Buying Champagne used to be so simple. Pick a price range that doesn't make you wince, find a non-vintage brut from a grande marque in a style you like and bingo! Year after year, you had a reliable choice, without the assiduous study, rote memorization, hand-wringing and general angst necessary to secure great wine from, say, Burgundy.
Of course, you can still buy Champagne that easy way, and most of us do. More than 95% of the Champagne sold in this country is made by one of the big Champagne houses, such as Moet & Chandon, Perrier-Jouet, Mumm, Laurent-Perrier or Veuve Clicquot, all members of the Syndicat des Grandes Marques, the organization of about 25 "great brands" of Champagne.
With a Champagne from one of the big firms, you get wine that usually has been masterfully blended to a house style from an array of vineyard sources. The level of excellence is almost invariably high. It's very, very difficult to go far wrong with French Champagne.
But if you slavishly stick to the well-known brands, you'll miss some of the more intriguing bubblies on the market. There's an exciting crop of estate-bottled, grower-produced Champagnes available this season, wines made by grape growers that reflect the characteristics of their specific vineyard sites.
Keep in mind that it is only when dealing with the wines from these smaller growers that you get a sense of the geography of the Champagne region. Wine from the big Champagne houses is almost never identified with a more specific site than "Champagne," with the exception of the famed Le Mesnil vineyard in the Co^te des Blancs. Grande marque Champagne is all about brands, an anomalous approach in France, where the country's vineyards are elaborately classified according to place-names by the appellation controlee laws. But unlike the grandes marques, Champagne from small growers is much more site-specific, being estate-bottled from vineyards in delimited areas.
You can see the difference in a bottling such as the Brut Blanc de Blancs from Guy Larmandier, a producer who owns slightly less than 20 acres of vineyards. The label is emblazoned in large letters with the name of the village where the Larmandier vineyards are situated. This is sparkling wine from Cramant and, oh, yes, it's Champagne.
