Champagne


Here's champagne to your real friends and real pain to our sham friends.

 

Here's to champagne, the drink divine,
That makes us forget all our troubles;
It's made of a dollar's worth of wine
And three dollars' worth of bubbles. 1

 

If ever ... in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won't believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert,—then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us,—when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity.
-Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

O thrice accursed
Be a champagne thirst,
When the price of beer's all we've got.

 

Some take their gold
In minted mold,
In minted mold,
And some in harps hereafter,
But give me mine
In bubbles fine
And keep the change in laughter.
-Oliver Herford

 

The bubble winked at me and said,
"You'll miss me, brother, when you're dead."
-OLIVER HERFORD

 

To the glorious, golden vintage of France,
Whose bubbling beauties our spirits entrance;
When with friends tried and true this nectar we quaff
We wish for a neck like a thirsty giraffe.

 

1This is the original version of this toast, at least 100 years old; so you may want to inflate the dollar amounts to update it.