Say champagne to your tapas

Champagne works just perfect as an aperitif. Served with fingerfood tapas style instead of or as part of the starter, it's even better.

The very basic possibilities are crisps, olives, slices of good sausages and/or cheeses. The variations are just about infinite.

I usually upgrade, inspired by some of the following themes:

• Crudité: raw vegetables - carrots, tomatoes, cucumber, cauliflower -with dip and/or NEW RECIPIE: tapenade
  
• Bread with a little something: Blinis, grissini, little pieces of bread, oatcakes with caviar of aubergine, tapenade, fish rillettes, tuna mousse, tomatopesto and so on.
  
• Cake salé - salty cake, that may contain feta-cheese, red pebbers, smoked ham or salmon, olives, nuts and much more.

Dry or sweet champagne?
These little dishes work fine with dry champagnes, that is variations within the brut and ultra brut-ranges with a dosage of 15 grams of sugar per liter or less. They are the most common ones anyway.

In Denmark a house like Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin sell quite a few bottles of the sweeter demi-sec, probably because of the immortal - apparently - Danish tradition of serving the champagne with sweet almond cake New Year's Eve.