“Too much of anything is bad,” wrote Mark Twain, “but too much champagne is just right.” Drinking champagne is like finding money or listening to a Ramones record—there isn’t really a down side. I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like it. So I’m puzzled that a great many passionate wine drinkers find so much champagne so contemptible.

Take a look through blogs, books and other written matter by folks who admire natural winemaking and the notion of terroir—the ones I’m most likely to be reading these days—and you’ll find pages of animated discussion about farmer-sourced bottles, especially from obscure and fashionable producers like Anselme Selosse and Cedric Bouchard. What you won’t find is hardly any mention of champagnes bottled by the grandes marques—the region’s major labels—that buy most of the grapes and bottle the majority of the wines.

The assumption among these otherwise discerning drinkers seems to be that big house champagnes are fit for little more than gifting at Wall Street office parties and pouring down young women’s backs in Eurotrash nightclubs on the Cote d’Azur, preferably out of jeroboams. Terry Thiese, who brings in one of the largest grower champagne portfolios, refers to big house product as “lowest-common-denominator pap served up by the mega conglomerates in the ‘luxury goods’ business.”

In The Wines of France (2006), the more circumspect Jacqueline Friedrich writes of grower champagnes: “Not only are they cheaper—the price of a grower’s top wine often compares favorably with the price of an entry level wine of a big house—they are usually better….Whiskey lovers might compare them to single-malts in a world of blended scotch.” The big houses get knocked for high yields, shoddy viticulture, indifferent winemaking, volume that runs into the millions of bottles per year, pernicious business practices, and worse. 

In turn, the grandes marques liken themselves to the famous houses of Cognac; the art of champagne, in their telling, lies in the blending of dozens and sometimes hundreds of still wines from vintages going back decades. The growers, they aver, are limited to a few colors in their palettes, since they work a handful of vineyards and don’t have the facilities to keep older reserve wines. (The reality, of course, is more nuanced: Roederer and Henriot, for example, are houses that practice immaculate viticulture, while growers like Raymond Boulard and Jacques Diebolt happen to be masterful blenders. More significantly, the relationship is generally liked on both sides and remains inextricably symbiotic: growers depend on the houses for their livelihood while the houses depend on the growers for their grapes.)

I’ve long been curious to find out what the acrimony is about, and there’s no time like the holidays to get sodden with bubbly. This winter, I decided to taste wines from 16 houses most likely to be stocked at the local Liquor Mart, and see how they fared. Importers and publicists provided most of the bottles. To fend of insanity and cirrhosis, I passed on rosés and anything retailing for more than $75 (if you regularly shop for bottles in the three figures, or sit on the board of a large urban museum, you probably get your wine information from the Robb Report anyway). An author, a brewmaster, a blogger, and a half-dozen folks working for importers and retailers here in New York tasted 14 of the non-vintage brut champagnes with me a in a single blind tasting; I didn’t mention the bottles’ big house provenance until we’d finished. Usually I abhor both writing tasting notes and sampling more than five or six wines in one sitting—it’s like watching two dozen trailers for movies you’d like to see in their entirety—but it proved an efficient way to cover a lot of ground. We tasted the rest of the wines in smaller groups. Though I received several demi-sec champagnes—vinified in the sweeter style common before brut began to catch on in the 1870s—I discovered that I simply don’t enjoy them, though the ones from Piper-Heidsieck and Pol Roger struck me as the most palatable. The dollar amounts listed reflect street prices from the better stores; thanks to the innovation of our financial services community, they are lower than they’ve been in years. Forthwith, the Champocalypse.