C'mon, Alice, Veuve Clicquot is not undrinkable. The 9 Euros a bottle special new year offer in my local supermarket (in France!) may be undrinkable.
I had some VC recently, it's three stars out of five, 15 out of 20, or around 80 out of a hundred, whichever scale you're using. It's inoffensive, undistinguished and therefore ideal for a brunch for 40 people who didn't come for the wine anyway. And I bet most people there couldn't tell Krug from diet coke.

Don't get me started, Alice. "The appearance of luxe" is fast becoming what the wine business thrives on. Think $1500 bottles of Musigny (futures, no less), think Cristal, think... BRANDING. The more expensive, the better, because Champagne, luxury liner Burgundy and Bordeaux have become vehicles for the public display of conspicuous consumption, so you had damned well better have a distinctive name and label on the bottle so onlookers will KNOW, without doubt and without additional fanfare, that you just burned up more money on a bottle of juice than they make in a week. Is LVMH making scads of money pursuing this marketing strategy? Sure it is. If you read the front page of the WSJ a couple of days ago, you also know that LVMH is fast tying up a lot of the output of the Champagne district for the next couple of decades so it can grow its business. Part of the problem with mass marketing is that you've got to be able to produce a mass market product and then expand your brands into various niches, up and down market. Tough to do when there is a finite quantity of fruit and land to grow it on. So trust LVMH to use its clout to get the vignoble expanded. Is this troubling? Sure it is. But it's basically what the big bubbly houses have been doing since they got started. And the positive side is that folks like you and I will continue to look for grower champagnes and thereby permit some of the little guys to give LVMH the single finger salute when it comes around waving a long term contract.

All that said, I have to agree that while there are plenty of better Champs out there, there is really nothing wrong with the general run of big house bubblies, most of the time anyway. I've found VC NV to be very unpredictable over the past few years. At times it is so characterless it seems just this side of sparkling water, at others it is actually crisp, clean, bone dry and perfectly elegant. Wouldn't be my choice, mind you, but it surely isn't "undrinkable." Undrinkable is The Frigid Mallard. Or Moet White Star.

Sometimes the best wine to serve is the one the drinker is able to enjoy the most. I used to always give my Japanese colleagues a bottle of Opus One. While I would have loved to have given them a great vintage of Les Amoureuses or Conterno, they wouldn't have appreciated it as much regardless of what was in the bottle. They really treasured and appreciated the Opus One and got great pleasure out of drinking it. For the most part, an unknown (to them) wine would be wasted. I'd rather drink it.

A couple of weeks before Christmas the Sunday NY Times had a fat magazine section that was 80% ads. Ads for total crap that no human on earth needed. I'm sure many gift boxes contained a lot of that crap. Marketers know how to get us excited. We all want something, whatever it might be, that accords us a sense of security because of how it will be perceived rather than because of its intrinsic worth. If you can fill your personal void with $35 acid juice, lucky you. Cheaper than a German car. Bet most people at this affair were pleased, even impressed. I'd say your friend got exactly what she wanted.

I would not necessarily attribute bottle variation in Champagne from the largest producers to storage or bottle age issues. I believe I can tell the difference between bubbly that could use a year or three of time in the cellar, bubbly that has spent too much time in too warm a warehouse, and bubbly that just doesn't have what it takes.

Most NV bubbly, in my view, is released before it really ought to be, driven by the time value of money and other costs of holding inventory. (And also driven by a mass market taste for light and bright Champagne).

I typically stock up on a selection of NV bubbly from perhaps a dozen different sources (some of the houses and some grower bottlings) and rotate the stock in my cellar so I am drinking NV that I bought 2 to 5 years before I open it. I typically hold vintage bubbles for 5 to 10 years (or more), depending on my ability to lay off of it and my ability to find it after it ends up stashed in some nook or cranny in my completely out of control cellar.

The point being I've got some degree of palate memory for what is reasonably attributable to storage conditions and bottle age, and what is not.

No, I think the bottle variation I have experienced with NV from big house marques like VC is because, try as they might, they simply cannot maintain a consistent house style given the enormous (and rapidly growing) volume of wine the big houses have to crank out. In the case of the LVMH brands, we know they are on a continual quest for new sources of grapes to try to expand production and sales. I imagine they have one helluva time trying to blend for consistency in the NV and at times have to cut corners like crazy to get "product" out the door.

I pretty much know when I open a bottle of Bolly that it will taste by God like Bolly -- nuts and bisquits and lemon curd all over the place -- unless, as you say, it sat too close to a radiator for too long and simply tastes like butterscotch.

But with VC, I haven't a clue anymore. Admittedly, I rarely drink VC NV, except when, as it often does, the orange label turns up at a party. And what I've noticed over the past few years is the wine seems to have completely lost a sense of direction. I get the feeling there is no longer a house style -- instead, you can almost taste the strain to meet demand and keep the CFO happy. What I object to most is the complete lack of substance. As I observed before, I've had examples of VC NV in recent years that seemed ridiculously dilute. That's not storage, bottle age or even dosage. That's quite simply sacrificing quality for quantity -- in the vineyard and in the cellar.

BTW, I also often buy NV on price. When a discounter offers me Piper (or Feuillate, or...) for $20 a bottle, which does happen now and then, by gosh I bag a case or two and pour it without tears when the inlaws come over, or grab a couple bottles to take to a dinner party where I know going in it will be head and shoulders the best wine on the table. When the crowd is drinking Yellow Tail, Piper will do just fine.

So go ahead and shoot me, Alice!