Love Dry Champagne? These 10 Bottles Are For You

Celebrations call for these crisp and refreshing bubbles.

The most familiar names in Champagne tend to be houses (known as maisons, in French) that, though they may own some vineyards of their own, primarily purchase their fruit from growers within the region. The best way to tell if a particular Champagne is produced from estate-grown grapes or fruit purchased from other growers is to look for the alpha-numeric code on the label  — it’s often in a vanishingly small font. A label that reads, “NM” means that the bottle is from a Négociant Manipulant that relies on purchased grapes. You’ll also sometimes see “CM”, which means that a bottle is from a Coopérative Manipulant, or a co-op of growers. “RM” stands for Récoltant Manipulant, meaning that the Champagne was made by the same producer that grew the grapes. One isn’t inherently better than the others; they’re just different models.

The advantage of NM and CM houses is that they can produce a potentially great deal of Champagne in a consistent style, since they’re theoretically able to blend across a wide range of terroirs and micro-climates. The ten below represent some of the best maisons, with a specific focus on their Brut NV bottlings — the flagship of the vast majority of houses, produced in a consistent, predictable “house style” year after year — as well as a higher-end example as well.

Nicolas Feuillatte Brut Réserve

Wonderfully generous and almost sweet with ripe fruit, Feuillatte’s Reserve Exclusive represents excellent value in a category that often skews a bit more expensive. For under $40, this delivers candied red apples, salted caramel, and an underpinning of chalk that lends savoriness to the finish.

Laurent-Perrier La Cuvée Brut NV

This Chardonnay-dominant Champagne, blended with Pinot Noir and supplemented with Pinot Meunier, is known for its floral and stone-fruit notes, all carried on a wonderfully elegant frame. The Brut Millésimé 2012, on the other hand, shows how brilliantly the house does with wines that will benefit from longer-term aging as well. It’s energized with preserved lemons, Granny Smith apples, and briny oyster shells, and pulsed with phyllo dough and lemon blossoms. Now or in another decade, it’s a standout.

Legras & Haas Brut Intuition

In a region with many houses whose histories can be traced back centuries, Legras & Haas is a bit of an outlier, having just been established in 1991. In that short time, however, they’ve gained a justifiably strong following. Their flagship, the Brut Intuition, brings together the three main grape varieties of the region, and the harmony between the Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay is excellent, resulting in a wine whose flavors of citrus, yellow plums, and toast play off one another with balance and energy.

Legras & Haas produces a range of Champagnes, and the 2015 Les Sillons Grand Cru, from the Derrière Partelaines vineyard in the village of Chouilly, is full of energy, the citrus acidity both mouthwatering and framed by dry chalkiness. Flavors of passionfruit and hard green apples linger through the long finish.

Charles Heidsieck Brut Réserve

Known for its toasty, biscuity Brut Réserve, Charles Heidsieck has been on a tear in recent years. Once you taste this Brut NV, there’s a good chance you’ll want to dive more deeply into the house’s range, culminating, if you can find it, with the new edition of Champagne Charlie, the first release of the cuvée since the 1980s. It’s a chalky, savory wine that rings with marzipan and apple fritters and is anchored by warm, comforting suggestions of multigrain toast, honeysuckle, cooked honey, Granny Smith apples, hazelnuts, and coffee.

Perrier-Jouët Grand Brut

Chef de Cave Séverine Frerson continues the great house’s legacy of producing the elegant, energetic Grand Brut that year after year delivers immense pleasure for less money than it tastes like it should cost. She also oversees newer initiatives like the Belle Époque Cocoon, a recyclable (and gorgeous) bottle-wrapping gift package produced from vine shoots and paper pulp. The first release was the 2014, and it’s magnificent, balancing verbena and lemon-lime flavors with buttermilk biscuits, apricots, yellow apples, and fennel. A final grace note of lemon blossoms and multi-grain bread end things on a honeyed, mouthwatering note.

Piper Heidsieck Cuvée Brut

Piper, as it’s often referred to, has been one of the more rapidly improving houses of recent years. Their flagship Brut NV, the well-known “Red Label,” is a solid value, with loads of apple compote anchored by toast. And lately, under the leadership of Chef de Cave Émilien Boutillat, this B Corp Certified house has really been on the rise. Boutillat has also inaugurated an exciting new project called Hors-Série, for which the house releases a very old vintage with a unique character worth highlighting. The most recent, from 1982, is a testament to the benefits of time, and rings with delicious notes of plums, toast, oyster shells, coriander seeds, green-apple fritters, hazelnuts, and carob. Bass notes of roasted coffee and leather pulse throughout.

Ruinart Blanc De Blancs Brut

Renowned for their work with Chardonnay, it only makes sense that the Ruinart Blanc de Blanc Brut is a standout. They also excel with other styles: The Brut Rosé, for example, is well worth savoring, with its undertow of cigar tobacco and cedar that work as haunting counterpoints to notes of cherries, plums, violets, and tarragon. The rosewater lift of an otherwise wonderfully chalky finish is unforgettable.

Bollinger Special Cuvée

With depth and richness to spare, Bollinger incorporates a relatively high percentage of Pinot Noir into its flagship Special Cuvée–60%, which is joined by 25% Chardonnay and the rest Pinot Meunier. This, combined with the fact that some of the wines are barrel fermented, is why it makes sense that this is a wine of power, toastiness, and drama. Bollinger’s Grande Année bottlings are also terrific — the 2014, for example, boasts aromas of lightly toasted brioche and pecans that set the stage for a palate marked by crunchy apples and Seckel pears, cumin, and minerality to spare.

Krug Grande Cuvée Brut

Famously blended from more than a hundred wines and then aged for up to a decade, the Krug Grande Cuvée Brut is unique in the world of flagship bottlings. Each new release is numbered, and expresses the character of the great house in thought-provoking ways. Their single-vineyard Clos du Mesnil and Clos d’Ambonnay are also considered world-class, though you’ll have to spend into the thousands for them.

Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé

This house’s most well-known wine is the brut rosé, a reliably delicious bottling whose joyous strawberries-and-cream aromatics are cut with mineral acidity. The palate showcases generous, lively flavors of white peaches, warm brioche, chalky minerality, and the suggestion of orange creamsicle. On the other end of the Billecart spectrum is the Cuvée Nicolas François 2008, which sings with buttery honey candies, lemon pastry cream, white figs, and sweet woodsy spice. Flavors of passionfruit, lemon-lime, verbena, and cardamom finish with a lemon blossom lift and a hint of graham crackers, warm brioche, chamomile, and fennel seeds.

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