Learn about Champagne and the Champagne Region

The best grower champagne under 40 euro in our range. Real families, real terroir, everyday prices. Where to start and what to expect in the glass.

Prestige and vintage grower champagne without the big-house markup. The top cuvees in our range, what makes them special, and how to choose one.

The organic and biodynamic growers in our range, from Avize to the Aube and Luxembourg. What the farming means, and why it shows up in the glass.

Zero dosage and extra brut grower champagne explained, and the producers we stock who do it best. What dosage is, how it tastes, and where to start.

The grower Blanc de Blancs in our range, from Avize chalk to Montgueux and the Aube. Who makes it, where it grows, and how to choose your first bottle.

Koningsdag is loud, warm, generous, and completely unpretentious. Champagne, in the popular imagination, is neither loud nor unpretentious. That is precisely why it fits.

That decision is called assemblage, the French word for the act of assembling a champagne from its component wines. It is the invisible craft at the heart of the category, and it is the reason two bottles from the same region, in the same year, can taste like completely different wines.

This guide flips the usual order. Instead of grouping our growers by village or grape mix, we group them by taste signature. Read the bucket that matches what you like in a glass.

Every bottle we send has a face behind it. Not a marketing face, not a brand ambassador with rehearsed lines about heritage and tradition, but a real person who walks the same rows of vines every winter and decides, alone or with family, when to harvest, how to press, whether to add sulphur and how much. That is what we work with. That is what changes the taste in the glass. The formal name for this approach is Récoltant Manipulant, French for "grower who makes his own wine."

There are older champagne houses than Jacquesson, but very few still belong to the family that runs them, and almost none have done what the Chiquet brothers did in 2000.

Among the three regions of Champagne, the Marne Valley is the one most drinkers underestimate. The Côte des Blancs gets the mineral reputation.

Every year Jacquesson releases one main champagne with a new number on the label. This year the number is 748.

The Côte des Bar sits in the Aube département, one of the three regions of Champagne alongside the Montagne de Reims and the Vallée de la Marne. Historically the poor cousin, geographically closer to Burgundy than to the champagne heartland, the Aube has quietly become the most interesting corner of the appellation.

This article explains what Crémant d'Alsace actually is, how it differs from champagne in ways that matter, and why we import three specific producers. If you want a bottle that behaves like champagne but tells a different story in the glass, this is the category.

That is the kind of private champagne tasting we host in Amsterdam and across the Netherlands, and this page explains what actually happens when you book one.

you can pick a champagne shop on the Netherlands that treats the wine and the box like they matter. Here is what champagne delivery in the Netherlands looks like from our side of the operation, and what to expect no matter who you buy from.

Our local, opinionated take on how to buy champagne in the Netherlands when you happen to live in or visit Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is one of those cities that rewards the people who slow down. The light changes constantly. The water is everywhere. Whole afternoons disappear sitting next to a canal, on a rooftop, in a park. It is the kind of city that was built for outdoor drinking, and for the kind of drinking that has nothing to prove.

The question comes up at every party, every shop counter, every dinner table where someone is choosing between bottles: is champagne really better than prosecco? Or is it just marketing and tradition keeping the price higher? The honest answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. Champagne, prosecco, and cava are three fundamentally different products made in three different places using three different methods. They can all be delicious. They serve different purposes. Th

There is a moment in every champagne maker's year when everything changes. It is not harvest. It is not the first taste of the wine. It is the moment when they add a tiny mixture of yeast and sugar to a bottle of still wine, seal it shut, and trust that chemistry will do what it has done for centuries: create bubbles that will evolve and develop for years. What separates champagne from every other sparkling wine in the world is not just where it comes from. It is also how it