I don't drink champagne or sparkling wine very often.  It's not that I have anything against either of them, but I don't go out of my way purchase them.  In bars they charge you $5 or more a glass, and for that amount of cash I can have two or three pints of beer.  Usually I have champagne or sparkling wine when it's being handed out for free...Like at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, at wine and cheese affairs, and the occasional corporate party.

Friday night was a quiet night and I had no intentions of boozing it up.  But my options for filling the eve were few.  I had no invites to parties that night, my eyes were too exhausted to read, and the best thing on television was a three-hour documentary on Chester A. Arthur.  Worse, my heart was pining because my darling Zelduh was in Mexico.  She left Monday morn and had only contacted me once since.  Feeling lonely and tormented by visions of her either being robbed by thugs or frolicking nude with men who looked something like Antonio Banderas, I made the fateful trudge to the fridge.

There were two beers and the bottle of Freixenet.  One of the beers was rotten, so I pounded the other one and then went for sparkling wine.

It had been lurking in there for about a month, the relic of a party we'd thrown.  After firing the cork into my ceiling, I dumped the better part of the bottle into a fluted 12-ounce glass.  Two of these and the 750-ml bottle would be polished off.

Freixenet was nice on the eye- a pale, pale white-yellow, lighter than gingerale.  While it was indeed a sparkling wine, it wasn't bubbling all over the place.  Though I drank the whole bottle in a hurry, it didn't make me belch. 

Freixenet (which comes from Spain) claims to be extra-dry, but it isn't dreadfully so.  Too often I've had extra dry champagne that evaporates upon sipping and leaves the tongue feeling throttled with a nauseating bitterness.  I got none of this from Freixenet.  Instead I tasted nearly nothing.  "Yes," I told myself after each drink, "this is sparkling wine...Nothing like a Chardonnay or any regular white wine...But what does it taste like?  Well, not much."   While dearth of taste shouldn't be celebrated, considering the number of bad tasting spirits I've encountered, it is a victory of sorts.

Fetching $12 or so at the local hooch wholesaler, it's an unexceptional but inoffensive sparkling wine. You can take it to a party and do yourself and your host no dishonor 

Though the Freixenet did lighten my mood for a time, it and the whiskey and numerous Heinekens I drank thereafter did produce a gruesome hangover.  But that's o.k.- it got my mind off Zelduh.  (Rating: ***)