If there is one thing anyone remembers from the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, it is the image of Marilyn Monroe grappling with the skirt of her white, halter-top dress. But I have a personal favorite scene from the movie that I propose to supplant this “iconic” bit. Invited by Tom Ewell to enjoy an evening of air-conditioned comfort in his apartment, Monroe graciously reciprocates by bringing with her a bottle of champagne and a bag of potato chips.
“Hey, did you ever try dunking a potato chip in champagne? It’s real crazy — here!” She dips a chip in his coupe glass and feeds it to him. “Isn’t that crazy?” she chirps.
“Yeah, pretty crazy,” says Ewell with a flat disappointment that she’s more interested in the combination of champagne and potato chips than in the Sergei Rachmaninoff he had put on the turntable in hopes of stoking romance.
I have to admit I’m solidly with Monroe. That is, I’m far more interested in the effervescent charm of champagne than the turgid, symphonic soup of Sergei. But what of champagne with potato chips, which Marilyn ranks right up there with air-conditioning on a sweltering city summer night? Is it “crazy” in the ‘50s slang sense Monroe employs or just plain crazy?
I aimed to find out — and did so by getting some wine-savvy friends together for a blind tasting. We munched on potato chips (the control in this particular experiment) and sipped excellent examples of the main styles of champagne. The tasting was in no way meant to determine which champagne was the best of the bunch but rather to determine which style of bubbly best complements the crunchy, salty, starchy snack food. The results ran contrary to conventional wisdom.
Far and away, the main sort of champagne made is the medium-dry style, designated “brut.” But at a decent wine shop, you should be able to find everything from bone-dry fizz (called “brut nature”) to sweet champagne, labeled “demi-sec.” Less sweet than demi-sec but sweeter than brut is “sec,” or “dry.” The sweetest stuff is “doux,” which is considered enough of a specialty that even otherwise well-stocked shops will be unembarrassed by having none on their shelves.
Whether a champagne is dry or sweet has little to do with the wine itself and mostly depends on how much sugar syrup (the dosage) is added to the bottle. Zero dosage gets you brut nature (some call it “ultra brut”), and to represent that fashionably austere style, I chose a bottle from Louis Roederer, a house that has helped pioneer superdry champagne. A small amount of sugar gives you brut, of which I chose two:
- Bollinger Special Cuvee, a fine example of a champagne in perfect balance
- Delamotte blanc de blancs, an elegant brut made exclusively from chardonnay grapes
Moving into the territory where there’s enough sugar to draw attention to itself, I poured the sec from Champagne Lanson (recognizably packaged in its opaque, white bottle) and what is perhaps the most readily available sweet champagne in the United States, the demi-sec from Veuve Clicquot.
Various food-and-wine pairing texts think of sugary fizz as a companion for chocolate mousse or other sweet treats. Robert Parker’s opinion is typical. “Genuinely sweet Champagne,” he wrote in Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide, is “suitable even for service with dessert.”
As admirable a palette as Mr. Parker possesses, I disagree with his advice that one pair sweet champagne with sweets. What we discovered in tasting the sparklers blind was that it was the noticeably sweet champagnes that went best with potato chips. Instead of matching sweet with sweet, far more appealing was to combine sweet with salty and savory. Even the most sophisticated oenophiles in our group, the ones who preferred the brut nature on first, unaccompanied sip, gravitated to the sweeter wines once they added chips to the equation.
Champagne and potato chips represent a melding of high and low, a perfectly American mix — an example of the enduring principle that opposites attract.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
