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.
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