Whenever we drink Champagne, we often go for the more common blanc de blanc or blanc de noir bottles over rose and other styles. But when we found Moet & Chandon Rose Imperial NV at a duty free store at an approachable price point, we knew we had to give it a try.
If you are looking for a sparkling wine with some intense red fruits and, admittedly, more mellow lees character, this one may need to be on your radar!
Whenever we travel, especially to regions that are not known for wine production, we often pick up a bottle or two of sparkling wine at duty free to enjoy somewhere beautiful.
Whenever our duty free shopping happens in Europe, odds are good we are picking up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne to enjoy if only because it is at a vastly lower price point than we are able to find at home.
For a bottle that you are paying for the name recognition as much as you are what is inside, a lower price point is always welcomed!
We're never ones to say no to an easy drinking Gamay, and when we can find this grape in a blend we almost always have to give it a try.
Domaine Curtet's Autrement Rouge gave us just that with a mix of Gamay, Pinot Noir, and Mondeuse Noir giving all of the hallmarks of a classic Beaujolais but originating from Savoie!
One of the perks of having a wine cellar is that sometimes we do not really know what we have in stock. We keep an inventory of our bottles, of course, but sometimes a few slip through the cracks and we forget about them for years.
Our Lamoreaux Landing Pinot Noir 2014 was one such bottle. We pulled it out not only to find that we had one at all, but also that it was pushing almost nine years old.
As we didn't expect this bottle to age too much longer, we decided to open it up and see how it was faring, and we were pleasantly surprised by what we found!
Whenever it comes to fine Champagne, you generally have many categories of bottles to choose from. These can include non-vintage, vintage, and more exclusive blends that feature the best of the best the producer has to offer.
Prestige-branded Champagne often is the top of the top for any given producer, and we knew we were in for a treat when we opened Champagne Dumenil's Cuvee Prestige Vieilles Vignes Brut.
But it wasn't until we sampled this astoundingly delicious bottle that we truly understood how special it was. This one is quite the gem!
When I decided to sign up for WSET Diploma, I knew I'd have to go sparkling heavy when in the D4 module.
As I have the least experience with all things bubbles, this meant finding new styles of wines to try outright (although not necessarily new grapes per our quest).
So early on in this module, I decided to go for Jean-Baptiste Adam Brute Rose- a Cremant d'Alsace made in the traditional method with a little bit of skin contact from my favorite region in France!
It was every bit what I hoped for.
When we visited several Sonoma wineries on a California trip a few years ago, we made sure to stop at Iron Horse Vineyards to try their acclaimed sparkling wines. We fell in love with them and brought many bottles home with us to enjoy later on.
Most of those bottles did not last very long, but we held onto a few to give a few more years of age to for good measure. One such bottle was Iron Horse Brut LD 2010, and we decided to open it up in mid-2022 to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary.
It was better than we expected.
We often find that non-vintage Champagne can have flavor profiles all over the place. Some are high acid with simple citrus fruit flavors. Others have strong lees components. Others still may have some indication of age because, well, we simply have no way of knowing how old that bottle was to begin with.
Champagne Taittinger's Brut NV definitely fell towards the end of being one of the more complex non-vintage Champagnes we've had to date, and now we simply want more!
While our love affair with the Sonoma winery, Arista, is primarily due to their stellar Pinot Noirs, we have been known to sample some of their other offerings like Chardonnay and even a rose made from Pinot Noir from time to time.
The rose from the Russian River Valley may not pack as much of a full-body punch as its intense-red siblings, but this rose wine from Sonoma checks the boxes for us all the same.
When we visited Napa, one of the first vineyards we made it to was Cakebread Cellars. Not only did we have a wonderful time at our tasting, we walked away with several bottles to enjoy at home. (You can read more about how we checked wine on a plane here.)
One such bottle was Cakebread's Pinot Noir Annahala Ranch 2015 and when we opened it in 2020 at five years old we knew we had found a gem- both for its flavor profile and its price point!
