01.Introduction
You can pay anything from $5 for an Australian sparkling to as much as $500 or more for a bottle of imported French champagne. Where should you draw the line?
CHOICE’s experts taste-tested 72 popular sparkling wines and champagnes, ranging in price from $7 to $205 a bottle. Some of the cheap ones, such as Renmano River Breeze Sparkling Cuvée ($7), scored very well, while some of the more expensive, such as Bollinger Brut la Grande Année 1999 ($205), didn't. Wines in the $12 to $20 bracket were disappointing overall.
Please note: this information was current as of December 2009 but is still a useful guide today.
How we test
Expert tasters are trained to judge wines on their merits, setting aside personal preferences. They know the price range, but otherwise the wines are tasted blind, identified only by numbers.
Each expert independently gives the wines a score out of 20, following the international showscoring system for wines – a maximum of three for appearance, seven for nose (aroma) and 10 for palate. The score published in the table is a consensus score reached when the experts discuss the wine after tasting, still without knowing the wines.
- A score of 14-15 points indicates the wine is OK but nothing special.
- One that scores 15.5-16.9 points would be awarded a bronze medal at a wine show
- 17-18.4 points would earn a silver.
- 18.5 or more would be awarded a gold.
Occasionally, the experts couldn’t agree. In these cases we refer to the wine as a “mixed emotion” in the table.