Thursday 3 October 2013

Other uses for champagne

I expect that most of you know that only sparkling wines produced in the Champagne region of France are technically allowed to be labelled as champagne. Here in Australia, locally produced wines in this style are called sparkling wines instead.  Once, at the Forest Lodge Hotel, the menu described them as sparkly. I think this is a wonderful mental image, although it did make me worry about swallowing glitter.

Mmm, these guys take their sparkly seriously... (Photo linked through from here).

As it turns out, the term champagne has at least one other use - it's a version of the SLC36A1 (solute carrier family 36, member 1) gene that interacts with the basic coat colour genes to product unusual and, most of the time, beautiful coat colours.