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Wine How to choose the best Champagne and other fizz this Christmas Whether you like Champagne or prosecco, here's our guide to finding a bottle that sparkles at Christmas and New Year's Eve Super chilled: the price of a palatable bottle of champagne is ridiculously low In 2013, global prosecco sales overtook those of champagne for the first time Photo: ALAMY By Victoria Moore 7:00AM GMT 21 Dec 2014 Follow The taste of sparkling wine is not its most important quality. Heresy for a wine correspondent to say such a thing, I know, but it’s true. What matters more is simply that it exists, fizzing away, cheering everyone up with its streamers of spritz and light-hearted promise of good times. This is why we drink so much of it. And we really do. Alcohol consumption as a whole has fallen 18 per cent since 2004, but sales of sparkling wine just keep going up and up and up. On our small island we now spend £541m on it a year, making it the fastest-growing alcohol category in the country, according to figures from Kantar released earlier this autumn. The statistics suggest it can’t just be us knocking it back so enthusiastically, either. Worldwide production of sparkling wine has risen by 40 per cent in the last ten years, says the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. Nearly three-quarters of it all comes from just five countries — France, Italy, Germany (where they produce a lot of delicious sekt, much of which they keep, selfishly, to themselves), Spain and Russia — but production elsewhere is booming too. It’s up in Australia and the USA while in South America, both Brazil (they love sparkling wine, much of it made from moscato, in Brazil) and Argentina (significantly, Moet & Chandon have an outpost here) are making three times as much sparkling wine now as they were a decade ago. What we have really fallen for in this country of course is prosecco, the sparkling white wine from the Veneto in north-east Italy. Once we opened it only for celebrations but it has almost become an everyday staple. Our thirst for it is apparently insatiable. Virgin Wines say they have sold 55,000 bottles of their £9.99 Le Dolci Colline NV prosecco alone this year, an increase of 134 per cent on 2013. Tesco, who sold 12 million bottles of prosecco in 2013, make that number look small. Prosecco is everywhere you look, so popular that dozens of bars and pubs up and down the country now even serve it on draft, though as far as I know it is still not considered acceptable to order it by the pint. One consequence of this ubiquity has been a rise in price and a fall in quality. I am the biggest fan of this wine that I know — I like its snowflake delicacy and pearskin elegance — but so many versions now just taste like alcohol-flavoured water with a few teaspoons of sugar, or some of those pastel-coloured fizzy sweets, stirred in. Inevitable, perhaps. I now sometimes treat myself to “expensive” prosecco — £14-a-bottle stuff that actually tastes in real life as it will in my imagination. Related Articles * The best bargain bubbles, from cava to champagne * The best deals on Champagne and fizz for New Year's Eve 28 Dec 2014 * When did Britain lose the ability to cook? 17 Dec 2014 * Why Swedes do Christmas best 15 Dec 2014 For most of the year you get more wine for your cheap sparkling wine pound if you look beyond prosecco. I’ve already written, for example, about the brilliant Jura sparkling wine that Aldi sells for £7.29. Christmas is an exception: right now, the big stores all try to out-glitter each other with wine deals designed to lure customers into shops. I like to think the craze for sparkling wine means a little bit more than prosecco for a fiver, though, and its fashionable rise has brought many more exotic options to our shores. Tesco, for example, has sparkling pignoletto (also stupidly cheap at the moment), an alternative to prosecco from Emilia Romagna. Sticking with Italy, Franciacorta is the country’s answer to champagne and it has been doing well here recently thanks to a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign. Made in the north, it tastes much richer than prosecco but I have yet to find one that could reasonably be called good value for money. Certainly steer well clear if you are one of those who think that English sparkling wine is over-priced. Franciacorta makes them look cheap. For £10-20 you can find sparkling wines that have real vinosity, that taste properly “winey” and just happen to be fizzy too. Such as? A thrillingly direct crémant de Limoux, for one. A fizz from Australia’s coolest wine producing region, Tasmania. Or a sparkling wine from the Loire, some of which are gentle and bucolic while others have more of a razor edge. I am utterly addicted to Huet Vouvray Pétillant 2009 France (13%, The Wine Society, £19.50) which is made from chenin blanc, very austere and dry, and tastes of baked, honeyed apples, with all the sugar taken out, and a gentle fizz put in. Granted, you can’t order it now for New Year’s Eve but January and February are always so long and so dark and so cold, don’t you deserve a few bottles of somethinng? I think so. 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