Champagne, Prosecco, Cava And Other Sparkling Wines
You would not call all red wine Burgundy. Stop calling all sparkling wine Champagne — six styles, one gas, six genuinely different drinks.
You wouldn't call all red wine Burgundy. You wouldn't call every white Chablis. But say "sparkling wine" to most people and what comes out of their mouth is "Champagne" — whatever's actually in the glass.
That's not fair to Champagne, and it's not fair to everything else. It's not snobbery either — it's the opposite. Prosecco, Cava, Cap Classique, Crémant, English fizz: they're not cheap knock-offs of one drink, they're different drinks that happen to have bubbles in common. And in a genuinely blind tasting, plenty of people prefer the Prosecco. That's not an insult to Champagne. It's just a different wine, built to do a different job.
Champagne
Grown in a genuinely cold, marginal region of northern France, on chalk soils that drain fast and reflect heat back up into the vines, Champagne is made from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier, fermented once into a thin, sharp base wine, then fermented a second time inside the very bottle you'll eventually open. That second fermentation is sealed in, so the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go — it dissolves into the wine instead, which is where the bubbles come from.
By law, that bottle then sits on its own spent yeast cells for a minimum of fifteen months before release, non-vintage; the good houses leave it for years longer. That slow ageing on dead yeast (autolysis, if you want the word for it) is where the brioche, toast, and biscuit character comes from — it's a genuine chemical process, not a marketing adjective. It's also exactly why Champagne is expensive: cold-climate grapes, hand-riddled bottles, years of tied-up cellar space, all before a bottle earns the right to the name.
Cava
Same method, different postcode. Cava is made the identical way — second fermentation in the bottle — mostly in and around Penedès, from Spanish grapes Macabeo, Xarel·lo, and Parellada rather than Champagne's trio. Minimum lees ageing is shorter — nine months for entry-level Cava versus Champagne's fifteen — which is a real difference in the wine, not just the price tag. Land, labour, and reputation cost less in Catalonia than in Champagne, and that gets passed straight through to the shelf price.
Worth knowing: in 2019, several of Cava's most quality-focused producers — Recaredo and Gramona among them — left the Cava DO entirely to found Corpinnat, a stricter, self-imposed standard with longer ageing and organic farming requirements, because they felt Cava's rules had gotten too loose for what they were trying to make. Not every Cava is the same Cava.
Prosecco
Here's the one real technical split: Prosecco, grown in the hills of Veneto from the Glera grape, gets its bubbles from a second fermentation in large sealed steel tanks — the Charmat (or Martinotti) method — rather than in individual bottles. That's finished in weeks, not years, and it's why Prosecco is fruitier and simpler than Champagne rather than toasty and bready: there's no months of contact with dead yeast to build that character, because there was never any intention to. Different process, aimed at a different result — bright, floral, drink-it-this-year, not built to age. Calling it "worse" is judging it by Champagne's homework when it was never sitting that exam.
Cap Classique
South Africa's answer, made almost exactly like Champagne — bottle-fermented, lees-aged — mostly around Stellenbosch. The clunky name (Méthode Cap Classique, "MCC" for short) exists purely for legal reasons: after EU pressure restricted the phrase "méthode champenoise" to Champagne itself, South African producers coined their own term in 1992 to describe the identical process without borrowing the French name. Same method as Champagne, its own regional character, arguably the best-value bottle-fermented fizz on this whole list.
Crémant
France's other traditional-method sparkling wines, made outside Champagne under a name formalised by French wine authorities in 1975 specifically so quality bottle-fermented wines from Burgundy, Loire Valley, Alsace, and elsewhere had something better to call themselves than "Mousseux." Crémant de Loire, often built around Chenin Blanc, tends toward orchard fruit and a chalky edge; Crémant de Bourgogne leans into the same Chardonnay and Pinot Noir Champagne uses, at a fraction of the price, because it's made ninety minutes' drive from Champagne rather than inside it.
The new king in town: England
The joke used to be that English wine was a punishment. It isn't anymore, specifically for sparkling wine: the chalk running under Kent and Sussex is the same geological seam that runs under Champagne's Côte des Blancs, and a warming climate has pushed England's growing conditions into a range that increasingly resembles Champagne's a few decades ago. English producers make it the traditional way — bottle-fermented, properly lees-aged — and have started beating Champagne houses in blind competitions often enough that nobody's laughing anymore.
Six regions, six genuinely different wines, one gas. Next time someone waves a glass of Prosecco and calls it Champagne, you now know exactly why that's the wrong compliment to pay it.