Summer is the season for champagne. The Rolls-Royce of bubbles continues to turn every summer event, from a posh picnic at Glyndebourne to a rewarding, end-of-the-week glass with Friday night’s takeaway pizza, into a memorable, body-and-soul-restoring event. Champagne’s astonishing chameleon-like ability to rise to every occasion and to bring the best out in everybody, provided you make some effort with price and style (see six of the best below), sets it apart from every other wine. The Prince of Wales, it is rumoured, grumbles about champagne’s mildly embarrassing burp-making qualities and saves the wine instead for high days and holidays. The rest of us rather enjoy those clever little bubbles that pass straight through the stomach wall and into the bloodstream, explaining the joyous instant lift that you get from drinking champagne.

Even opening a bottle of champagne is special with all that expectant fumbling with the foil and wire muzzle before the sudden enjoyable pop and whoosh of bubbles. Triumphant racing drivers and show-offs are fond of spraying themselves with champagne, and all those dark spotty patches on restaurant ceilings are where clumsy waiters have let corks fly dangerously and unnecessarily. But please: as the Champenois have spent years trying to get the bubbles into your glass, don’t follow suit. The process takes a costly and laborious second fermentation in the bottle, where the carbon dioxide bubbles are dissolved into the wine, and then months of ageing and riddling the sludgy, yeasty deposit down into the neck, where it is frozen and removed, to give champagne its fizz and hall-mark intriguing, complex flavours. Lots of folk are frightened of opening bottles of sparkling wine, including my sister, who has watched me often enough to know how. All it takes is to keep your thumb firmly on the top of the cork and once the foil and wire is removed, to continue to hold the cork in one hand and gently twist the bottle with the other hand. Once you feel the cork start to move, tighten your grip so that the gas gradually escapes, leaving you and yours home and dry with a full bottle of bubbly.

Champagne, as befits its aristocratic nature, is the most sensitive of all wines, especially to heat and light. Do not leave it in the fridge until it has dropped to a tastebud-numbing ice-lolly level – an hour in the cool, or a ten-minute dip in a bucket with ice, should be plenty to reach the optimum 45F or 7.5C temperature. Nor is it the bottle to buy from a hot sunlit shop window, or those that are warm to the touch under supermarket lights. And don’t kill your fizz by serving it in those silly saucer-shaped glasses that enjoyed a renaissance a few years ago, supposedly modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breasts, that flatten both bubbles and bouquet. The best champagne glass is one of the cheapest: a tall, thin, plain tulip-shaped glass, or flute, that encourages the bubbles to spiral to the surface in a steady, mesmerising stream.

Classy but not prim, champagne helpfully takes happily to all sorts of summer mixes. The best are made with fresh fruit juice and most of summer’s soft fruits, provided you remove the pips, combine all too seductively with champagne. My favourite is a fifty-fifty blend of fresh peach juice, preferably white peaches, and fizz creating that delectable summer drink, a Bellini.

Replace the peach juice with fresh orange juice and you have a mimosa, or buck’s fizz, and a fifty-fifty mix of champagne with Guin-ness makes a gorgeous, creamy black velvet. Avoid at all costs the classic champagne cocktail, a truly evil blend of cheap brandy and bubbles, which kills both drinks and results in the mother of all hangovers. With practicalities out of the way, what else is it that makes champagne unique? Champagne’s cool northern climate and soft, chalky subsoil naturally produces the high-acid, low-alcohol, intensely flavoursome but not overblown base wines that make the best sparklers. Centuries of natural selection have seen Champagne’s low rolling chalky hills become home to the region’s three main grapes that together with the chef de cave, or wine-maker, create the perfect base for a sparkling wine blend. Chardonnay contributes elegance and freshness to the blend, pinot noir gives backbone, strength and depth of fla-vour, while the aromatic, soft, quick-maturing pinot meunier marries the other two grapes together.

Other countries in the world have tried hard to imitate champagne but so far none has managed to match, let alone surpass, the finest vintage and prestige, or deluxe blends. On the nonvintage quality rungs below, a few producers, using the same grapes and the same traditional méthode champenoise, in places such as California, the Antipodes and even England, have managed to produce sparkling wines that match the cheaper, nonvintage wines from lesser champagne houses. Generally, you have to pay a lot more for the privilege of drinking these fancy champagne taste-alikes priced around £20 plus, that’s about £5-£7 more than you would expect to pay for the real thing. Not much of a substitute, but of interest to experimental wine nuts seeking something new.

All sparkling wine, including champagne, goes up and down in quality like a yo-yo and it’s a shame to note that Spain’s méthode champenoise, cava, with few exceptions, does not cut it any more. Waitrose’s vibrant, peppery Cava La Rosca (£4.49) and Majestic’s lively, spicy Calamino Brut (buy two for £3.99 each) are welcome exceptions to the surly, oily cava rule. Both make good big-party and wedding fodder. Prosecco suits some but I find it too sweet and obviously marzipan-scented for my liking. And the latest crop of popular Kiwi and Aussie sparklers are pricey, but alas, mostly rubbish. Summer 2007’s best smart alternative to champagne is the non vintage Sparkling White Burgundy made exclusively from the chardonnay grape and delivering plenty of agreeable, lively, appley, waxy fruit for £7.99 at Waitrose.

Given the Great British Public’s impressive enthusiasm for champagne, we drank a whopping 40 million bottles last year, twice that of our nearest competitor, the US, and way ahead of our other arch-rival for the title of champagne swigger of the year, Germany, with just 10 million bottles. France still drinks more champagne than anyone else, but domestic consumption has been falling as export markets grow. What the UK won’t be facing this year though is a champagne shortage. The Champenois have always been keen to keep what they view as the discerning British champagne drinker happy in preference to other tiny, emerging markets.

Talks of a shortage are also unfounded when there is around three-and-a-half years of stock, from a series of bumper years and reserve wines specially set aside for any short-fall harvests, in the Champenois’ cellars – easily enough to cover global demand. As usual French vigneronsare keen to hype and distort vintage prospects to their financial advantage, even when they still have the grapes hanging on the vines. And those growers in Champagne must be some of the wealthiest and opportunistic in France. The truth is that the grape growers in Champagne are sitting on stock for tax reasons alone, and as the likelihood is that they will be forced to release them when demand dictates, there is no chance of anyone running out of supplies.

And I’ll drink to that.

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue