Champagne for dinner, anyone?

MENTION champagne and celebrations immediately come to mind - weddings, birthdays, anniversaries. It's something you make a toast with, have as an aperitif at the start of the meal, and that would seem to be its main function.

But as the sole drink of choice throughout an entire meal, instead of conventional white and red wines? Not so much. Perhaps, at a Chinese wedding or birthday dinner, which is less circumscribed by the norms that accompany a Western meal.

Of course, it is possible, with one or two injunctions and special attention to a few details, to serve champagne throughout, say, a French dinner. Champagne is basically white wine which, during production, is bottled and corked and undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle. Bubbles of carbon dioxide are formed in the wine as a result of this secondary fermentation, creating a "fizz".