Lille Allen
Champagne is more expensive than ever, but these bottles deliver value and quality.
Champagne, Champagne. The bubble of writers and poets, the drink of heroes and icons, beloved by everyone from Oscar Wilde to Charles Dickens, Dorothy Parker to Drake. It’s the most famous style of wine in the world, synonymous with revelry, celebration, and big life moments.
It has also, sadly and inevitably, gotten quite expensive recently, subject to much of the same inflationary price increases as the rest of American life over the last decade. Though granted a gallows reprieve from a proposed 100 percent tariff in 2020, prices for many Champagnes have nonetheless risen higher than your cursed millennial mortgage rate.
In years past it was my privilege to write Eater Guides to Grower Champagne, House Champagne, and Rosé Champagne. I stand by every recommendation in these pieces, but it is eye-wateringly sad to look back through and note the price changes on nearly every single included bottle. Some have gone up $10 or $20, which sucks, but won’t break your heart; others have doubled or tripled or more in cost, rendering them unobtainable for most readers (unless you’ve got a rich Uncle Oswald, in which case, let’s open up some Prevost).
Which is not to say all Champagne is too expensive now, or that value cannot be found in this most hallowed of wine regions. Finding it these days simply requires some degree of open-mindedness and ingenuity; it might mean checking out a new winemaker, or trying a bottle from one of the names you’ve overlooked in years past.
Below you’ll find Champagnes in a range of styles, all of which I believe represent both quality and relative value — nearly all of them are under $100, and the one splurge I’m recommending is honestly so good, it’s worth it. I’ve personally bench tested each of them over the past few weeks (a rough job, but someone must do it) and can assure you you’ll be tasting nothing but stars with these bottles.
Chavost Blanc d’Assemblage
In traditionalist Champagne, where players large and small are often resistant to change, Fabian Daviaux has in a few short years transformed his family’s wine cooperative; where once it sold fruit to the larger Champagne houses, now a small group of around 70 multigenerational growers are pooling their collective organic holdings to make a range of distinct wines in a contemporary style. The response from wine drinkers, bottle shop owners, and Instagram bottle shop types has been overwhelmingly positive, and Chavost has emerged in a few short years as one of today’s most attractive options for natural-minded Champagnes at around $50 retail.
The distinctive farmhouse labels help — natural wine is at least in part an aesthetic movement — but visionary Fabian Daviaux has serious chops to back it up. It’s hard to call any Champagne truly “natural” or “minimal intervention”; Champagnes are among the most interfered with wines on the planet by nature of how they’re made. But Chavost makes a compelling argument for extending #natty styling to the Champagne game, using naturally occurring yeasts, eschewing nearly all use of sulfur, and aging only in steel barrels. The end results are reminiscent of the best qualities of natural wine: idiosyncratic, beguiling, and utterly alive.
Chavost’s entry level cuvée, the “Blanc d’Assemblage,” is 50/50 chardonnay and pinot meunier, and it more or less physically leaps from your glass with energy and drinkability (time for a refill). You’ll taste big green fruit flavors — Granny Smith apple, Comice pear, greengage plum — and also a secondary note of that subtle, dreamy brioche quality that Champagne lovers so verily love. I would rock up to a party with this to impress people I didn’t know that well yet, or open it alongside something big and old and traditional to play a game of contrasts. Drop me in a chill wine bar pouring this by the class and we’ll call it good. And yes, there are magnums.
Champagne Delamotte Brut
Although I overlooked it for many years, I am now convinced this classic option represents one of the very best present values in all Champagne. Delamotte predates the United States; the house was founded in 1760, and the Delamotte family story is an indelible part of the twisting, turning history of this funny little corner of France.
The world of Champagne is like a multitiered jewel box or a matryoshka doll — there are layers to this thing, secrets within secrets. But with Delamotte the secret is an open one: This is the sister house to Champagne Salon, which is among the most revered and allocated wines presently on the planet — demand far outstrips production, and only a few select retailers are even allowed to sell Salon to the public. Delamotte and Salon sit directly adjacent to one another in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, a hallowed portion of Champagne; they share offices and facilities, are managed by the same executive director, and are produced by the very same winemaker. They even share grapes in some years. But a bottle of Salon starts at around $1,000 to get in the door, and prices go up from there — it’s not a wine you’ll find on normal retail shares, and requires some hunting to even obtain. A bottle of Delamotte, meanwhile, is a cool 50 bucks or so, and readily available at good wine shops around the country, or online.
To me this is like spending an Airbnb week in a house you’d someday love to afford, or renting the runway instead of buying that De la Renta outright. The wine is 55 percent chardonnay, 35 percent pinot noir and 10 percent pinot meunier, and tastes harmonic and fresh, like a well-struck opening orchestra chord. It’s creamy and clean and could only be Champagne, the sort of thing you’d like to serve with fresh fruit as a dessert, or raw seafood as an appetizer. It’s a real pleasure — and a real value.
Moussé Fils Eugene Extra Brut Blanc de Noirs
Another Champagne with natural bona fides, but this time along the sustainability track — ”sustainability” and “Champagne” being not exactly the most intimately overlapping terms, at least in the olden days. Winemaker Cédric Moussé goes all out on the mindfulness front: All the grapes are farmed organic, he uses geothermal heat to run the winery, farm animals walk the vines to help with pest and weed control, the wines are made with well water, he makes his own mineral-based sulfur, and much more. If you’re the sort of person who wants to walk the walk on this stuff beyond buzzwords and greenwashing, this guy’s winery is the real deal, and working like this in Champagne is exceedingly rare.
The wines are also killer. The entire range of Moussé Fils bottlings is worth checking out (I like the Perpetuelle Blanc de Noirs for $60 quite a lot), but the cuvée Eugene is an Extra Brut Blanc de Noirs that absolutely grabbed me in a recent tasting. Some of that is because this wine is made with 20 percent pinot noir and 80 percent pinot meunier, a grape that usually plays a backup role in Champagne blending. It’s a little bit like watching the sixth man on your NBA team bench come in and reel off a double-double — there’s something deeply pleasurable about harnessing this unsung grape, and allowing it to play a lead role. The wine is golden and round. There are Christmas spices — ginger, nutmeg, clove — and a soft red cherry structure that taste singular and interesting.
I could rattle off a dozen other blanc de noirs Champagnes from grower Champagne makers at two, three, or five times the price of Moussé Fils, only I’m not sure they’d actually drink better. Grab these now; when we update this guide in a couple of years I promise you this bottle will cost much more.
Guy Larmandier Grand Cru Cramant
New York’s venerable Rosenthal Wine Merchant has been importing the grower Champagnes of Guy Larmandier (pronounced the French way, like “ghee”) since the early 1980s. I have overlooked these wines in favor of other, trendier Champagnes. But as those other, trendier Champagnes have gone up and up in price, the Larmandier wines have stayed steadily accessible, with the Vertus Brut Zero available for under $50, truly a ripping deal.
I’d like to nudge you one tick up the hill here, however, towards Guy Larmandier’s Grand Cru Cramant, a Blanc de Blancs Champagne made entirely from chardonnay hailing from the village of Cramant, which is rated as a “Grand Cru,” or most desirable. This is so intensely mineral and dry, super lean and fresh, but with the most pronounced note of crisp toast underneath flavors of white table grapes and Comice pear.
Champagne this good, with a Grand Cru pedigree, should cost much more, and yet the Guy Larmandier Cramant is around $65 — it drinks like it costs $100. And what’s more, the wine itself is really beautiful, the most lovely shade of straw, with an intense, constant stream of bubbles (known as the “bead”) rising up from the bottom of your glass. I think it ticks every box, and I can’t wait to open another.
Champagne Frederic Savart L’Ouverture 1er Cru Extra Brut
We’ve gone up the scale now a bit in price, and so please forgive me for being blunt, but at $83.99 any bottle of anything had better be really damn good. The Champagnes of Frederic Savart are not just damn good — they are mind-warpingly, outrageously, howlingly delicious, and worth every dollar you might choose to spend.
These wines are laser beams, crisp and pure and whip-smart taut, with texture and intensity that just goes on and on. Every Savart wine is worth buying and drinking, but its entry level wine, called LOuverture, is a blanc de noirs made from 100 percent pinot noir fruit hailing from premier cru vineyards. This wine sees a combination of barrel and stainless steel tanks during the fermentation process, which helps layer that razor-sharp tension with something slightly softer, like a Bosc pear, or Texas red grapefruit. This, plus the fact it’s all pinot noir fruit, gives you this truly singular only-in-Champagne experience of drinking a wine that is simultaneously crunchy and creamy, soft but sharp. Some Champagnes are meant to drink before dinner; this you could serve right alongside anything on the dinner table it would cruise beautifully. Drink it with a chargrilled steak and thank me later.
Julien Prelat Les Cotes Blanc de Gris
For $90 I want a wine that’s going to deliver in a couple of different ways: It should first and foremost taste great, but it should also offer a sense of discovery, and give you an intellectual sort of pleasure, the sort of wine that’s fun to talk about with the people you’re drinking with. With Julien Prelat, a very new wine label (its first vintage was in 2010) making wine in the Aube at the southernmost tip of the Champagne region, we have all these parameters met.
LIke with Guy Larmandier, there are less expensive wines in Prelat’s range to check out, including blanc de noirs and blanc de blancs bottlings that run around $60 and $85, respectively. But this bottle I’m recommending is the Les Cotes Blanc de Gris, made using 100 percent pinot gris grapes. This is all but unheard of in Champagne, where chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier dominate 99 percent of all the wines produced. Drinking a pinot gris Champagne is totally distinctive in a brain-tickling, geeky way — if you were shopping for, or say married to, an insufferable wine nerd or something (it must be horrible), bringing along this bottle would result in serious oohing and ahhing and exclamations of delight and intrigue.
But then, you open it, and wow — yellow sunflowers, chiffon mousse, fine sea salt. An hour later, with a little air, and there’s pastry cream, lemon bars, and the most beautifully direct note of fresh pressed apples. It’s a novelty, it’s an education, it’s a true and very really delicious bottle of wine, and for under $100 in the world of Champagne, that’s value and then some.
Krug 172ème Edition Brut
Well. You get to the end of a Champagne guide built around value and discovery, only to arrive at a recommendation for Krug, which is: 1. Among the most famous Champagnes in the world, and 2. Steadily rising in price year over year with no stopping in sight. What gives?
Just taste it. Better yet, bring it to a party and watch other people just taste it. You don’t have to know anything about wine to appreciate Krug, but the wine geeks in your life will swoon when they see it arrive alongside you. Everyone loves Krug, and the amount of effort and intentionality that goes into these wines is just staggering.
Each year for its numbered Grand Cuvée release series, the House of Krug builds a tiny universe in each bottle. The 172ème release is mostly based on the 2016 vintage, but includes a blend of reserve wines — around 40 percent in total — featuring wines going all the way back to 1998, and drawing on the work of more than 140 individual growers.
Imagine your perfect, platonic ideal of what Champagne should taste like, look like, smell like, and that’s what you have with Krug. Krug manages to somehow drink like the Champagne bubble feels — it tastes spherical, redolent of breads, nuts, butter, shocked to the core with citrus fruits and all the while effortlessly elegant and persistent. It reflects upon itself, performs itself. It is profound and moving.
I brought a bottle to a party because I wanted to observe the effect, which was fun, but I rather wish I’d hoarded the bottle for myself, which would have also been a different sort of fun. I’m not sure if there’s any other wine in the world that makes me feel this way, and you can’t put a price on that, now can you? There’s more than one way to calculate value. If you’re really going to splurge — like say you got some really great news in a day and age where such occurrences are at an all-time scarcity premium — this is the one. You’ll never be disappointed by Krug.
