Even before COVID-19, there was always something a little hypocritical about the ritual of the annual holiday sparkling wine roundup. All year long, the industry would drive home that familiar refrain about liberating the style from its age-old holiday pigeonhole and appreciating it like any other form of wine. But without fail, come the first whiff of autumn, that logic went straight out the window.
What else could we have expected? No matter how persuasively the industry argued, the style’s associations with celebration and luxury remained hard-wired into our brains. Such has been the outsize cultural influence of the world’s most famous and widely imitated sparkling wine. There’s no need to clarify which one, since it has forever been synonymous with the entire category. But if Champagne’s centuries of aspirational marketing spin still loom large in the collective subconscious, the region’s monopoly over all things bubbly is finally imploding.
Maybe the pandemic helped to accelerate a shift that had already been a while in the making. After all, the past two years have given us few reasons to feel festive—and yet even under quarantine, sparkling wine sales continued to skyrocket. Take it from someone who spent a year in lockdown writing a whole book about the stuff. Bubbles can be whatever we want them to be—especially now that we have more fizzy options at our disposal than ever before.
Evidence of this shift is all around us. Just pop into your neighborhood wine shop and poke around. You’ll quickly discover that the sparkling universe we inhabit today has grown every bit as vast as the world of wine itself, spanning an eclectic mix of growing regions, grapes and production methods, from Savoyard crémant to Czech pét-nat.
With this liberation, the once-obligatory Champagne toast can now be swapped with any number of low-key options, whether sealed under a cork or a crown cap. Priced under $35 per bottle and broken down into four user-friendly categories, the following selections have been deliberately tailored to an impromptu, choose-your-own-adventure approach to the holidays. Though varied in style and aesthetic, they’re the sort of all-purpose bottles you won’t regret keeping in rotation over the weeks ahead and well into 2022—whatever it may bring.
