It was the best of times; it was the worst of times for sparkling wine businesses on both sides of the Channel this year. In France, it was a tale of two fizzes, with the seemingly irresistible rise of crémant matched by champagne’s lingering sales slump. In the UK, meanwhile, high-profile East Sussex producer Ridgeview’s slide into administration drew back the curtain on the precarious finances that seem to be part of the territory for even the most admired and apparently successful English sparkling winemakers – a damp, chilly British dose of wintry economic reality at a time when the wines are reaching new peaks of excellence.
With consumers in all of sparkling wine’s most important markets still enduring their own bitter local flavours of the apparently interminable cost of living crisis, it shouldn’t, perhaps, be all that much of a surprise to learn business is hardest for two regions operating at the very top of the market – or that a drink promising the same methods and style at a fraction of the price should be having its moment.
But the scale of that moment in the UK is nonetheless quite striking. According to M&S, sales of one of my favourites of the breed, M&S Classics No 12 Crémant de Bourgogne NV (£12), for example, have apparently jumped by 213% over the past year, while crémant’s share of the retailer’s sparkling wine sales have jumped from 9% to 20% in the same period. Chatting to buyers at recent tastings, it’s a similar story at Morrisons (home to the excellent, candied red fruit of its own-brand the Best Crémant de Limoux Rosé Brut NV; £12.75) and Sainsbury’s and Lidl (I’d happily sip either the Taste the Difference Crémant de Limoux NV, £12; or Lidl Crémant de Loire NV, £10.99, as festive aperitifs). The consensus – in the words of the M&S press release trumpeting the style’s “rocketing sales” – being that people are looking for “complex traditional-method fizz this year, but without the champagne price tag”.
In fact, while price is probably the main factor, crémant is also just one of many beneficiaries (and champagne perhaps the most notable victim) of a complete turnaround in our understanding of where quality sparkling wine can come from, and how often we feel we can drink it. A few years back, almost all sparkling wine was drunk at very special occasions and effectively came down to a choice of champagne for the splash-out, and prosecco or cava if you were running a tighter budget. These days, people drink bubbles all year round without so much as a twinge of look-at-me-living-the-high-life self-consciousness – and they’re happy (and able) to source it from pretty much every wine-producing country.
Choosing bottles for what is still by far the biggest moment in the year for fizz-drinking, a truly international list might start in Catalonia with the brilliant-value lime-and-toast organic cava of Codorníu Cuvée 150 Aniversario Brut Ecológico NV (£8.99, Lidl), before heading across the Med to Amyndeo, in north-western Greece, for the pithy, delicately floral Domaine Karanika and Brut Cuvée Speciale, Xinomavro, 2022 (£26, Maltby & Greek) via Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, home of the vividly dark-berried, sappy red sparkling of Nivola Lambrusco NV (£14, £12.50 as part of a mixed case of six, Majestic). Then switch to the southern hemisphere with top producer Simonsig’s outstanding Cape champagne-alike the Society’s Exhibition Cap Classique 2023 (£12.95, The Wine Society) and Tasmania’s gorgeously rich but scintillatingly scything House of Arras A by Arras Premium Cuvée NV (£28, Amathus Drinks), before finishing back where we started with the genteel red-berried M&S Rockferne English Sparkling Rosé (£30) and the insouciantly sophisticated Bruno Paillard Premiere Cuvee MV (£44, Hedonism; Wanderlust Wine).