway, the Gordian Knot now symbolises an unsolvable problem. It’s like a metaphor or something.

Since we’re doing installations, we should probably look at a shark:

This is – honestly – called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. It is by a very rich man named Damien Hirst. I reckon he regrets calling it that, now that the coke has worn off. I don’t reckon he regrets much else.

As I always say in these Guides, you need to look at these artworks and ask yourself how they affect you. How do they make you feel? For me, I am reminded of one thing: the seminal 1999 movie Deep Blue Sea, in which LL Cool J hides in an oven, and for which Samuel L. Jackson is still awaiting his Oscar:

You might remember in our Guide to portraits, we saw a lot of tops-off action. Real racy stuff. Hiroshi Sugimoto gets a little more 3D with it:

Aujourd'hui le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive]

This is probably meant to be a comment on society’s growing fixation on artificial stimulations, about how everyone’s losing grip on reality. It may also be a covert advertisement for “sex dolls”. For more on that, watch what might be the weirdest interview in morning TV history:

 [Skip to the 5-minute mark to have your only question answered, bald-facedly.]

 

Now, I don’t normally like to criticise art. When I do criticise, I prefer to give constructive criticism, such as “try using more purple.” Purple is the best colour. But I’m about to show you what I think is the worst piece of art I’ve ever seen. It’s called Drink Europa, by Charbel-joseph H. Boutros:

That is a glass of water on a shelf. It is probably an IKEA glass, and an IKEA shelf. You might even have one of those glasses at home. Why is it art? Well, apparently it contains water from each of 27 European countries, so if you drank some of it, you’d be drinking geography. To properly convey my feelings, here’s a Q&A section:

-       27 countries, eh? That must be all the countries of Europe! Nah, there’s like 50 countries. It’s just some of the countries.

-       Is it actually 27 countries? Good question. His website says 27 countries, but at the Palais de Tokyo it said 28. There are 28 countries in the EU, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this is what he means by “the 27 European countries,” and that he got his numbers wrong.

-      Could the extra one reflect the fact that Croatia acceded to the EU in 2013? Probably, but fix your website, guy!

-       Must be some fancy water though, huh? Some rare water? Nope, he went for the most popular branded mineral water available in each country. For example, Evian represents France.

-       Woah, but Evian is a really flash water company! Not in France. It’s just like Pump here.

-       But imagine, it’s like drinking geography! But you don’t drink it; you look at it. Why not look at a map? A map is a much better place to look at geography.

-       Ok, but it’s probably a really creative, unique thing to do. Putting a glass of water on a shelf? I mean, where else can you see that?!

The Tate Modern, in London, is the correct answer. You see, you can’t even defend this as being a creative and original piece of art. Drink Europa was made in 2013, but in 1973 a wacky Irish chap named Michael Craig-Martin put a glass of water on a shelf too. His was called An Oak Tree, and came with an accompanying diatribe explaining why the glass was really an oak tree. Said diatribe included the following: "It's not a symbol. I have changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree. I didn't change its appearance. The actual oak tree is physically present, but in the form of a glass of water."

That is, of course, everything you might hate about art. “Wankery”, I believe they call it. [It won’t surprise you to learn that M C-M went to Yale.] However, when you see it and read the full caption, it does leave a certain impression. I saw it when I was 14 (that age when you simply must visit modern art galleries), and have never forgotten it. It is original. And challenging.

Drink Europa is neither original nor challenging. When a 9 year-old goes on holiday to Europe, they might decide to collect a bit of dirt from each of the countries they visit (and smuggle it back through customs). Now, imagine if that dirt was mass-produced and could probably be bought at any decent British supermarket. It’s not water from an oasis in the desert, or from under the ice in the Arctic. If a Primary School class did that, you’d think ‘that’s a fun little project’, and then be pissed off because your kid had to bring the expensive water from Luxembourg. And then some kid would knock it over, and the glass would break, and then another kid would vomit – because they’re kids – and you’d take a photo of the vomit because it might actually look more like art than the fucking glass of water!

As an aside, I like imagining art forgers walking through the Tate Modern thinking, “I reckon we could do that one. See that urinal over there? Could probably buy one like that at Park & Clarke for $40.”

Sometimes, contemporary art is just provocative.

The Wall's Shout by John Giorno

Gross, but it might still be a better phrase than “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall”.

One of the big differences between contemporary art and its older counterparts is the effect that modern technology has had. Film is a good example. Films in Da Vinci’s time were pretty patchy, and the sound and lighting quality left a lot to be desired. Today, films can be art (see: that Tom Green clip above). Michael Bay, for instance, is going with the “more is more” approach in his filmmaking. About 75% of The Meaning of Life is just weird art.

In his art/film The Clock, Christian Marclay used scenes from movies which show the time, and put together a 24-hour clock. So if you go in at 2:45pm, there will be scenes which include a clock reading 2:45pm, and this will change at 2:46pm. So you’d have to watch the movie for 24 hours to see it repeat. Pretty good, nerdy stuff.

Here’s a clip featuring Colin Firth and a coked-up, shirtless Richard Gere. You’re welcome, ladies.

The Youtube caption says you were supposed to have watched that clip at 0.04pm, but I don’t think that’s a real time. It is a strangely addictive movie/clock/installation, mainly because you spend the whole time waiting for a movie that you’ve seen before, and then getting excited when you recognise something. Also, when you see it in a museum, it’s exciting because it’s like a movie, and you didn’t really want to go to a museum anyway. A movie is much better.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of contemporary art here. It’s so varied, so various, so varietal, that we couldn’t possibly hope to cover it all. And the best part is, there’s new contemporary art happening all the time! You know what, you could do some. I’ve already given you the kid’s vomit idea, or you could do something really conceptual where you draw on a crayon using paper…that’s definitely something an arty person would do.

A Guide to Gardening

Today, gardening is a bit of an anachronism, like natural breasts and idealism. But retro never goes out of style, and what could be more retro than good ol’ agriculture? It’s what separates us from the reptiles. Gardening is really just agriculture, but without the ambition. So get gardening!

Step 1: Make up a theme

The best gardens follow a theme, like “Japanese” or “Soviet Gulag”. To illustrate, we will examine my recent visit to the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival, in the Loire Valley. The oh-so-important theme for the festival was “Gardens of the Deadly Sins”, of which there are seven, apparently.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, generally speaking, the theme of a garden might not be obvious to the naked eye. Thus, it is important to accompany your garden with a descriptive plaque in order to get the message across. For example, this paragraph served as the description for the abovementioned Festival:

What if, entirely naturally, the garden led to unbridled hedonism - temptation born from a lost Eden, a thirst for knowledge and expense? A magical place which, to blossom, relies on the rule that subversion is possible and which, to thrive, knows where its limits lie…The gardens will celebrate an alchemy which, while far from flawless – ie free from sin – will nonetheless be, as Valery put it, “the perfection of the righteous.”

It is best if your plaque conveys very little except that you own a thesaurus.

As mentioned, the theme of this Festival was “sin”, and some of the garden exhibits approached this theme more literally than others. This garden represents “purgatory”, which I believe is the Catholic equivalent of café jazz:

This garden highlights an important concept: the hardest part about gardening is getting things to grow. To get around this, the gardener here just built all the hard bits out of wood. Simple! Then, to really nail the theme, [non-gender-specific pronoun, because it’s 2014] added some fun little “confessions”. Voila, la theme!

Apparently, we spend all our lives balancing sin. At least, I think that’s what was written on the plaque for this one:

See, those are all seesaws! That’s quite a feat of engineering, I’d say. Maybe not the best at getting the flowers to grow, but the carpentry is nice.

Step 2: Once you have a theme, pretend that your garden matches it

It doesn’t really matter whether you have the garden or the theme first, because whether you are a good gardener really depends on whether you’re a good carpenter. Just build something, plant some flowers around it, then act like you planned it all along.

In fact, if I had one tip for becoming a great gardener, it’d be doing a carpenter’s apprenticeship. That’ll sort it!

Step 3: Be a patriot!

They had a garden themed for the Volcanic Plateau. Our Volcanic Plateau. It was Mt Ruapehu, Mt Tongariro and Mt Taranaki, but in France! It even had its own obtuse write-up:

There was indeed smoke (steam, I reckon) rising from the volcanoes, especially Taranaki. As with many of the garden exhibits, if I’d never read the plaque, I would never have guessed that this was a venomous love triangle. I probably would have just thought that someone cleverly put together a few mountains and added some NZ-native bush. [See Step 2, above].

Strictly speaking, the mountains (as represented here) do not exactly accurately match their namesakes. But who cares? They had them, and they were glorious.

Step 4: Things you can walk through are good things

You’re already a whiz at carpentry, so why not carpent yourself up a pseudo-tunnel thing to walk through? Make your tunnel a spiral shape, to really show off:

Is that a young Liam Neeson?

Step 5: Accessorise!

As Seth from The OC once said, “if you were to put a mirror on that opposing wall, I really think that would open up the energy flow in this room.” Mirrors can be outdoor things too:

This is a great way to confuse any animals you might own, and is perfect for narcissistic nudists. If every garden had a mirror, can you imagine the improvement in everyone’s parents’ gardening attire?

You might like to put a table in your backyard. I would applaud that decision. I would double-applaud it if the table was enormous and had flowers growing in the middle of it:

This has dual benefits. First, your table can take up the entire backyard, but there is still room for all the pretty flowers that you will forget to plant. Second, you can conduct UN negotiations from the garden:

Step 6: Forget the flowers, a pool is better

Flowers die, but a pool won’t. Sure it might get all green and scummy, and if you get fish, the fish might die. So you get a cat, and train the cat to eat the dead fish, thereby saving you from flushing them down the toilet, and thus saving water (clean, green alternatives).
What if the cat drowns in the pool? The fish are piranhas. They’ll sort it out.
What if the cat dies in another fashion? I’ve got this cousin…never mind.

Don’t bother with the fish. What’s more important is that you have a pool. In fact, get a pool like the one above. It’s not even deep enough to swim in. There are no fish; no ducks. This pool is entirely aesthetic. What a display of needless excess. You had potentially useful land which could have grown crops or housed animals, but you put in a functionless pool because, eff it, you can. This is why the terrorists hate us.

Conclusion

If I were to critique my friends at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire International Garden Festival (if!) I would say that a garden festival is best suited to happy, colourful themes. A Lion King-themed garden would work, as would a Roses theme (the chocolates, but you could use roses – the flowers – to represent Roses – the chocolates). The gardens were very well designed (and carpented), but the theme was a bit of a non sequitur.

If I could leave you with one bit of advice, it’d be this: get a big field, and fill it with sunflowers. Sunflowers are the people’s flower.

Bringin' the (Cham)pagne

Myself, the Baguette Winner and two of our friends hopped on a train to Epernay, in the Champagne region. That’s where they make the champagne.

The easiest way to explain it - even down to the travel time – is that it’s just Martinborough. A cute little town set up to accommodate tourists for a day or weekend, there to tour the champagne houses.

We kicked it off with a tour of Mercier. The pride and joy of their house is a really big barrel:

The cask was made for the World Fair in 1889, and nicknamed the ‘Cathedral of Champagne. Apparently, it was such a big deal that it was considered the main attraction of the Fair – alongside a little metal structure made by a chap named Eiffel. It doesn’t get a shout out in the Wikipedia entry for the Fair, however, and I’m starting to think that Mercier’s promotional video may have taken some liberties. According to Wikipedia, the main attraction (aside from the Eiffel Tower) was in fact a “Negro Village”, but perhaps Mercier felt that mentioning this would be a tad negative.

To get the cask to the fair, Mr Mercier had to buy and then demolish five houses. They seemed rather proud of this fact.

The tour included a slightly bizarre laser-guided train tour of the cellars (which they refer to as caves, with good reason). This was way slower and more boring than it looked in the pictures, as there really isn’t a lot to see. The trouble is, these vast, endless cellar/cave things pretty much look the exact same the whole way. The histories of these places are obviously pretty interesting, but all the best bits of this were detailed in the promo video mentioned above. And the cellars are pretty much full of bottles that just sit there and don’t get touched for awhile, so unless you’re a identical-stationary-bottles-with-no-labels-ophile, there isn’t much to see. What did make it impressive was the size, and the fact that these tunnels had been around since Queen Victoria.

The good news was that the tour finished with two glasses of champagne (a brut and a rosé), and it had barely hit midday. So can’t really complain.

After Mercier, we took ourselves back down ‘Champagne Avenue’ and into Epernay, in search of a traditional French lunch. We managed to find this at La Cave a Champagne, a funny little Fawlty Towersy restaurant, which had a collection of Michelin Guides on a shelf, but did not in fact have a Michelin Star. [It is in the Guide, though]. It was a very classically French menu, meaning that everything was either in a cream, butter or cheese sauce, and it was very good for the price (€20 for three courses). The huge disappointment, for me, was seeing the chicken come out to every other table, immediately after I had ordered the fish. I just don’t like fish as much as chicken. When will I learn?

You can read more about this meal (which included snails!) here.

After lunch, feeling tired and full (all that cream!), we stumbled back up Champagne Avenue to check out Moët. They didn’t have a big barrel, but they did have a statue of Dom Perignon:

This tour began with one of the tackiest promotional videos I have ever seen. People were audibly giggling during its screening. Luckily, it’s on Youtube!

Let’s examine some of the finer points:

-       Great generic music; because nobody is so rich that they want to pay royalites;

-       Every time we saw that finger delicately tracing the rim of the glass, people laughed. Is it a pensive gesture? Sensual? Erotic? It is clearly meant to be evocative of something, but we all just thought it was stupid.

-       “Pioneer in technology and innovative research”: A whiteboard pen? That would be a huge claim to fame, indeed.

-       The main problem with this video is that it says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF VALUE. Did you know that Moët is owned by the same company as Henessy and Louis Vitton, two other standards of luxury? Why not throw that in? Or how about showing some of the process, or giving some of the history?

-       This is literally the bit in Entourage where all of the talent agencies are trying are sign Vinnie, and they all show virtually identical clips beginning with “BMW…Rolex…Vincent Chase”. Nobody buys this crap.

I guess it’s not that bad. But they actually sat us down with a straight face and had us watch this. We had already paid, so who were they trying to convince? And if they really wanted to sell champagne, this would have been a far more tasteful advertisement:

The good news is that the tour itself went straight uphill after this. The cellars in these places are directly under the buildings, so we went from watching that dumb video, straight down a marble staircase in the same room. Suddenly, we were in the caves where they store millions of bottles of champagne. Of course, it looked virtually identical to the Mercier caves, even though each house would claim that it was the ‘original’ or whatever.

For this tour, there was no train, and we actually had a human guide (about 15-20 people in our group). This meant that we could ask questions and interact a little more. Our guide could pick up a bottle and point out the sediment, for example, and demonstrate how they are rotated. There still wasn’t a lot to see down there, but it felt much more informative.

Moët & Chandon also produce Dom Perignon, which you will recognise from your favourite rapper’s humble-brags. Dom Perignon is strictly a vintage champagne, which means that all of the grapes used are from a single year, deemed to have produced an especially good crop. There were other facts about what made it special, but you have Wikiepdia.

"Y'all drink Dom but not rosé..."

A few fun champagne facts before we end this thing:

-       You know how champagne bottles are really thick? That’s because they used to explode all the time (due to the bubbles). Apparently, Dom Perignon himself may have come up with this solution.

-       The Moët people claim that “magnum” is the best size for champagne, because it has the best volume to surface area ratio (ie, the amount of wine touching the air pocket at the top). There’s a good chance that this is just the size they wanted us to buy, for margin reasons and whatnot.

-       Champagne is fermented in the same bottle right the way through, in either your standard bottle or a magnum. If you buy a bottle bigger than a magnum, it will have been filled from other bottles (and this is why they reckon magnums are better tasting).