I love New Year and the sparkling wine that comes with it, but OMG, my fellow inebriates, I can’t get my nose into those narrow little flutes.

Thankfully, Miss P had a solution. She used an empty apple-sauce container as a trough for yours truly so I could enjoy New Year as well.

“Isn’t that a bit humiliating?” someone asked.

Well, you tell me. Is it more humiliating than trying to stuff your head into a 1.5-inch hole?

Ahhhh, but that’s how you enjoy the bubbly experience. Flute-shaped stemware helps retain carbonation with its reduced surface area at the opening. The whole idea is to reduce nucleation so the bubbles keep sparkling as long as possible.

But does it matter? With a champagne flute, I get nothing. With P’s trough, I get some of the cheap-ass bubbly (my parents went all out: $4.72 for a 200-mL bottle of FREIXENT CARTA NEVADA BRUT). Thing is, once it’s been poured into my trough, the bubbles are gone.

But how does it taste?

I’ve had it with bubbles and I’ve had it without. And it definitely needs bubbles. It needs them as a distraction from its tangy-sour-bitter nastiness. While Freixenet has some reasonable bubbly out there, this is not among those offerings. Imagine drinking something at the stroke of midnight that reminded you of dissolved Aspirin—persistent screaming high notes, a medicinal chord, and little else. All it has, my fellow inebriates, is fizz.

So do not drink it out of a trough, friends, even if a helpful little seven-year-old offers her apple-sauce cup for that purpose. This stuff is difficult to drink—it needs all the help that effervescence can give it. If the New Year’s ritual were important to you, maybe you could slug back one flute, but more would be masochistic.

My dad, however, went over the line. He threw his FREIXENET out without finishing it. Like no one would have helped him with it.