Sparkling wine is not just for celebrations

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Aromas of fresh-cut flowers, ripe citrus fruit and green apples. It has balanced flavors of ripe lemons, limes, sweet tangerines and kiwi while maintaining an undertone of chalky minerals and hint of toasted bread.

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Amazon has finished issuing credit on all those well-meant-but-ultimately-returned gifts. The New Year’s Eve confetti has been swept away. Santa is sipping a well-deserved mojito in the Caribbean. The holidays are officially over.

Time to break out the bubbly? But of course.

As dense as my wife claims I am, I do understand the celebratory nature of one of my favorite styles of wine. The bubbles. The popping of the cork. Those nifty, tall glasses. I get it. Sparkling wine is fun and remains the go-to wine for celebrations since the time of Dom Perginon, who supposedly declared upon his first sip of Champagne: “I’m drinking the stars.”

Of the 18.4 million cases of sparkling wine consumed by Americans in 2013, about 9 million of them were popped open in last three months of the year, with preponderance around the holidays, according to The Wine Institute. For most, I’m guessing, this may be the only time of year they had a glass or two of bubbly. That’s a shame.

News flash: Sparkling wine is yummy. That is if you can somehow overlook all the distractions of the popping and the foaming and the gentle bubbles rising up in your glass. It is just as yummy in December and the early hours of Jan. 1 as it is on a Thursday in February, especially if there is food involved.

Now, I know a lot of those sports championship winners out there are wiping the stinging, bubbly liquid out of their eyes and saying to themselves, “Wait. You can drink this stuff, too?”

In a word, yes. And while it does make for a fine celebratory locker room shampoo, sparkling wine sparkles best when paired with food.

Sparkling wine accentuates the flavors in food for the same reason it stings the eyes of those standing in the winner’s circle. All sparkling wine is naturally high in acidity because its grapes are harvested when they are slightly under-ripe and replete with malic acid. (That’s the stuff that makes your cheeks flush when you bite into a tart Granny Smith apple.) Sparkling wine is so acidic that most winemakers add just a touch of sweetness before they put the cork in the bottle to make a more balanced wine. It’s the acidity in wines that brighten flavors of food they are paired with.

While not my first choice for a medium-rare New York strip, sparkling wine is a first-line choice for any seafood, especially seafood that comes out of a shell or walks around on spindly legs and has big, red claws when they are cooked (or not cooked). I love sparkling wine, especially those from Champagne, with sashimi and ceviche. And as I’ve mentioned in these columns more than once, there is no better wine pairing for southern fried chicken than rosé sparkling wine.

As a state and a metropolitan region, Georgia and Atlanta really need to get their acts together when it comes to bubbly. Californians drank more than 3.6 million cases of sparkling wine in 2013 and ranked first in a report published by the Beverage Information Group. While higher consumption paralleled states with larger populations, as a region, the Atlanta metro area didn’t make the list, which included only the top-10 metro areas. Boston, San Diego and Detroit ranked higher than Atlanta.

Detroit! We can do better than Detroit, right?

Let’s enter the new year with an enlightened attitude about wines with bubbles in them. My challenge to you is to open a bottle tonight to celebrate nothing. It is time as a state and a region that we stop and celebrate nothing with sparkling wine.