Everything You Need To Know About Champagne
Vintage versus non-vintage, the sweetness scale nobody explains, and what you are actually paying for at the top end.
Two bottles both say "Champagne" on the front. One's a straightforward, fruity house blend built to be opened this year; the other's a single-vintage bottle that spent most of a decade quietly maturing in a chalk cellar before anyone was allowed to sell it. Same region, same three grapes, wildly different wine — the label's small print is where all of that difference actually lives.
Non-vintage versus vintage
Most Champagne you'll ever drink is non-vintage (NV) — a deliberate blend of multiple years, built by each house to taste consistent year after year regardless of how any single harvest went. Vintage Champagne is the opposite bet: made only in years good enough to stand alone, from a single harvest, aged for years longer than NV requires, and priced to match the risk the house took by not blending it away. Neither is "better" by default — NV is arguably the harder job, since consistency across variable harvests takes real skill; vintage is the showcase for an exceptional year.
The sweetness scale most people never see written down
"Brut" isn't a fixed style, it's a point on a sliding scale of sweetness, measured by how much sugary "dosage" is added just before corking. Roughly, from driest to sweetest: Brut Nature (barely any added sugar, sometimes none), Extra Brut, Brut (the common default, still genuinely dry), Extra Sec, Sec, Demi-Sec, and Doux (properly sweet, and increasingly rare). Most Champagne sold defaults to Brut, which is why "dry Champagne" sounds redundant to most drinkers — it's just the standard, not a special request.
Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs, and rosé
Blanc de Blancs is white Champagne made entirely from white grapes — in practice, entirely Chardonnay — giving a leaner, more citrus-driven style. Blanc de Noirs flips that: white wine made entirely from black grapes (Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, or both), pressed off their skins fast enough to avoid picking up colour, resulting in a fuller, richer style despite still being white. Rosé Champagne gets its colour either from a brief skin contact with black grapes or, more commonly in Champagne specifically, by blending in a small amount of still red wine before the second fermentation — one of the only places in the wine world where blending in red wine to make pink is standard practice rather than a shortcut.
Prestige cuvées, briefly
Every major house has a top-tier bottling — its best fruit, longest ageing, and highest price — sitting above the standard range. These wines exist largely to demonstrate what the house is capable of at its absolute best, and the price reflects scarcity and reputation as much as anything measurably different in the glass, in line with how expensive wine pricing generally works once you're past a certain point.
Actually serving it
A tulip-shaped glass, not the flat saucer coupe that shows up in old films, preserves the bubbles far longer and concentrates the aroma properly. Serve cold — around 8–10°C — and don't worry about finishing the bottle in one sitting: a decent stopper keeps a Champagne perfectly drinkable, if slightly less fizzy, for a day or two afterwards.