Find a cheap and good Champagne

You need to know how most champagnes are made if you want to understand the importance of a winemaker's champagne (also known as grower's champagne, proprietor's champagne or manipulating grower's champagne).

In Champagne today, 2/3 of bottles are vinified by 5 multinationals. These companies often don't own the vines, but buy the grapes by the ton and vinify them in huge cellars under their own employees' supervision. You're probably familiar with these "industrial" champagnes. We often find them on the shelves of supermarkets and some wine shops. These champagnes are produced in very large quantities, but they are not the most affordable or the best quality.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Champagne today is home to almost 4,000 winemakers. These hands-on harvesters work on their own or with their families, cultivating the vines that will be used to produce their champagne. The same hands work on the vines, the harvest, the vinification and often even the marketing: those of the winemaker himself. This traditional system cuts out the middleman and guarantees not only quality, but also a luxury product at a fair price.

The difference with the big brands, whose success relies heavily on high-budget marketing and advertising campaigns, is that winemakers invest in their own production tools to get the best out of their vines and grapes. The best advertising for a craftsman is to produce quality champagne. Word-of-mouth will do the rest.

Another factor when calculating the price of a champagne is its international reputation. Champagne is one of the best ambassadors of French culture, and tasting champagne is considered an outward sign of success in many countries. The great Champagne houses were able to jump into this niche and take advantage of the soaring prices caused by the demand. As a result, many of them tend to sell their production abroad, driving up prices right up to the shelves of French retailers.

On the other hand, winemakers' champagnes are much less known abroad, and understandably so. How could the American public possibly know each of Champagne's 4,000 winemakers?

Winemakers can only produce a few tens of thousands of bottles a year, so they can't keep up with ever-increasing foreign demand. They prefer to focus on the French market, which is more knowledgeable and the cornerstone of a healthy winegrowing business. As one of our winemakers rightly put it: "What's the point of producing champagne to sell on the other side of the world if the French themselves don't drink it anymore?"

It's crucial that winemakers continue to offer good, inexpensive champagne if France's "traditional" champagne consumption model is to work. So are winemakers' champagnes affordable? Yes, they are! Champagne growers continue to offer some of the most affordable champagnes on the market, whether it's to protect themselves from speculation, to better control their production from vineyard to bottling plant, or simply to demonstrate good farming sense.

How about quality?