Champagne is for Douchebags

But so Is New Year's Eve. So You're Going to Have to Buy Some

You know what the Japanese consume to celebrate New Year’s Eve? Soba noodles. Yes, fiber-rich, protein-laden, buckwheat pasta. This is how a reasonable culture welcomes the year.

We Americans like to burn it all down. New Year’s Eve is eating caviar, getting drunk, lighting fireworks, and chugging Champagne straight from the bottle, preferably on a megayacht:

So if you’re New Year’s Eve-ing in the U.S.A., you’ll need to pop a cork inexpertly to make a loud noise and then overflow some glasses with foamy sparkling wine.

I’m neither an expert nor a fan of sparkling wine. I enjoy bubbles the way any Jew who grew up around seltzer does. But I also know that the two ways to hide flavor are carbonation and low temperatures. If your mom gave you warm flat Coke to calm your stomach when you were sick, then you had a moron for a mom. You also were shocked to find out what cola really tastes like. Which is not great.

But again, I get it. Just like you got a diamond when you got engaged and ate a turkey on Thanksgiving, you’re going to drink bubbles on New Year’s Eve. But there are less dumb ways to do it.

If you’re going to a dress-up party that’s trying to be fancy, and the people aren’t wine snobs, then you probably have to bring Champagne. Like wine that’s actually from the castle-filled region 90 miles east of Paris. And it won’t be cheap.

Champagne can be delicious. It’s can have warm toasty flavors. It’s often got tiny bubbles. It’s made with three grapes: pinot noir, chardonnay, and pinot meunier, which is a grape I’ve only heard about when people list the third grape in Champagne. There’s also a “blanc de blanc” version made with 100 percent chardonnay, which is quite acidic and good with richer food. There’s a “blanc de noir” which is just pinot noir and is nice on its own. There’s non-vintage Champagne, in which the winemaker mixes grapes from different years to make a consistent house style, much like Tropicana mixes oranges. And there are occasional vintage Champagnes, which have the year on the label. These are supposed to be special and aged and you shouldn’t buy unless you’re really into Champagne.

The trouble with Champagne is that it’s like a mall in a Vegas hotel: it’s all about brand names. Some Champagne houses have been around since the 1700s, get name-checked in songs, and sport labels that look like logos on the Real Housewives’ purses. Dom Pérignon, Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Krug, Taittinger, Louis Roederer… I’ve written half of a Sex and the City episode.

Champagne is so tied to being status-conscious that an insecure, controlling Billy Joel character describes his Big Shot girlfriend this way, in the very first lines of the song:

Well, you went uptown riding in your limousine
With your fine Park Avenue clothes
You had the Dom Pérignon in your hand
And the spoon up your nose

Avoid this as best as you can. At the very least, I implore you not to give your New Year’s Eve host a bottle of yellow label Veuve Clicquot¹. The same molecules of water have been on Earth since before the dinosaurs, given and returned in a constant cycle. So it is with bottles of Veuve Clicquot. People gift it to me and I regift it to others, the garish yellow box never opened. It is possible, in fact, that there is no Veuve Clicquot Champagne at all, only heavy Veuve Clicquot boxes. Veuve Clicquot is so universally gifted that my friend Kristin Newman, a sitcom writer, was given a box of Veuve Clicquot that came with a “Happy Anniversary” note. It was not her anniversary. The note was addressed to the person who gave the bottle to Kristin. I was relieved to find out that person wasn’t me.

Luckily you don’t have to buy a $100 bottle, because there are good off-brand $30 bottles of Champagne. I like Trudon’s Emblematis, Ariston’s Aspasie, Alexandre Le Brun’s Tradition, and Pierre Mineral.

But if you’re having a non-tuxedo dinner with people who you don’t have to show off in front of, you can save a lot of money by buying sparkling wine from anywhere else in the world besides Champagne.² Even places in France.

Sparkling wine made outside of Champagne goes by “crémant,” which means creamy, which sounds less gross in French. I buy a lot of it from Alsace, especially a $20 bottle of Allimant Laugner Cremant d'Alsace Rosé because it’s pink and that’s fun. But I also buy cremant de lots of places: Loire, Limoux, Jura, and Burgundy.

Cava, a Spanish sparkling wine, works well enough. I’ve never had this cava, because it’s $100, but showing up with a bottle shaped like a torpedo would be baller. I have no idea how you put it down on a table. You probably never do. Just walk around with it yelling, “Buy my crypto!”

I have had lots of this $25 cava, which is officially called Segura Viudas, but my lovely wife Cassandra and I call it Pimp Cava, because it wears more ridiculous jewelry than Bishop Don Juan.

Two summers ago, when I was staying at the Grand Hotel da Vinci in the beach resort of Cesenatico, Italy, for work, the guy who was paying ordered a bottle of sparkling wine called Ferrari. It’s $25, delicious, 100 percent chardonnay, and, most importantly, SAYS FERRARI on it.³ If you’re bringing a $75 Veuve Clicquot yellow label to a party instead of a wine that SAYS FERRARI on it, you are doing it wrong.

American wine isn’t usually a better deal than European bottles, but I didn’t mind an Argyle Blanc de Noirs Willamette Valley Brut Sparkling Wine I got for $15, or the $7 bottles that Sofia Coppola made from her dad’s Napa vineyard: Francis Coppola "Sofia" Monterey County Brut Sparkling Rosé.

But if you want Champagne on New Year’s Eve, reason not the need. You might as well enjoy it to end 2024. Because come next year, the tariffs are coming.

1. Veuve Clicquot’s $175 La Grand Dame is, however, delicious.

2. Champagne for your sham friends, real wine for your real friends.

3. It has no connection to the car, but it sure seems like it does because it SAYS FERRARI on it.