Naked Christmas: Presents, plonk and a pliosaur

Now, many of us will have the opportunity over the coming days to sit down with a nice glass of wine or two. And, arguably, one of the best ways to get dinner off to a flying start is to pop open a bottle of bubbly. But which one, and why does the fizz do the bizz, or is it all just in our heads? As well as being an internationally regarded immunologist, Cambridge University’s Clare Bryant is also a wine buff, and she took me to her local eatery in Saffron Walden, Chaters, which also doubles as a distillery!

Clare - It's that time of year, Chris. And one of the things that I think is particularly interesting about champagne is the whole history and science behind it. And what does a bubble do? So there's two elements to this - there's the methode traditionnelle, which is a way in which champagne is made, but it's also a way in which many sparkling wines across the world are made, including England, which produces particularly fine sparkling wine. So today we'll compare champagne with an English sparkling wine.

Chris - I'm looking forward to that bit. How far back in history does it go?

Clare - In the 1600s, the champenoise, the people in Champagne, decided to make wine to try and compete with people in Burgundy. They were making wine with one particular grape, pinot noir. And along the way, one of the things they found was, because they were farther North than Burgundy, it was colder during the fermentation process. They were getting a stopping point when the wine was too cold. And then, when the temperature warmed up again, they were getting fermentation occurring again. What they found is that sometimes their wines were fizzy. Now, initially, this caused total horror because this was a wine fault. And then after a while they tried marketing it, in particular to us Brits and the Brits decided they really liked fizzy wine. By around the mid 17, 1800s, sparkling wine was something they were working hard to produce. The challenge was, though, to get nice sparkling wine, you need to have the fermentation in the bottle, which means the bottles need to be very strong. So it wasn't really until about the early 1900s manufacturing processes started to produce bottles that were strong enough. After that production kicked off the champenoise were in business.

Chris - What's involved in actually making it, though?

Clare - So there's two phases of fermentation which is absolutely key. So you harvest the grapes, of which there are three usually, pinot noir, pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay, and they make what's called a base wine. Then they put this wine into bottles with some more yeast, a little bit of sugar, and then the wine undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle and that's what generates the gas. After a while, they take the old yeast out and then they dose it up with a little bit more sugar sometimes to alter the sweetness of the wine, and that's it.

Chris - How did the bubbles contribute to the wine, though? Is it just that it's fizzy and frothy and it looks exciting? Or do they actually affect the chemistry?

Clare - It actually contributes to the taste and the flavour because the bubbles act as a carrier. They carry volatile molecules all wrapped up in these little parcels of carbon dioxide and then, as the bubbles burst, they release the smell and the aromas and everything that's associated with the wine in a very concentrated way across the top of your glass. So whereby when you normally taste a glass of wine you might swirl the glass to try and get the aromas out, you don't need to do that with champagne. That's what the bubbles do and that's what makes the wine so exciting.

Chris - I think we should try some. What have you brought along for us to consider?

Clare - So I've bought two half bottles of wine, today.

Chris - Where's the other half? Have you already drunk it?

Clare - Chris, don't be so churlish. It's lunchtime. So what I've bought is a half bottle of rose champagne because rose champagne is very interesting. That's pink champagne. What they do to make rose champagne is they add a little bit of still red wine to the bottle to give it a pink colour. So that's a traditional champagne from France, and then I've also bought a half bottle of white sparkling wine from Nyetimber, which is one of the oldest English champagne makers in the UK.

Chris - I think we should pop some corks, but we've got to be careful how we do this, Clare, because there's a paper in the British Medical Journal for Christmas that cautions us how to safely open champagne bottles because apparently a very high proportion of eye injuries are caused by escaping champagne corks.

Clare - Yeah, I saw that. That's from our colleagues in ophthalmology. You can totally understand that because a cork comes out at quite a rate. But actually their advice on how to uncork a bottle of champagne is very relevant to maintaining the flavour as well because if you fire that cork out at a great rate of knots, you are firing out lots and lots of CO2 and you're reducing the flavour. So the best way to do it is to take the wire off, pop a tea towel over the top, gradually ease out the cork, and then gently pour your wine, preferably down the side of the glass because if you fire it into the middle of the grass you're losing your bubbles. There's about a million bubbles in a hundred mils of champagne, so you want to keep those as much as possible.

Chris - It sounds like the guy who counted the perforations in a Tetley tea bag, but which one are we going to start with?

Clare - Would you like to start with the rose? That's how you open a bottle of champagne, Chris.

Chris - I'm impressed. None wasted.

Clare - None wasted.

Chris - Right, so I've got a couple of glasses. That's one. Beautiful.

Clare - As you can see Chris, in your glass, there's little bubbles just coming up to the top and they'll be bringing all the aromas up to the surface. Take a deep sniff.

Chris - It's a very fruity number, there.

Clare - Should be fruits, cherries, cranberries, that kind of flavour actually in there. Tell me what you taste.

Chris - It's beautiful. Cherries. I can see why they're saying cranberries and cherries. Didn't get the smell so much, but the flavour: big hit. Beautiful.

Clare - And I can taste little toastiness on the back as well. And it's that combination of fruit toast and the bubbles and you can feel the bubbles on your tongue as well. That, coupled to the texture, that's what really helps carry the wine. So yeah, it is delicious, I have to say.

Chris - I probably wouldn't have considered something like that a rose, and I didn't realise that they made it by adding red wine to the mixture, and it's delightful.

Clare - Yeah, it'll work really well with smoked salmon. Any of the usual, traditional starters.

Chris - Let's try the English one. I'm really keen to get stuck into that and see how it compares. The people having lunch in here are going think we've got a lot to celebrate, Clare

Clare - We survived another year, Chris - there's a lot to celebrate! So you can see something else interesting here as well, Chris, which is you can see a sort of mousse-y stuff that comes out on the top. So that froth is due to the protein in the wine, actually. Have a sniff.

Chris - This doesn't have the same fruitiness. This is more of just what a white wine would smell like. To me, it doesn't have that same fruity sparkle.

Clare - Yeah, I agree. There's no cherries there, right?

Chris - It's nice, though. It's fruity, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what fruit. Apples maybe. It's certainly fruity, but it doesn't have the intrigue that the other one did. That tantalised my taste buds.

Clare - I would agree. This is more of a chardonnay flavour through it. It's a different beast, but it's a beautiful beast. They're two different things. That's one of the reasons why I bought them, because I knew the flavour profile would be different.

Chris - And lastly, what should I eat with this? Because there's a lot made of horses for courses, wines for different dishes. So what's a really good compliment for these sorts of beverages?

Clare - So one of the things that's very interesting about champagne is that actually it balances out with quite a lot of different foods, but in particular it works well with the umami food profiles. So things like smoked salmon, which has been an obvious pairing as you know, but it's the kind of complex flavour, the umami flavour, that you get with smoked salmon, but also with ham and various other savouries. And in fact, in front of us, we have a little bit of ham and we shall shortly try it with the sparkling wines and see what we think.

Chris - So there you go. We've sorted out at least the start to our Christmas dinner this year. Cheers Clare, thank you very much for doing this for us, and now I know a bit more about champagne. I'm really grateful.

Clare - Happy Christmas, Chris.

Now, those of us that have spent the past few weeks buying presents for loved ones will know that it can feel like one of the most stressful parts of Christmas. So, is there anything we can do to make it a bit easier on ourselves? I’ve been speaking to David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life...

David - I think the most important thing to remember, and it can actually be a source of great comfort to us, is that we don't have to worry too much about the expense of the present. This is one of our key biases is that we think the value is all important, especially if we're giving a present to a wealthy person, for example, or if we think that it's going to be compared to all of the other presents that someone is receiving. But a ton of research shows expense just really isn't a big priority for the person receiving the gift. They care much more about how personal it is, what it means to them and the other person, than the price tag. It really isn't all about the price tag at Christmas.

Chris - So what sorts of things should I weigh up then? If I want to go and buy a gift for, say, my wife or my brother?

David - One of the things that we pay far too much attention to, apart from expense, is the surprise factor. We really want to see that huge smile or that little bit of shock on the day as someone opens their present. What the research shows is that might delight someone in the moment but, in general, they're going to be far less satisfied with those kinds of surprising gifts than something that would be really useful, that would really contribute to their happiness in the long term. A simple example of this is that you we might buy a showy bunch of flowers that's already in bloom, but people are generally much more satisfied and feel closer to the gift giver if you buy them something that's going to bring happiness day after day over a longer period of time. So rather than that bouquet of flowers, you might buy them a house plant, for example.

Chris - Someone wrote to one of the newspapers the other day and said that her husband got her a chainsaw for Christmas. This can backfire, can't it? Because you end up with the gift that the person wants themselves and they give you saying, "This'll be really useful in the garden," thinking, "Actually that's quite what I want." And it's also kind of saying, "You don't do enough in the garden" if you're not careful.

David - Lots of gifts can be backhanded compliments. They can really carry these mixed messages. I think our egotistical tendencies can play a big role in other ways as well. So, for example, there's research showing that we're really reluctant to buy someone a better version of a product than the one that we own ourselves. In fact, we might just not buy them that product at all. So it might be that you're buying someone in your family a new food mixer and you'll get the version that's slightly worse than the one that you own because you don't want to feel in competition with them - you don't want to be jealous of the gift you're giving.

Chris - Someone said to me once that other gifts that tend to go down very well are experiences. When you send someone off to a spa, or to do that jump out of an aeroplane they've always wanted to do, or that hot air balloon ride?

David - Yeah, that's exactly right. People really value personal growth and that's one of the most important things within any relationship: giving people the opportunity for personal growth. We call that self expansion. Buying these experiences is one way that we can contribute to that. There's lots of research showing that when people do create opportunities for self expansion, it brings people closer together. That trip to the spa, or tickets to a concert, you've got all the anticipation before that event happens - so that's bringing a lot of happiness to the person - and then it's sticking in their memories for months and years afterwards.

Chris - Any tips for, if we flip this round for a moment and say, we are the recipient, not the giver, and we get something that really does leave us a bit lukewarm, any tips on to how to handle that?

David - So I think this comes down again to our egocentric thinking. We are thinking so much about our own disappointment that we actually forget that the person buying the gift, it might be mistaken, but they probably did put a lot of thought into it. Just trying to consider what options they might have been looking at and how much time they might have spent thinking about this that soon shifts those feelings of disappointment into a feeling of gratitude that at least they bothered, at least they had you in their mind when they were going about their Christmas shopping.

Chris - So think about that as you unwrap what you know is a bit of a naff present. You must have an example yourself of a particularly fantastic present you've had and a particularly awful present you've had. Care to share?

David - I will do. First, the awful present, and I think this is a really good demonstration of that last point. It was my birthday actually, and one of my friends sent me in the post a secondhand cassette tape of Belinda Carlisle. I wasn't a Belinda Carlisle fan, really. This was in the 2000's when cassettes weren't really listened too much. I really struggled to think why she had chosen that. But I think reading this research, I'm sure that she felt there was some personal connection there, that maybe in the past I've mentioned that one particular song or that we'd heard it at a party together and it brought back lots of memories to her that it just didn't bring back to me. But actually, I think she really made an effort there and I should have been more grateful at the time rather than expressing my disappointment. In terms of the kind of best present I've received, that was my electric piano from my parents when I turned 18 and now, 20 years later, and it's still something that brings me great pleasure and it's something that, every time I use it, I remember my parents, I remember in that event how exciting it was to open it, and it really does bring me closer to them even when they're far away.