Above: in the greenroom at Mercury Lounge, I discovered — to my surprise — that Bollinger tastes good in a plastic cup.

Sexy chanteuse Céline Dijon was upstaged at Nous Non Plus’ Mercury Lounge show last night by a bottle of our favorite champagne Bollinger. About halfway into our set, bassist and chanteur Jean-Luc Retard called for a small celebration of our recent French tour with a bottle of Bollinger Special Cuvée.

I have always been a huge fan of Bollinger and the new Nous Non Plus disk will feature a song that we’ve written about our favorite Champagne (out in Spring 08?). For my birthday this year, the band gave me a bottle of Grande Année 1999.

Good stemware is hard to find in rock clubs and so plastic beer cups served as a substitute for crystal flutes last night. At first I was disappointed to see how the fizziness exploded and lost its concentration in the wide-mouthed drinking vessels. But I was pleasantly surprised when the wine reached my lips and the aroma hit my nose: the expanded diameter of the plastic chalice seemed to intensify the classically yeasty notes of the wine.

My current day gig working as marketing director for the restaurant group that owns and manages Centovini Restaurant and Bar in SoHo has brought me into contact on numerous occasions with SoHo interior design guru Murray Moss, owner of the eponymous store, the restaurant’s designer and one of the partners, and undeniably one of the nicest taste-makers I have met in my time in NYC. On those rare nights where I have had the chance to sit down with him over dinner at the restaurant (usually in the company of a writer or two), the conversation has often turned to a discussion of the merits of aesthetically pleasing stemware over “technical” stemware. Murray often challenges conventional wine-wine glass pairings and many of the wines at Centovini are served in stemware that transgresses standards complacently embraced by the wine industry.

My experience last night made me question the wisdom of the obligatory flute and think that Murray is right to lament the absence of the coupe à champagne, simply called a “coupe” in English (some believe that the coupe was modeled after Marie Antoinette’s breasts, a apocryphal legend that is surely false but fun to consider nonetheless).

Click here for a Newsweek article featuring Murray subtitled “It’s not about the glass is half full or half empty—it’s about the glass itself” (you have to click on the image of Murray to get the article to load).

Maybe it was the steamy August night, maybe the hot stage lights at Mercury Lounge… but, man, the Bollinger tasted great in those plastic cups.

Above: Prof. Harry Covert (Greg Wawro, center left) and Céline Dijon (Verena Wiesendanger, center right) pose with fans after our show last night at Mercury Lounge (photo by Gary Wexler).