French Bloom La Cuvée Vintage 2022 (750 mL × 6)

French Bloom began in 2019 with Maggie Frerejean-Taittinger and Constance Jablonski, who wanted something to raise at a table and could not find it. The name says where they started from: French fruit, French method, and a family that has been making sparkling wine for generations.

The grapes are organic Chardonnay from the Languedoc, picked about two weeks earlier than the region usually harvests so the acidity is still high when the fruit comes in. The wine is made first and the alcohol taken out afterwards, then cut with sparkling Gensac® spring water — which is why the range reads as wine rather than as grape juice with bubbles. Le Blanc finishes saline. L’Extra Brut is four ingredients and no added sugar at all. La Cuvée, the vintage bottling, spends over six months in new 225-litre oak barrels and comes out tasting like an old Blanc de Blancs.

Raimonds Tomsons, World’s Best Sommelier 2023, called La Cuvée an excellent example of a non-alcoholic sparkling with great complexity and depth. Formula 1 named the house its official non-alcoholic sparkling wine. Both are the kind of recognition that used to go only to bottles with alcohol in them.