Your favorite bubbly at < $15.01

[Tyrrell]

On New Year’s Day I had a crew of friends over to taste sparklers for my big event. We were too busy enjoying ourselves to take good notes but I’ll post what I remember. So here they are in order of increasing preference.

Freixenet Brut (Pava), perhaps you have to be around my age to recall this phenomenon but in the late 70’s and early 80’s there was a type of candy that was sold called “pop rocks”. Children would put a sort of sugar dust on their tongue that would, after being exposed to the child’s saliva, explode. I recall the experience of small painful explosion’s happening on my tongue as novel and sickly sweet but not particularly pleasant. Apart from the lack of sweetness we found this drink to be very reminiscent of pop-rocks. We used a cup of it for the cheese fondue, the fondue turned out to be the best that I’ve ever had. I’m tempted to say it was good because we let it sit in the warm fondue pot for hours and let the flavors blend rather than because we made it with liquid pop-rocks but you never know.

Domaine St. Michelle Cuvee Brut and Blanc de Blanc (Washington State), both of these had small yet ferocious bubbles. The blanc de blanc tasted fresh and crisp the Cuvee brut was more complex.

Centraire Brut, This one was mysteriously labeled “France” no matter how many times the bottle was examined it obstinately refused to give further clues as to its origins. This was another blanc de blanc. I thought it to be a bit more balanced than the St. Michelle. We opened this one up fourth and we came back to it about an hour later to compare it to our last bottle. We found that after letting it have some warmth and some time to become less bubbly it became thoroughly unpleasant.

Marquis de Perlade (Alsace), another blanc de blanc this one … was the last bottle of the day and was therefore served to the least sober collection of guests. It was our third all chardonnay wine and it was everyone’s favorite of the three. It may have tasted a bit better than the French wine of unknown origins but far more impressive to us than the taste were the bubbles. They (the bubbles) were smaller and less aggressive.

Col Vetoraz Valdobradene (Prosecco), this was the first bottle we opened and universally the favorite bottle of the day (thus hindering any attempts to create a sense of mounting excitement). The bubbles were as good as or better than the Marquis de Perlade and it had a complexity that we all preferred. This wine also had a small hint of sweetness to it which made me doubt my choice of stocking up on Bruts.