A refresher on sparkling wine
For the New Year all you need to remember is this:Elvis Belts Exciting Songs.
That four-word mnemonic device I just created will help you remember the first and most important step of picking out a sparkling wine, how sweet it is. There's seven classifications on sparkling wine but the four common ones from dry to sweet are:
Extra-Brut (Elvis): Very little sugar, not enough to make it taste sweet in the slightest.
Brut (Belts): Technically supposed to taste sugarless but usually the sugar is slightly noticeable. Think pop mixed with three-quarters club soda.
Extra-Dry (Exciting): The middle of the pack and the most crowd-pleasing. You'll definitely notice the sugar but shouldn't be overwhelmed by it.
Sec (Songs): Definitely on the sweet side, this is going to taste like a bubbly, alcoholic fountain drink.
To make it even more fool-proof, just remember brut means dry and anything starting with the letter "D" is sweet. (The two sweetest classifications are semi-dec and doux.)
Here's three more steps for picking a good sparkling wine cheaply.
That means it's fermented in the bottle, which is the way they do it in Champagne. It renders a superior and complex product.
The other way to make sparkling wines is in big vats with carbonation pumped in. This is the way that Andre and Cook's and nearly all sparklings under $10 are made. It's easy, cheap but artificial. It's given the misleading classy name of Charmat-Method.
Tip two: Champagne does not mean made in France.
Due to some legal documents America never signed, sparkling wines made here can call themselves champagne. Cheap American stuff like Andre's and Cook's call themselves champagne. Usually, the bottle will say California champagne but sometimes it just says champagne. If the bottle says cava that means it was made in Spain.
Titles like champagne, cava and sparkling wine are overrated. There's some great sparkling wines and shitty champagnes. More than the title on the front of the bottle, look at the label on the back. Like with good wines, good sparklings are individually numbered. Look for that small number on the back (sometimes it's a separate sticker) saying 003450 or a number like that.
Tip three: After one bottle, it all tastes the same.
To paraphrase Doug Frost, "drink what you like." Yes, methode champenoise, batch-labeled champagnes are very good but they can get very expensive quick. The cheap stuff like aforementioned Andre's and Cook's may be charmat-method but it's purposely flavored to be crowd-pleasers. Often, these crowd pleasers taste better than expensive stuff. From the Freakanomics blog:
Not until I read Goldstein's book [The Wine Trials] did I realize just how weak the correlation was in blind tastings between expert evaluations and price in experimental settings...It turns out that the story with respect to cheap wine is even more true for champagne. I've never tasted a $12 bottle of champagne that I didn't enjoy immensely. It turns out I am not alone. In blind tests, Domaine Ste. Michelle Cuvee Brut, a $12 sparkling wine from Washington, is preferred nearly two to one to $150 Dom Perignon if you strip away the labels.
On my personal list for this year is a bottle of Roederer's Estate which goes for around $20 and tastes just as good as anything by Moet & Chandon and a couple of bottles of Andre's because it tastes much better than a $5 bottle of sparkling wine should taste. (The $5 part helps as well.
-- Owen Morris
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