The Best Champagne to Buy

I love Champagne — the way it smells, tastes, and bubbles up while I’m enjoying a nice full glass. As we stride toward the time of year (and what a year) when Americans consume the most Champagne, there are decisions to be made, should we all be so lucky: namely, which bottle to pick?

Champagne’s legacy of luxury and connection to upper-class marketing has created a worldwide industry distributing 300 million bottles in a typical year. It’s also resulted in a good deal of confusion and opacity when it comes to choosing what to drink. My suggestion for ease of enjoyment? Start with a smart bottle from one of the great Champagne houses.

For centuries, power and money in the Champagne region have flowed through the big Champagne houses (sometimes called Grande Marques), many of which are household names: Veuve, Dom, Roederer’s rap-famous “Cristal” bottling, and so on. French luxury multinational LVMH typifies a modern take on this, formed in the ’80s upon the merger of iconic French fashion label Louis Vuitton with Champagne house Moet & Chandon, which in the 1970s acquired the cognac producer Hennessey.

But the wines produced by these houses have been snubbed over the last decade by a certain kind of drinker, typically younger, relatively new to wine, and predisposed to drinking natural wines first and foremost. I’ve been guilty of this very thing, having gravitated far more toward so-called “grower Champagnes,” humbler bottlings (in production scale, not necessarily price) in which the wines are produced by the estate that grows the grapes. By contrast, the bigger Champagne houses might source the fruit for the wines from dozens, or even hundreds of individual growers across the Champagne region, blending them together under the careful guidance of a chef de cave, a term that denotes the head winemaker and cellarmaster in charge of the whole operation.

Indie and natty they aren’t, but for pure drinking pleasure I’m convinced many house Champagnes are due for a reappraisal by anyone who likes a good glass of something nice — after all, marketing isn’t the only reason these wines are enjoyed by millions. For a drinker easing themselves into the decision-making process, it’s helpful to start by focusing on a handful of firms and their entry-level offerings, typically described as “non-vintage” (NV), meaning that they’re made from grapes across multiple years of harvest (sometimes also denoted as “reserve,” depending on the house). These house Champagnes represent a broad range of prices, each one readily available in the U.S. market.

Suffice it to say that Champagne is not for everyone this year; such is the weight of the world we inhabit. At the same time, I think there is an understandable and very human impulse behind the desire to find comfort and celebration in the relative safety of a sturdy bottle. If you’ve got the means and bandwidth to think about enjoying a bottle of Champagne this holiday season, there’s ample cause to say cheers. Here’s to a little light in the darkness.

The most popular Champagne is actually pretty good

Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label

It’s not possible to really engage with the world of Champagne houses without confronting the phenomenon of Yellow Label Veuve. Thanks to its near-total market saturation, Veuve overtook Moet in 2013 as the most widely consumed Champagne in North America. LVMH sells 1.5 million cases of Veuve each year across the brand’s various bottlings, and a cool 400,000 of these are sold to the United States, a considerable majority of which is Yellow Label. It is a global product, like Coca-Cola or Guinness beer.

There’s a good reason for that. This wine is made to a precise formula, unvarying from year to year and bottled with the inclusion of Veuve’s vast collection of reserve wines, blended into Yellow Label to ensure consistency. Yellow Label gets 10 grams per liter of dosage (which refers to the sugar added into Champagne at bottling to balance acidity and promote longevity), and is composed of grapes from more than 60 parcels across Champagne.

For the price, there may be more interesting wines on the market, but if your heart is set on Veuve, or it’s one of the few Champagnes available where you live, I certainly understand (especially if you’ve been pulled in by one of Veuve’s flashy seasonal boxes). There is no other wine that tastes quite like it. And about that price: Yellow Label Veuve can run close to $60 or as low as $39, depending on where and when you make your purchase. I recommend checking different shops (including grocery and big-box retail) in your area for pricing. It’s the same stuff in the bottle, no matter where you buy it.