Champagne - Champagne from the supermarket

Lots of people buy their champagne at the supermarket. There’s nothing wrong with that, they offer a large variety. Just remember to buy after careful consideration.
You can play it safe and choose a big champagne house, but you won’t impress a champagne lover with a well-known brand.
The house brand of the big houses is certainly a good choice, but the real craftsmanship can only be found in their cuvées. Unfortunately those bottles cost a small fortune.

The fake “Veuve”

Especially at the end of the year the shelves are filled with low priced champagnes you normally can not buy during the rest of the year.
Sometimes on their label you can find a fictitious “Veuve” name and they are always sumptuously decorated. The bottle contains but an emotionless product.

These are custom-made inferior champagnes, made with grapes of inferior vineyards. Furthermore, it’s not the first but the second compression of the grapes that ends up in the bottle. The result is a flat, ordinary product and, because carbon dioxide has been added, it often causes a terrible headache.

Questionable practices

In order to be able to meet the demand, some supermarkets buy non-labelled bottles of champagne from different small producers. Nothing earth-shattering but for the fact that those bottles all get the same label!
This results in the fact that a bottle of champagne from chain store X is not necessarily identical to the apparently same bottle from chain store Y. The house brand from a supermarket can differ in smell, colour, taste, ... in short in quality depending on the chain store. We advise you to read the small print at the bottom of the label, where the content’s origin is mentioned.