Fizz

I'm blatantly cherry-picking here. Not what I write about, necessarily, but what I concentrate on planning for. And the things I'm planning for are the things I like and/or know stuff about, regardless of their place in the hierarchy of priorities.
Heaven knows I have nearly a year to sort this stuff out – so why am I think about the fizz first?
Well, it's probably to do with the fact that I like wine, and I've recently been discovering British wines. Also, I've just read Barbara Kingsolver's magnificent Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the account of her family's efforts to spend a year eating only food produced within their county. No mean feat in a temperate zone when the family includes a pre-teen and a teenage girl, neither of them creatures known for their openness to new food experiences. So with the allotment and all that, I'm quite into my local food at the moment.
So my first thoughts on the fizz front were English wines. The climate of the south of England is beautifully suited to producing nice dry white sparkling wines, and there are quite a few from vineyards and producers such as Three Choirs (www.threechoirs.com), Ridgeview (www.ridgeview.co.uk) and organic pioneers Sedlescombe (www.englishorganicwine.co.uk). English fizz has topped some international sparkling wine tasting competitions, putting some noses out of joint in more established regions of France and Spain. And in terms of affordability there's a range of prices from around eight quid a bottle to twenty, or thereabouts. I've had some of the very lovely prizewinning Ridgeview Bloomsbury, but that was because it was in my Wine Society English taster case and it's a bit out of my price range really.
So on a press trip to the very, very wonderful Cream O'Galloway organic farm and ice cream producers in (No! Wait for it!) Galloway, I was very happy to be introduced to Cairn O'Mohr fruit wines, made by the sister and brother-in-law of Cream O'Galloway co-founder David Finlay. Now I associate fruit wines with being a bit thick and gloopy and sweet – maybe nice for the occasional warming drink but not much else. But Cairn O'Mhor's elder and oakleaf fizz is a very drinkable dryish sparkling wine, made with ingredients from the Perthshire countryside and ordered via www.cairnomohr.co.uk. Which I will be doing, several cases of, in some months' time.
Be warned, though – don't read Ron's blog on the Cairn O'Mhor website while eating biscuits. The rants about his neighbours and many of the other people he comes across in life may induce chokings and coughings that might impact on the likelihood of your being around to get married at all...