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Friday, April 25, 2014

V- is for Veuve Clicquot

                 Champagne courtesy of our lovely friend, Mark!


A to Z April Challenge

Some people should not be allowed to drink French champagne and I’m fairly certain I’m one of them… mainly because I don’t pronounce the names properly.

Despite having learnt French at school and having a Francophile father who’s always correcting my gaffs, I still persist in calling Moet & Chandon, Mow-ey, in a distinctly Australian twang (upwards inflection included when I’m asking someone if they’d like one).

Apparently one is supposed to pronounce the ‘T’ in Moet because of the little umlaut which sits on top of the ‘e’. Even though I've spent twenty minutes looking for an umlaut on my laptop keyboard it doesn't appear to be present and I’m not searching through my wing dings for it but…. an umlaut looks like small two dots.

Moet is a word derived from the Dutch and unlike the French they say the Ts at the end of words so yes… you definitely have to sound out the T.

Veuve Clicquot however, is not pronounced Verve Click-ot, because it was named after an actual French man and as you know the French do NOT say the Ts at the end of their words.

It’s all too confusing so I’ve decided I’ll keep on saying “Mow-ey” and “Verve Click-ot” because some people (Scotto) think my uncouth vulgarity is cute.

Another reason I shouldn't be allowed to drink French champagne is that I DO get a hangover from it. 


“Oh! But you can’t get a hangover from good French champagne!” I’ve heard so many times. 

Well, yes you can.

Many years ago, when I was in my twenties, I worked as a sales executive for a hotel chain and one evening my arduous task was to represent the company at a Moet & Chandon product launch.
The bubbles flowed (freely) all night and by the time I’d finished my laborious duties and caught a cab home to my rented terrace house in Woollahra, I was a bit too wobbly to wrestle with our dodgy front door lock.

I hammered loudly on the door in an unproductive attempt to awaken my slumbering flatmates.

After thirty minutes of futile pounding the only thing left to do was sleep in my hatchback parked out the front and wait until daylight.

I woke up sweating like a small pig with the Nissan Pulsar’s gear stick grinding into the small of my back and the piercing sunlight accentuating my blinding headache.

Slowly I extricated myself from the Japanese rotisserie-on-wheels and after glancing both ways down the street to make sure there were no muggers around, resumed my (by now painful) pummeling until finally, both of my livid flatmates thrust open the door.

“What the hell’s wrong, Pinky?” they yelled, one of them standing in his pajamas with a cricket bat in his hand ready to fight off a home invasion.

They didn't believe me that the lock was jammed (probably because I reeked of ethanol urgently escaping my liver via my pores) and consequently neither flatmate spoke to me for the rest of the weekend.

The moral of the story is this; French champagne by any other name still reeks as badly as cheap wine the next morning and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Tastes nicer though.

*Most unfortunately, this is definitely not a sponsored post.