Champagne really annoys me. There’s been a lot of it about recently, so I’m going to get this off my chest. It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s the best sparkling wine in the world, with an ability to age, a complexity of flavour, and the variation from one producer to another is fascinating. But you really have to pay over the odds for that excellence. Furthermore, poor Champagne abounds and it comes at a fairly high price too. The Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée rules are supposed to protect us from poor wine. To be called Champagne the wine has to come from the area and be made from the right grapes in the right way and the French are very good at enforcing that. But, to be called Champagne, the wine also has to taste like Champagne and to meet a certain minimum standard and the French are very poor at enforcing that. So we can easily spend £20 on a bottle that is trading on its name, not its quality.

A standard defence by the producers is that Champagne is difficult to make. When it started in the 17th century it was made like any other wine, except that it was bottled just before fermentation was complete. The final fermentation took place in the bottle and produced the fizz. Unfortunately, it was hard to judge the right moment to bottle. Leave it too late and the wine was flat; bottle too early and so much pressure built up that the bottles exploded. Cellar workers had to wear face protection against flying glass; and if one bottle exploded the whole batch was likely to do the same. The solution they found, la méthode champenoise, uses secondary fermentation in the bottle. Fermentation in the vats is allowed to go to completion, then, as the wine is bottled, a little more yeast and sugar are added and a temporary cap put in place. All bottles are stored head down, agitated regularly so the dead yeast cells fall down to the cap, then an inch or so of wine in the neck of the bottle is frozen, expelled, and the cork inserted. It’s done so fast that the pressure in the bottle is not lost.

You won’t see the words ‘méthode champenoise’ on bottles other than Champagne; but that’s only because the word champenoise is forbidden outside Champagne. Elsewhere, it’s called méthode traditionelle and it’s used in other parts of France that make much cheaper sparkling wine. So the argument that the méthode champenoise makes Champagne expensive doesn’t wash. So what is the alternative? Prosecco from Italy and Cava from Spain are names that have a certain cachet and which give some guarantee of quality, since they rely, not on their prestige but on whether people like them. The trouble is they don’t taste of much, at least the bottles under £10 don’t.

So, when there’s a need for bubbly, my favourite is Crémant de Limoux. For centuries the villages around Limoux, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, have been producing a sparkling wine called Blanquette de Limoux based on a local grape called Mauzac. In 1990 a new appellation was created, Crémant de Limoux, of which up to 90% may be made of Chardonnay or Chenin Blanc – grapes that give a richer flavour than the rather ‘appley’ Mauzac. The wine is made in the same way as Champagne but it has no prestige outside south-west France and so the price is not artificially elevated. You can get it at under £10 a bottle in the UK, under 5 euros a bottle in France. And if someone complains that it’s not Champagne, point out that it’s Champagne’s older cousin. Production of sparkling wine in Limoux began in 1531, 170 years before Dom Perignon is supposed to have invented Champagne.

Incidentally, if you like your sparkling wine dry, only buy wine labelled Brut. This means it has a sugar content of <12 g/l. That makes it drier than ‘extra dry’, (12-17 g/l) or ‘dry’ (17-32 g/l)!

Andrew Polmear