The 30 participants each designed their own sparkling-wine blend from among 250 base wines, and attended three seminars on pairing sparkling wines with caviar, raw oysters, calamari and beef.
Most houses give the wine color by adding a portion of still, red Pinot Noir wine to the blend before the Champagne-to-be undergoes its second fermentation in the bottle, the one that produces the trapped bubbles.
This means that a great deal of the bad wine that tourists report being served is not really grape wine and may be a blend of a little Chinese grape wine and a lot of imported bulk wine of undetermined origin.