Which alcoholic beverage — don’t you just love the word beverage? — has the least calories? Vodka, obviously. Hence the Skinny Bitch (vodka, soda water and a twist of lime).
Thing is, supposing, like me, you think of vodka as being a bit hardcore? I have a friend who had a friend in rehab who used to mix it with Benylin cough syrup and for some reason, that image has always stuck. My children, meanwhile, think it is very weird, the idea of their mother drinking vodka. Especially if she orders more than one.
So then, this dilemma of maintaining one’s, um, girlish figure and being a highly functioning alcoholic. What to do, what to do? Red wine gives one red veins, white wine is just too clichéd for words (don’t even talk about rose it’s WAY too fattening), so really there is only one alternative left… and that is champagne.
But I don’t LIKE champagne. Or “poo” as we used to call it in the early ’90s. It reminds me too much of all those dreaded press launches I had to go to when I first started out in magazines, all those over made-up PR ladies with lipstick on their teeth and slightly skew-whiff hair-dos and so forth…
At least, I didn’t think I liked it until a bottle of the stuff arrived on my doorstep the other morning to try out. Produced by the French artisan winemaker Alexandre Penet and launched by ex BBC broadcaster Amanda Thomson, No Added Sugar (Low Dosage) Skinny Champagne: I seriously think it is going to be the NEW THING.
Part of the reason I’ve never liked champagne is the sick-y breath it gives you straight afterwards. There’s also the stonking headache you can get the day after if it’s not super, super expensive. But here’s the thing. Because this Grande Cuvee champagne is so very, very very BRUT, you don’t get the sickly sweet taste and nor do you wake up feeling you need to take the whole day off or you seriously might die. More importantly, IT IS ONLY 78 CALORIES A GLASS (a bit less than a single shot of vodka).