NV Lhuillier Brut Tradition Champagne 750 ml

Look anywhere but Champagne.

It’s conventional wisdom for anyone seeking a great sparkling-wine value. That’s because Champagne is the world’s gold-standard region for bubbly, and if you want to get a high-quality bottle there you usually have to contend with a correspondingly high price tag.

Which brings us to the lacy, mousse-soft, NV Lhuillier Tradition Champagne—one of the greatest sparkling-wine deals we’ve offered in our history.

Produced by a 144-year-old family-run estate, the Tradition hails from the village of Fontette in southern Champagne. Composed of 80% Pinot Noir and 20% Chardonnay, it plays exotic fruit and floral aromas against vibrant acidity in clean, classic, striking fashion. It’s likely we wouldn’t have stumbled across this bubbly if we hadn’t been biking across Champagne this summer. When we stopped for a break in Fontette, a restaurant owner who saw us heading to his patio greeted us with glasses of cold, fizzing, pale-gold Champagne.

After just one sniff, we weren’t worrying about our Strava numbers anymore. We were almost afraid to ask to see the bottle, assuming it to be yet another local microproducer with too little to accommodate our audience’s appetites. But this time, we caught a lucky break.

The star winery of the village, Lhuillier (pronounced luh-wheel-lee-AY), holds around 74 acres, with vines up to 40 years of age. As Champagne imports in Britain have been falling lately, there happened to be a windfall in supply—and we moved that very day to take as many bottles as we could. A Champagne cellar-stuffer of record proportions, we’re far prouder of getting this bottle to you than we are of finally making it to Dijon, covered in sweat and a couple of bruises.