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This year’s best Champagne for under £30 revealed
With it being Friday it seems apt to think about how best to celebrate the end of the week and for that, we have looked through the results of this year’s Champagne Masters and picked out the highest-scoring Champagne for under £30.
Castelnau Brut Reserve is a blend of Chardonnay (40%), Pinot Noir (40%) and Pinot Meunier (20%) and has a dosage of 8 g/l
This brand was the only label to pick up a Gold medal in the entry-point for Champagne pricing, which was the band of samples sub £30, and it has been a consistent top performer for the price-to-quality ratio of its cuvées since we started the Champagne Masters more than 10 years ago.
The Gold medallist for 2020 in the £20-30 price category was Champagne Castelnau Brut Reserve, a non-vintage cuvée that just scrapes in beneath the £30 cut-off – and can be bought today by UK residents from The Wine Society.
What do you get for your money? Well, the appeal of this fizz is its pleasingly mature characters, meaning it has the brioche, beeswax and hazelnut aromatics usually found in pricier Champagnes that have spent more time ageing in the cellars of the region.
Here, you get all those lovely nutty and gently honeyed notes for a minimal outlay by Champagne standards, and plenty of fresh lemon and apple fruit too, along with a creamy-texture to the fizz, and a refreshing finish – although there’s nothing excessively firm about the style of this generous Champagne.
Ok, so it may not be a famous name, but you can just tell your friends its a Champagne for those in the know, or drink it in private.
And if anyone asks, key to its character is the five years this cuvée spends in Castelnau’s cellars, slowly taking on those delicious flavours described above.
For a full report on 2020’s Champagne Masters you will have to wait a couple more weeks as this will feature in our annual Champagne Report, out next month.
This will include all the medallists from this year’s competition, which was our biggest yet.
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