It was my birthday dinner, we were at a French restaurant, and the cocktails list was short, obscure, and unexciting, so, champagne it was. There were a couple of heart-stoppingly expensive reds and whites on the beverage menu, besides the selection of sparkling wines, but the champagnes were all about $100, and in fact, the one I chose was exactly $100. It was a Pommery Brut Royal, which Odin, our server, assured me was a popular choice. I’m not a champagne connoisseur or anything, but the first cold, fizzy sip told me that this champagne tasted as satisfying as I would expect it to taste. Subsequent sips become less and less satisfying as the champagne flattens in the glass; to get the most enjoyment out of one’s champagne, I suddenly remembered (it had been a minute since I last had champagne), one needs to keep sipping a freshly poured glass in quick succession, which means a light buzz early in the evening. The bottle-in-progress wasn’t on our table (there was barely enough surface area on that table for our food), and instead, our bottle of Brut Royal was kept iced in a bucket at a nearby hub for similar iced bottles of wine. Still, under Odin’s attentive eye, Charlie and I were never left with an empty champagne flute in our hands until we had finished the whole bottle.