It’s a rotten job, but someone’s got to do it.  Richard McComb limbers up for summer with a Champagne marathon.

Nipping off to a Champagne tasting on a pleasant summer’s day might seem like a care-free, jolly assignment. All you have to do is get to the place, sit back, raise glasses, repeatedly, sip, take a stab at being engaging, and remain half-way coherent. It is a skill I have perfected over the years.

Do not be deceived, however. Trying Champagne is a serious business. In fact, it is deadly serious.

I am talking to François Bourde, the delightful head sommelier at Hotel Du Vin in Birmingham, about the pressure on cellar masters to get the correct blends, to achieve the exact levels of sugar and the right balance of yeast.

It must go wrong sometimes, I suggest. No one’s perfect, and even the French are prone to le cock up. So what happens when there is a blip, when the bubbles go flat?

“I would not like to think,” says François, his relaxed demeanour dissipating faster than a cork flying out of a winning Formula 1 racing driver’s magnum. François noticeably shudders, and turns pale. He looks like he needs a drink.

“I think someone would die,” he whispers.

Blimey. Death by a thousand bubbles. It is sobering stuff. Now I need a drink.

Fortunately there are eight bottles of champers on the table. Bolly or Tattinger? Gosset or Ruinart? Rose, or blanc de blanc? Decisions, decisions ... What a hellish job.

I have met up with François in the appropriately named Bubble Lounge to be educated in the ways of the fizz. The summer is here and Brits like nothing more than a glass of Champagne, and then another one.

We import more of the liquid gold than anywhere else in the world, and for many of us it remains the essence of picnic pleasure and cocktail hour. An absence of sun is one thing, but an English summer without Champagne would be truly unthinkable.

François, being a trooper, is doing things the correct way – tasting, swilling, sucking and spitting, the foaming spume flying into a natty silver gobbing bucket. He makes a wonderful noise as he jettisons the bubbly, achieving a visual effect reminiscent of putting one’s thumb over the end of a hosepipe. His aim, though, is faultlessly accurate.

Unfazed, I match the wily Frenchman, drink for drink, with one significant difference: I am swallowing. François says I can follow his lead.

Whatever next? Spit out Champagne? He cannot be serious. It has just gone 11 o’clock on an otherwise mundane Wednesday morning and I can think of no better way of perking up proceedings than lashing into some bubbly.

Besides, my oral aim is no match for the jet François achieves from his puckered lips, and I fear I might inadvertently shower myself, or worse still, one of the elegant, groomed ladies who breeze past our table.

In the Champagne swallowing stakes, I am far from alone among my countrymen and women. Last year, grape-lovers in the UK drank their way through nearly 39 million bottles of fizz, almost a quarter of total output..

The second biggest importer, the United States, managed a modest 21.7 million bottles and the Japanese bagged only nine million.

Such is the growing demand for the luxury drink that France is planning to expand the region in which Champagne can be made. If it goes ahead, it will be the first expansion of the fiercely guarded geographic designation for more than 80 years. As many as 40 new villages will be able to use the coveted Champagne name, the enlargement driven in part by the need to quench the thirst of millionaires in Russia, where the market for the drink grew by 41 per cent last year.

Thus far, Champagne appears to have stood up well in the face of the global economic downturn, and François has not detected any flagging of interest at Hotel du Vin.

A couple of months back, three customers’ Champagne tab topped £1,300. “It wasn’t a special celebration like a birthday,” says François of the trio’s binge. “It was probably a successful business deal.”

The Champagne Charleys started with three bottles of Bollinger Special Cuvee (total £192), followed by a single Moet et Chandon Brut (£69). 

Then they upped the stakes with a Dom Perignon 1983 (£390) and pushed the boat out with a Dom Perignon 1976 (£660).

“Since the credit crunch, I have sold all of my most expensive bottles of Champagne,” says François, rebutting talk of doom and gloom. He is already on the look out for Christmas bargains, when Champagne consumption in the UK tops summer quaffing.

“The English consume much more than the French,” says François. “Champagne houses will do anything for the English.”

He will be tasked with buying in £10,000 worth of Champagne for the Birmingham hotel, including Krug Grande Cuvee, a snip at £139 a throw. Last year, the hotel sold 60 bottles in December.

But I wonder what you get for one of the whoppers, like the £660 Dom Perignon. “When you open the bottle you can really feel the difference,” insists François. “The older wine is biscuity and buttery. It has great length.”

He says he is embarrassed to admit it, but his favourite ever Champagne is the 1959 Dom Perignon. “It is a big brand and it is a bit of a cliché,” says François.

“I was invited to Dom Perignon four years ago and tried 10 different vintages with the wine master. The ’59 was by far the best I have ever tried. Being that old, you would expect it to be flat with oxidisation, but it was very alert with buttery flavours.”

 What a dreadful existence, jetting around the world tasting wines. François apologises for being “not quite synchronised,” and explains he has just returned from a 10-day “working holiday” in Australia. The poor lad’s jet-lagged.

His trip featured four tastings a day, starting at 8am. I almost start to feel sorry for my Gallic brother, whose young age (he’s only 27) belies his vast knowledge. If you want to talk to someone with passion for his job, François has got it in chilled bucket-loads.

And so it is that he teaches me my first important lesson about Champagne – we tend to drink it far too cold.   My mentor explains that this is why fizzy lacks flavour and a knock-out bouquet – because often it has been chilled within an inch of freezing.

“It is like people who order Chablis at 3C,” explains François. “You might as well have a bottle of San Pellegrino.”

“Here, here,” I say, taking a cursory sip of the first glass.

The tip is borne out as we embark on our tasting odyssey. François insists we try each Champagne twice. Well, he is the expert, and I am not going to argue.

First, we try different Champagnes from glasses that have been left at room temperature for 20 or so minutes, and next it’s into the fizz straight from the bottle.

And so it is that the pre-poured Gosset Grand Rosé (list price £70 a bottle) has a wonderful long finish, not too moussey, stunning legs, just stunning, and hints of almonds and citrus across the back palate. Cheers! (My description here may be explained by the fact that the Gosset is the third bottle up and I am warming to the challenge.)

The Champagne does, however, lack fizz, and tastes like a different wine when glugged from a cool, newly opened bottle. It is not as fulsome in flavour but wow, feel those bubbles dance on the tongue.

“It is too cold,” declares François. “You lose flavour – and that is horrible!”

Yes, absolutely.

François believes the optimum temperature for Champagne should be 8-9C, but if it is served that “warm” then customers do tend to complain.

It is a baffling business and that, in a sense, is one of the joys of this drink – the appreciation of Champagne is mind-bogglingly subjective.

The Ruinart Blanc de Blanc (£65) is a case in point. It is one of François’s favourites – “Complex, I love it,” he says – but it is my least favoured of the day.

It has a lovely straw/golden colour but I just keep tasting cheesy notes. You win some, you lose some. You drink some more.

Later on, while my teacher is collecting another bottle (I’d tell you the number – the fifth, for example – but I’ve lost count) I pour another glass of the Ruinart. Maybe I was wrong. Was I too harsh in my judgment, a bit of a pikey?

Checking that François doesn’t catch me having a sly one, I scan the bar like a Secret Service agent and go through the ritual: pour, smell, slurp, aerate in mouth, swallow.

No. Still cheesy. The Ruinart Blanc to Blanc is a blank for me.

If Champagne seems like an expensive, luxury hobby, that is because it is. But the price of fine wine only serves to embellish the pleasure of finding a relative bargain, epitomised by Hotel du Vin’s own house Champagne, by Raoul Collet, a collective based to the north-east of Epernay and founded in 1921.

During a blind tasting of 100 wines by 10 hotel group sommeliers, Raoul Collet came out tops. It is sold at £34.50 a bottle and, for what my own opinion is worth, beats some established Champagne brands hands down. It is, for example, 20 quid cheaper than a bottle of Bolly.

Which in turn sparks off another realisation – that you don’t have to be flash, a footballer, a rap star, or a corporate lawyer, to enjoy Champagne.

Choosing a good bottle can be a minefield, but that’s what people like François are there for. Don’t be intimidated, tell a good sommelier what you want, and he’ll find it.

Champagne, above all else, has an emotional attachment, and mood – and, in all honesty, quantity – does appear to affect the tasting experience.

Hearing myself gabble on, I tell my guide that the Bollinger doesn’t taste like I had expected it to taste, that I associate it with Christmas, and turkey and the smell of granny’s slippers.

“But of course, you are working today. It will taste different,” says François. “And it will be different if you taste it when you are with a lover.”

Don’t worry, mon frère, I know exactly what you mean.

After a blissful morning tasting Champagne, humdrum narrative discourse is redundant. Poetry, dear boy is the only thing that makes sense.

Now, which bubbler are we trying next?