Notice that you do not see a vintage year on this label.

This means that the bottle has a blend of champagne from different years. The opposite of this is vintage champagne, where all the champagne in the bottle is made entirely from a single year’s grapes.

Winemakers produced non-vintage champagne out of a desire to control the champagne’s quality. The quality of champagne grapes, like all other wine grapes, are heavily influenced by the weather. Too much rain and not enough sun negatively impacts the ripening of the grapes. If the current year’s grapes are not good enough to create a vintage champagne, winemakers blend champagne from different vintages, grapes and vineyards before bottling.

Vintage champagnes are only made a few times in a decade. This is because during a year with bad weather, the winemaker has to decide whether it wants to release a vintage champagne. As they are rare, vintage champagnes are generally more expensive than non-vintage ones.

It is hard to say whether vintage champagne is ‘better’ than non-vintage ones, since a non-vintage champagne blend is carefully selected from good grapes across different years. All one can say is the vintage champagnes are ‘special’ since they are made from all grapes in the same vintage.

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