NON-VINTAGE CHAMPAGNE

Champagne is serious business – despite the high jinks eternally associated with it. Its annual sales, totalling £4.25 billion, are the economic motor of the region.

While Champagne’s 34,300ha cover just 4% of France’s national vineyard area, the wines are responsible for a whopping 20% of the country’s wine revenue and 22% of its wine exports.

Most of the bottles made, shipped and drunk – a little more than two-thirds in fact – are so-called ‘brut sans année’, or brut (dry) non-vintage wines.

While most of the column inches given over to Champagne focus on prestige cuvées and single vintage releases, the entire industry actually hinges on these less exalted, high-volume bottles.

Tasting brut non-vintage may not be as thrilling as tasting vintage Champagnes, or the celebrated têtes de cuvée deluxe and prestige bottlings, but it is far more telling. These wines are, after all, the calling card of each house. The NVs give clues about quality and are the key to the style of a house. It is their consistency and reliability over the long term that is decisive and forges a house’s reputation.

Those of us who always keep a bottle chilled just in case we need a little pick-me-up will have one of these in the fridge – and hopefully more in the cellar. These are the go-to bottles which do the heavy lifting for Champagne as a whole.

Grandes marques

A huge part of that market has traditionally been cornered by the so-called grandes marques, or ‘big brands’. This self-styled name harks back to the Syndicat de Grandes Marques, which today has been subsumed into the Union des Maisons de Champagne organisation. Previously, the Syndicat had grown gradually out of a group formed in 1882 to protect the name of Champagne in the era before French appellation law existed.

Over time, however, they dedicated themselves to furthering the prestige of Champagne in the world. This illustrious bunch, with chairmen from the likes of Veuve Clicquot, Pommery, Louis