A glass of champagne at the end of a day’s work? Yes please, just the ticket! Except it wasn’t. After the first few sips, my glass of grande marque champagne, £47-£48 a bottle in most supermarkets but bland and uninspiring, was left to one side.
Supermarkets sell loads of sparkling wines like this – so-so champagnes with hefty price tags, as well as sickly proseccos. We buy them, especially ahead of a long weekend, because they feel luxurious, but they don’t taste joyful.
Yet there are many sparkling wines priced under £20 that do. On holiday in the south-west of France this summer, we drank Gaillac Perlé: a sharp local white, cheap as chips, with a tang of green apples and greengages and just enough tiny bubbles to tease the tongue.
From the Basque country on the other side of the Pyrenees, Txacoli (pronounced cha-koh-li) is similarly peppy. Made mostly from the hondarrabi zuri grape, it is typically crisp and very lively with a sense of salty minerals, like Badoit. A good wine, in short, for a hot day. An excellent example is Rezabal Txacoli Getariako Txakolina 2022, Spain (11.5%, The Wine Society, £12.50).
‘Txacoli doesn’t have the awareness [of some other Iberian wines], but it does have a following. If we run out I get lots of emails asking where it is,’ says Wine Society head buyer Pierre Mansour.
If you long for a sparkling wine that is clean-cut, like champagne, but, again like champagne, has a certain richness, then crémant should be your first port of call. Both of these – and cava, too – are made by fermenting the wine a second time in the bottle, then leaving it to hang out for a while with the spent yeast cells. This rounds out the wine and can bring it a brioche-like tinge. Crémant is made in several different parts of France; look out for the excellent crémants from the Loire and Limoux.
