A GP acquaintance of mine has a lady patient who is 92 years old. This lady lives in her own home, looks after herself with little outside help and has a houseful of great-grandchildren to visit every Sunday. According to my friend, she is more active and in better health than many of her 70-something patients.

When asked what it was that she thought kept her so healthy, the lady replied: "Oh, it's the glass of champagne I've been having for breakfast for the last 60-odd years!"

If my time is up sooner than average, I'm blaming my other half. He doesn't like champagne, or indeed any other sparkling wines. (Apparently, it's the bubbles he can't get to grips with!) So, to keep my consumption up I am forced to have lots of parties with plenty of champagne on offer. What a blow that is!

Champagne may well be a luxury but it doesn't have to be treated with kid gloves. You just need to bear a few things in mind.

A young champagne - or sparkling wine - should be served at around 8C. That's a bit chillier than a still white wine and so it needs to be in the fridge for a good three to four hours before opening.

Do not - as I have learnt from personal experience - ever be tempted to pop a bottle in the freezer for rapid chilling'. One of three things will happen. The best of the worst-case scenarios is that it's just too cold to enjoy.

Extreme cold dumbs down all the aromas, in much the same way that frozen peas are utterly flavourless until they are warmed up.

Secondly, a champagne cork is ludicrously hard to extract once it's been in the freezer and you will look a bit of a prat in front of your pals when you are wrestling with the bottle in the most unglamorous fashion possible.

Lastly - and yes, this has happened to me - you run the risk of completely forgetting you put it in there and the next time you open the freezer you are greeted with the sight of a frozen, exploded bottle and frosty champagne crystals covering every last crevice.

It's an automatic clean and defrost job' and if you make the discovery the morning after the night before, I can promise you that it's not something you will want to be doing at that moment.

d=3,2,1On a more positive note, if you have an ice-bucket and some ice, a bottle of bubbly can be chilled down in under half an hour, which is a great get out of jail card if you are not the world's best forward planner.

You might want to look like Lewis Hamilton when it comes to opening time but it's just a criminally wasteful thing to do.

I'm one of those drinkers that have to save every last drop of drinkable liquid and to do that, you need to do it the simple way: remove the wiring, hold the base of the bottle with one hand, grasp the cork in the palm of your other hand and twist the bottle.

There will be a light pop to accompany the satisfaction that that you have still got 75cl to enjoy!

A spoon - silver or otherwise - plopped in the bottle neck will not retain the effervescence of your champagne once it's been opened. If you really can't finish off the contents at the first sitting, you wll need to seal it with a champagne stopper.

Don't leave it too long though. I'd say you had really need to have supped the leftover spoils no more than a day or two later.

Beyond that, what else is there to say? I think I'll leave the last words to the economist John Maynard Keynes who once said: "My only regret in life is that I did not drink more champagne."

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