Crémant class

As Crémants de Loire and Bourgogne turn 50, the style's popularity continues to bubble up. In time for the party season, we present 20 great Crémant buys, from around France

- STORY & SELECTION ANNE KREBIEHL MW

France is awash with bubbles. And no, I'm not talking about Champagne; I’m talking about Crémant, the bottle-fermented sparkling wines made outside Champagne, across eight French regions. From Alsace in the northeast down to Burgundy, then skirting the Alps in Jura and Savoie, south to Die and Limoux, across to Bordeaux and finally the Loire valley, these Crémant appellations trace an effervescent tour of France. They look back on various sparkling wine traditions and come with delicious regional accents.

Sparkling wines have long been popular in France. Legend has it that they’ve been made in Limoux since the mid-16th century, although evidence of the wine's effervescence is considerably younger.

It was the early success of Champagne and its processes that inspired others. Négociant and winemaker Joseph-Jules Lausseure made Bourgogne Mousseux from his Pinot Noirs in 1818, others soon followed and by 1827, more than a million bottles of sparkling Burgundy had been sold in France. Belgian Jean-Baptiste Ackerman pioneered the style in the Loire valley, a hub of sparkling wine production to this day. He founded his trading house in Saumur in 1811, got into wine production, experimented, and received a gold medal at the 1838 Industrial Exposition of Angers for his 1836 sparkling wine. Troglodyte cellars, carved into the local tuffeau limestone, were ideal, of course.

In Alsace, Mousseux d’Alsace was made in the 1880s and ’90s, but it took young Julien Dopff, from a family of coopers and wine producers, to take the idea mainstream. He had visited the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900, discovered Champagne and the méthode Champenoise (as it was then known), and promptly decided to train in Epernay. He then began to make sparkling wine back home in Alsace.

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