Excellent Champagne starts around 50 €. It also keeps going past 200 € with ease. At some point, surely, this stops being about better wine.
August 2026 · Juho KoskelaChampagne is an excellent way to test whether money buys happiness, because the answer starts as “yes” and then gets increasingly interesting.
There is genuinely excellent Champagne around 60 €. Scratch that, André Clouet’s Grande Réserve can be had for 40 €. There is genuinely excellent Champagne around 40 €.
There is also Champagne at 100 €, 200 €, 300 €, and onward until the appropriate pairing is no longer Toast Skagen but an SEB investment banker handling your generational wealth.
I have ended up drinking enough bottles across that range recently to run into an uncomfortable question: at what point does the extra money stop buying meaningfully better wine and start buying delusions of grandeur?
This is not a blind tasting. The wines are from different vintages, producers, blends and styles, and I drank them on different occasions. In other words, this would be a terrible scientific experiment.
Fortunately, it’s a wine blog entry.
What makes the comparison interesting is that the cheapest bottle here was already annoyingly good.
Roughly 60 € at EU retail. And immediately, we’ve got a problem.
The colour was striking: bronze, almost. The nose was full of autolytic depth from the beginning. Brioche, toast, nuttiness, a little cream, ripe green apple. Then apricot, which initially sounded ridiculous even to me, until it became increasingly obvious as the wine opened up.
The palate started with ripe green apple, lemon peel and a faint continuation of that apricot, with a floral note that reminded me of lilies.
And then the acidity punched me in the face.
Not merely “fresh” – tons of sharp, mouth-coating acidity, amplified by chalky minerality, that strips the fruit away from your palate.
Underneath it all there’s still this rich, creamy texture and a ridiculous amount of brioche.
The finish is medium-long, dry and dominated by toast, chalk and acidity that keeps lingering on your tongue after most of the fruit has disappeared.
Easy 92–93 points for me.
At sixty euros. Great. Now everything else has a problem.
This is exactly the style I love in grower Champagne: plenty of richness, but with actively hostile structure.
It also sets the bar rather high for everything that follows. If 60 € already buys this much personality, autolytic depth and structural intensity, what does another 150 € get you?
Around 80 € at current EU pricing. I paid 59 € delivered, which in retrospect feels criminal. Why didn’t I buy more?
Bright golden in the glass. Piss-coloured, if we’re abandoning the standard wine magazine vocabulary for a moment.
The nose is an immediate lemon-peel punch. Bright lemon, ripe green apple, even a little honey, with brioche sitting behind everything. Surprisingly intense aromatically.
The palate continues the attack. Extremely bright lemon peel, greener apple than on the nose, brioche and pastry. Then, singing somewhere in the background, honeyed pastry and warm spice. Vanilla too.
Some oak influence, perhaps?
Turns out that’s not much of a mystery: 34 % of the wine was vinified in oak. Only 24 % went through malolactic fermentation, which also conveniently partly explains the other defining feature of this wine: the acidity. It’s huge.
The funny thing is that the colour, honey and pastry all suggest a wine beginning to show some age, and then the acidity arrives and reverses all of your assumptions.
It’s mouthwatering in much the same way as the Egly-Ouriet, with medium chalky minerality underneath. Eleven years from vintage, it still feels comically fresh.
My only real complaint is the finish. Medium+, when I desperately want it to be long.
The finish itself is excellent: toast, warm spice, vanilla, chalk and lingering acidity. It just disappears slightly sooner than the wine deserves.
This is the bottle that makes the whole price question particularly awkward. Even at today’s roughly 80 € rather than the absurd 59 € I paid, this is highly intense, complex, fresh and expressive.
It already feels complete. Not “good enough for the price.” Just excellent Champagne.
And then Bollinger makes the value problem worse.
Around 110 € at current EU pricing. I paid 84 €. Again, why didn’t I buy more? Anyway.
Disgorged in January 2023. Three and a half years of bottle age. Let’s actually taste the wine though.
Golden yellow in the glass. The nose starts much richer than either Egly or Roederer: red apple, lemon sorbet, strawberry, brioche, toast, baked goods and sweet spice, especially vanilla. There’s a little honey too.
Apple pie? Honestly, kind of.
The palate continues with more red apple and strawberry, a little peach, faint honey and vanilla.
And then the structure starts winding up.
The acidity is already there from the beginning, but through the mid-palate it just keeps building until it explodes. High, mouthwatering acidity, with loads of chalky minerality underneath. The fruit starts getting pushed aside and the wine becomes almost entirely about structure.
The texture is bone-dry. No creaminess. Nothing close to it. Instead, it grips.
Not tannin, obviously, but almost tannin-like in effect: mouth-drying, sharp, and somehow making you immediately want another sip.
The finish is long and mostly stripped of the pastry notes that dominated the nose. There’s a little red apple left, but otherwise it’s acidity and chalk doing the work. And the minerality keeps going even after the finish itself has mostly faded.
“The acidity is there from the beginning. It just keeps winding up until it explodes in the mid-palate.”
This is where my neat little “grower Champagne is the violent one” theory starts falling apart.
Bollinger is hardly some tiny grower operating from a shed, yet AYC18 has more in common structurally with Egly and, as it turns out, Le Léon than with the softer, creamier style found in Dom.
At around 110 €, it also gives you something very specific: Pinot fruit, pastry and spice on the nose, followed by this dry, chalky, acid-driven grip that completely changes the wine through the palate.
Which means we’re now three bottles in and still nowhere near 200 €.
Then Dom Pérignon enters the room.
Roughly 200 € at EU retail.
Light straw yellow. And… oddly closed?
There is fresh citrus on the nose, though surprisingly ripe citrus at that, plus white flowers. But very little autolytic depth. Compared with the Roederer, especially, it’s surprisingly restrained.
The palate is more expressive. Tons of stone fruit: apricot and nectarine over semi-ripe lemon. The flavours are medium-intense rather than explosive.
The texture, though, is fantastic. Very creamy. The mousse is creamy too. Outside of the label, this is the most immediately luxurious thing about the wine.
There’s medium acidity, enough to clear some of the fruit away, followed by a little chalky minerality. But I was expecting more of both, to be honest.
I also notice the dosage quite clearly. The citrus reads ripe rather than sharp, and the whole profile comes across broader and softer than Egly, Roederer or Bollinger.
Then a medium finish, carried by primary fruit and slight chalkiness.
And that’s it.
Maybe it’s simply too young. It probably is. That isn’t irrelevant: ageworthiness is part of what you’re paying for with Dom Pérignon.
But the bottle I drank now is the one I’m judging. In a discussion about drinking value, “it might become considerably more interesting after another ten years” can be completely true while remaining a strange defence of what is in the glass today.
“Maybe it just needs another decade is both a legitimate explanation and a hilarious thing to say about a 200 € bottle.”
Right now, I’d take the Roederer over it without much hesitation. I’d take the Bollinger too.
The Dom has better texture than either. But Roederer has more intensity, more acidity and more immediate personality, while AYC18 has that bizarrely compelling dry, mineral grip.
Dom Pérignon is obviously very good Champagne.
At 200 €, “very good” starts becoming an awkward compliment. Like calling a First Growth Bordeaux “easy-drinking.”
Roughly 210 € at EU retail.
And then Krug shows up and ruins the easy conclusion.
Golden yellow, based around the 2017 vintage.
The nose is, again, surprisingly closed. Toast, some vanilla, stone fruit and a light citrus lift. Not remotely the explosion of autolytic depth that the word Krug had caused me to expect.
Then you taste it.
Brioche first. Nougat, nuttiness, ripe peach, ripe citrus, vanilla. The texture is rich and extremely creamy.
And then the wine decides to change direction.
Sharp citrus comes through, followed by high acidity and chalky minerality that slice straight through all of that richness. The pastry notes continue into the finish but become more vanilla-driven.
Long. Dry. Tons of tension. And I mean tons.
The progression is what makes it so good. You first get this rich, creamy, almost decadent palate, and then acidity, minerality and lemon arrive to clean everything up before it becomes heavy.
It developed nicely in the glass too. The nose opened, the components started knitting together, and the whole thing became more convincing the longer I sat with it.
I still wanted more autolytic depth, particularly aromatically. At 210 €, I think I reserve the right to complain.
But this was the first bottle where I really understood the invoice.
Not because it was three or four times better than Egly-Ouriet. It wasn’t. It was doing more things at once, and crucially, doing them without falling apart: rich without becoming heavy, sharp without becoming austere, creamy and dry almost at the same time.
Annoyingly, the Krug deserves respect.
Roughly 200 € at EU retail.
Finally, restraint leaves the building entirely.
100 % Pinot Noir. Bottled in 2015, disgorged in 2022: seven years on the lees and another four years in bottle before I got to it.
The nose shows the ageing immediately. Yeast, deep pastry notes, raisins, citrus and faint green apple.
Then comes the palate: huge acidity. Ripe green apple and lemon up front, followed almost immediately by this enormous saline, mineral grip that takes over the entire wine.
Extremely dry. Almost weirdly tactile.
It reminds me of tannic red wine in the way it sucks your mouth dry and immediately makes you want another sip. The acidity is massive, but the salinity is what makes it feel truly ridiculous: this persistent, savoury mineral character that seems to coat everything rather than sit underneath the fruit.
And the finish is comically long. Toast, salinity and acidity that simply refuse to leave.
This is basically Egly-Ouriet amplified by three.
Which is perhaps not what a bottle costing 200 € would ideally like to hear about the 60 € wine.
But the Bollinger now gives me another reference point too. That same dry, grippy, almost tannin-like structural effect is here again, except Le Léon pushes it considerably further.
Egly has richness being held together by aggressive acidity and minerality. Bollinger gets drier, firmer and more tactile. Le Léon takes the whole idea and becomes unreasonable about it: more saline, more persistent, more severe, almost absurdly mouth-drying.
Everything has been turned up to eleven. It is, frankly speaking, insanity in a bottle.
And unlike Dom, there’s no waiting around wondering what you’re supposed to be paying attention to.
Unfortunately, yes.
It would have been much more financially responsible to discover that 60 € Champagne is just as good as 200 € Champagne and everyone buying Krug has given in to collective wine psychosis.
But that’s not what happened.
What did happen is that the pleasure-to-price graph flattened quite aggressively.
Egly Les Prémices at roughly 60 € is already excellent. Distinctive, intense, structured and interesting enough that I would happily drink it next to bottles costing several times as much.
Roederer Vintage 2015 is an even bigger problem. Around 80 € today, it gives you enormous freshness, intensity, complexity and polish without losing the slightly violent structural side that I clearly enjoy. At the 59 € I paid, the comparison becomes unfair.
Bollinger PN AYC18 adds another complication around the 100 € mark. It is less creamy and arguably less immediately pretty than either, but that dry, chalky, grippy structure gives it an identity that is impossible to miss.
By the time the price jumps to roughly 200 €, the cheaper bottles have already covered an alarming amount of ground.
Dom 2015, at least to me today, doesn’t make the argument for spending more. The texture is beautiful, but if I’m choosing purely based on what was in the glass, Roederer wins. So does the Bollinger.
At essentially the same price, Krug and Le Léon make a much stronger case. And Krug especially matters here because it proves the ceiling actually does rise: 200 € can buy a kind of complexity and simultaneous richness and tension that I didn’t find in the cheaper wines. It just doesn’t guarantee it.
The other thing this comparison killed was my grower-versus-grande-marque theory. Style turns out to be a much better predictor of what I actually want to drink than producer category: the severe, acid-and-mineral axis runs from Egly through Bollinger to Le Léon, while Dom sits somewhere much softer and creamier.
Krug complicates that distinction by managing to do both. It gives you that odd transition from decadent richness into sharp, mineral tension, with several layers somehow happening at once.
Le Léon takes the acid-and-mineral style I already love and turns it into something absurd – more of everything without becoming fatiguing.
Are they proportionally better than the 60–110 € bottles? Absolutely not. Are they different enough that I understand why somebody pays for them? Unfortunately, also yes.
Money buys increasingly distinctive Champagne much faster than it buys increasingly enjoyable Champagne.
Perhaps that’s where the delusions of grandeur actually begin.
Not when you convince yourself the 200 € bottle is objectively three times better than the 60 € one. That’s just ridiculous.
It’s when you’ve already accepted that it isn’t, buy it anyway, and can explain in exhausting detail exactly why.
And now I’m slightly scared of what Bollinger R.D. is going to do to me.