Part 3 - the cheese, meal and dessert

While Champagne is of course nice on its own, it's even better when paired with cheese and food that brings out its flavor. With Champagne being so light and delicate, you can see how having it with a rich steak buried in steak sauce might completely overwhelm its flavor. With Champagne, stay away from all red meat, vinegar, lemon, and tomatoes. Acidic foods really destroy the flavor of the wine.

Cheeses
For cheese, we tried the Champagnes with brie, gouda and mild cheddar. We found these went very well, especially with the more complex sparklers. The Beaumont did very well with food, because of its rich flavor. We also had loose almonds, which were quite exceptional with the wines.

Meal
We had a scallop dish, a shrimp with asparagus dish, and scallops-and-mushrooms. All went exceptionally well with the Champagnes. Be sure to stay away from using lemon, and instead stay with olive oils. Mushrooms especially did well. We had a broccoli and cheese quiche which was also quite perfect.

Dessert
For dessert, we had shortbread, which is a classic pairing. It was a great foil to the flavors of the Champagnes. We also had a Kugelhopf - a light almond cake which goes extremely well with Champagnes. This was truly delicious. We did try a rice pudding with the sparklers, which is recommended, but found the one we had was too sweet to go with all but the Pommery Pop. Try a not-sweet rice or plum pudding, if you enjoy those.

Strawberries
Finally, we experimented with plunking whole strawberries into the various Champagnes, as had been suggested by a wedding caterer. We found that whole strawberries gave off very little flavor - undoubtedly those skins are thick! We then started cutting them into pieces. We found that pieces of ripe strawberry began to turn the liquid pink and start to give an acidic-strawberry flavor to the liquid. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, acid and Champagne don't go together very well. This did really bad things to most of the wines, especially the Le Domain. However, with the Pommery Pop, since it was so sweet to start with, it came out reasonably well.

Part 1 - the Sparklers from Australia & California
Part 2 - the French Champagnes

The Basics of Champagne
Methode Champenoise - How Champagne is Made