| Recommendations |
| • Bubbly Recommendations • Gewurztraminer Recommendations • Rosé Recommendations |
Champagne is a beast among wine. If you've ever felt intimidated by Champagne, you can rest assured that you're not alone. For starters, it's expensive, and for a few reasons. The grapes used to make Champagne must be grown in Champagne, France. Not only that, but production costs of Méthode Champenoise are high, as an additional step of adding sugar and yeast to each individual bottle is necessary to induce the secondary fermentation that gives Champagne its bubbles and unique baked bread aromas. The bottles are then turned upside down to allow the yeast to settle in the bottle’s neck, then opened, allowing the spent yeast cells to exit, and recorked. It’s a lot of work for bottle of bubbly.
Perhaps above all, though, it's also marketed as the ultimate in luxury lifestyle, which makes it feel unapproachable. And don't get me started on confusing French wine labels.
The good news is, for sparkling wine, Champagne isn’t your only option. Sparkling wine is made all over the world using two main methods and every style of wine grape imaginable. The two methods are 1) injecting Co2 directly into the finished wine, typically resulting in sparkling wine with too-large bubbles that fizz out fast, and 2) a process called “Charmat” in which wine undergoes the secondary fermentation in a large tank (as opposed to in each bottle like Champagne), and is then bottled under pressure. The second method is ideal, and isn’t as expensive in part because the bottles aren’t being corked, turned, uncorked, and recorked. Look for “Charmat method” or “metodo Itliano.”
Above all, don’t fear that not having genuine Champagne on the holiday table will spoil the celebration. Chances are that your quests won't even notice. Recent blind tastings of inexpensive wines and their pricier counterparts that included Champagne (detailed in The Wine Trials 2011) showed that while most consumers can tell the difference between the expensive and inexpensive wines, they usually prefer the inexpensive ones. Lucky hosts…
Below are three sparkling recommendations for your holiday tables: a real-deal Champagne, a bargain-priced finalist from The Wine Trials 2011 tastings as an alternative, and something completely different for those of you with a sweet tooth. Cheers.
| Bubbly Recommendations: |
|
Taittinger Brut “La Francaise” Champagne Champagne, France $39.99 In the case of genuine Champagne, you usually get what you pay for, and it's rare that you pay under $30 per bottle. Fortunately, with a tried-and-true producer like Taittinger (based in Rheims, in the heart of Champagne production in France) you rarely will go wrong. Their Brut is a stellar example of what most people think of when they hear “Champagne”: dry, overflowing with green apple and pear fruits, and topped off with aromas of baked bread that result from Champagne's time-honored production method of secondary fermentation in each bottle. Domaine Ste Michelle Brut Columbia Valley, WA $10.99 Made by Washington state's mega-producer Chateau Ste Michelle, this dry sparkling wine isn't anywhere near as complex as a Taittinger, but is made from the same grapes (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir) and delivers similar green apple fruitiness and a lively texture at a third of the price. This Brut makes a great compliment to sushi dinners, and for under $12 it kicks the pants off of just about every other similarly-priced sparklers on the shelf. Banfi Rosa Regale Brachetto d'Acqui, Italy $10.99 (half-bottle) I thought it would be fun to include something totally different in this list, and you can't get much different than Banfi's Rosa Regale, which is a red, sweet, and lively party-in-a-bottle. No green apple or bread here – just cranberries, rose petals, & a whole lot of fun. Don’t expect an open bottle to stay full for very long. |
Joe Roberts is a wine consultant and musician. He is the author of 1WineDude.com, which was recently voted Best Overall Wine Blog in the 2010 Wine Blog Awards. He lives in the Philadelphia area with wife Kerri and rambunctious daughter Lorelai Kate.
Article photograph from ghirson via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Planet of the Grapes" photograph from Getty Images, "Bottle" photograph from istockphoto.com
