Where Good Champagnes Go when they Die

We polished off the lasr bottle of 1990 Acacia Champagne on Christmas day and acquired a bit of an education in the process.  Mrs. B. and her buddy Marian had split a case of it a few years back and one of the bottles had wandered off into a far corner where it surfaced only this month--too late, in other words, for any likelihood of decent drinkability. Champagnes, like their owners, do not live forever and there comes  time when the only decent course is a kind of champagne euthanasia.

So we popped the cork and got our first surprise: it had changed color.  A purist would say it had "discolored," but that's too judgement.  We did have, in lieu of the familiar light yellow, a faint auburn or bronzy hue--in short, a lot like sherry.  Or rather, essentially like sherry: what we had here was a kind of bubbly champagne/sherry, with a bit of the taste and the charm of each of it ancestors.

The secret (per Marian, who speaks with more authority than we do): oxygen.  Apparently lots of sherries retain oxygen which, given time and quantity, promote a kind of aging--just as it does, dear reader, with you.  Usually it's a mistake, something fit to be dumped down the drain. But there are a number of sherries  in which the producer actually encourages the process, so as to give the product a tang all its own.  With just a hint of Yule log.  So, skoal!  No, wait, Hа здоровье!  Ah, well, you get the idea...