Non-Champagne France

We Americans use the catchall term “champagne” for all sparkling wine, though we oughtn’t. “Champagne” is the sparkling wine of a proud region of northeastern France, and the name should stay there.

We wouldn’t appreciate a Cognac maker experimenting with corn mash and calling his spirit “Bourbon.”

Much of the pride of the people of Champagne derives from the method by which they make their sparkling wine. We (and they, of course) call it “the Champagne method.” (Another name for the method is methode traditionelle.)

Nearly every French winemaking region outside Champagne produces sparkling wine using that method, for it is a winning way. Causing a secondary fermentation and trapping its carbon dioxide in an individual bottle, then aging the wine on its spent yeast cells for even just a year, is a transformation of one wine into another of appreciable magnitude and delight.

Perhaps most to be appreciated and delighted in is the price. French methode traditionelle sparkling wine almost always costs less than the least expensive Champagne. To reiterate: they are not the same wine, but 40 dollars will buy you either a cheap Champagne that runs a high risk of being a taste-bud dud, or a high-end methode traditionelle with as strong a chance to be wildly delicious.

Crémant:
“Crémant” means “creamy” and may indicate a sparkling wine with about half the atmospheric pressure as Champagne’s “methode champenoise.” But now the term is used throughout France, appended by a region’s name, as a synonym for “methode traditionelle” and as containing its full 5-6 atmospheres of pressure.

Several regions of France, notable, even exceptional, for their own non-sparkling wines, produce crémants: among them, Alsace, the Loire, Bordeaux, Jura, Burgundy and Limoux (the eldest). Most French crémants are non-vintage, meaning blended from wines of several years; a few crémants, especially from Alsace, Burgundy, and Limoux, are dated by vintage.

Grape varieties reflect the individual region’s strengths so, for example, most Loire crémants contain healthy proportions of chenin blanc. Semillon and muscadelle figure in Bordeaux white sparkling wine; its red grapes, in its dry rosé bubblies. Alsace allows only the pinots noir, blanc and gris, along with auxerrois and riesling for Alsace cremants. And so on throughout the country.

Do not confuse “crémant” with “Cramant,” an important grape-growing district of Champagne that sometimes will figure in the name on a label of the same.

Vouvray
Though it is part of the Loire Valley—quite prominently, at that—the chenin blanc stronghold of Vouvray often makes a methode traditionelle sparkling wine not labeled “crémant,” but simply as “Vouvray.” You’ll know it’s a sparkling Vouvray simply because it arrives in the thick-glass, wire-topped bottles that contain several atmospheres of pressure.

But as with all Vouvray wine, it is 100 percent chenin blanc and can be, like them, from dry to slightly or markedly sweet. The information about the sweetness level you’ll find on the label, using the same terms common to sparkling wine all over the world (“brut,” for example, signifying “dry”).