On CTV’s Your Morning, we chat about how most people think of sparkling wine as the drink of choice for the holidays. What’s the difference between champagne and other sparkling wines, and the two you recommend? Although champagne only comes from the Champagne region of France, almost every other region of the country and many other countries around the world produce sparkling wines, often using the same winemaking methods and grapes as champagne. I have two classic champagnes: Taittinger Brut Reserve Champagne Champagne A.O.C., France […]
Blanc de blancs
10 Best Champagne Wines to Buy Now + 5 Surprising Facts about Champagne
The sparkling wine Champagne is named after the northern region of France where it’s produced. Other regions of France, as well as other countries, make sparkling wine, but only those from Champagne may be called Champagne. You’ll find my most recent Champagne reviews and ratings here. 5 Surprising Facts about Champagne: 1. Supposedly the eighteenth-century blind Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon, accidentally discovered how to put the bubbles in Champagne when his wines started fermenting again in the spring after the cold winter had stopped them. Other records attribute this discovery to the British scientist Christopher Merret thirty years before Pérignon. […]
Why is Rose Champagne More Expensive than Regular Champagne?
Rosé Champagne is often more expensive than white champagne because making it is more labor-intensive and time-consuming, and therefore, more costly to produce. The most common method in Champagne is to blend non-sparkling red wine into the champagne. The other approach is more difficult because it involves carefully limiting contact between the red skin and the juice during the part of fermentation called maceration (soaking the grapes in their own flesh, juice and skins to extract the colour, tannin and flavour compounds into the must or juice) to create the coveted pale salmon color known as oeil-de-perdrix or partridge eye. […]
What is Blanc de Blancs Champagne?
Most Champagne is white wine made from red grapes. Two of the region’s three grapes are red: pinot noir and pinot meunier. Pinot meunier, found mostly along the rich floor of the Marne Valley and in Aube, is considered a simple workhorse grape, giving the wine a fruity, perfumed roundness and early maturity. Pinot noir, grown mostly on the slopes of Reims Mountain, contributes aromas of cherries, berries and other red fruit; it also gives the wine structure, length and body. The third grape is white, chardonnay from the south-facing Côte des Blancs; it offers aromas of daisies, white peaches […]
