Sparkling Wines to Celebrate with This Holiday Season

While Blanc de Noirs sparkling is made from Pinot Noir grapes, the Blanc de Blancs variety is layered and complex, toasty with citrus midpalate, a great pairing partner for seafood dishes. For a splurge, opt for the 2000 late disgorged J. Schramm.

This pioneering Oregon producer makes a handful of sparkling wines including this chiseled, brioche-forward bottling that was harvested in 2014 and then spent five years “en tirage,” or in-bottle. The source is 100 percent Chardonnay.

As the first LEED-certified American winery and a certified B corporation, Sokol is a good buy for more than just the wine. And at just under $30 per bottle, we like this sparkler, which not only helps preserve avian habitats but showcases a blend of white varietals with notes of apple blossom, lychee, and white peach.

Plum, raspberry, and nutmeg are the hallmarks of this rosé sparkler from the house launched in 1974. Nutty caramel rounds out the palate, derived from aging on the “lees,” or yeast. We like it as a dessert pairing.

Aging a wine on the lees confers complexity to a sparkling wine. Traditional Champagne must be aged at least three years, and most producers wait between five and eight. That’s why this 10-year-tirage bottle is worth seeking out. You’ll get amplified brioche characteristics along with poached quince and currants.

A textbook version of the ubiquitous sommelier’s knife, but with a comfier handle, a sharp blade for slicing through capsules, and a double-hinged lever for easy extraction of even the most stubborn synthetic corks.

We’ve duked it out over fancy glassware in the past, but this series of wine glasses might make converts of the mason jar set. With a flatter bottom profile and undulating curves to afford for vigorous swirls, the Silhouette of each glass is designed to provide maximum air contact with the contents. That means the aromas meet your nose and meld with the palate of your wine to provide an orgiastic crescendo of sensory components.

Made in Japan since 1967 and strengthened through an Ion-Exchange process, these glasses are compact, stackable, and ultra-durable. They’re often used for hot tea in ramen shops, but they function just as well with a weeknight Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (or a thumb of whiskey). Bonus: A six-pack of these costs less than a single Riedel!

Glass half-empty or half-full is not what we’re mulling with this smart series of tumblers, which features relief sculptures of prominent mountains in the base. What better way to contemplate the heights you’ll reach in the year ahead than to drain a dram with heft like this?

Go ahead, drop $300 on a fancy blown-glass decanter. That’s blown money, once it meets the edge of an elbow after the third bottle of the night. We’ll be drinking the money we saved by using this dirt-cheap and durable Pyrex surrogate, which is made for the lab but works damn well enough on wine, too. It’s food safe, brand-new, and best of all cheaper than most wine we’d recommend.

Previous models of this system injected inert Argon gas through the cork via hypodermic needle, pushing wine back out and preserving the delicate juice inside. That’s fine for sipping your way through $800 bottles of cult cab, but for the average drinker just looking to prolong something pretty damn good, or maybe to work through a few bottles in a night without the pressure of draining them, this system is a life-saver. Instead of punching through the cork, you’ll swap on grommeted rubber necks after the cork is removed. The result: Four weeks versus a few days of post-cork longevity—and zero opener’s remorse.

Consider a dual-zone compact wine fridge like NewAir’s—perfect for cramped kitchens.