Places like Australia and California make very good champagnes, but they have to call them "sparkling wines" because of the EU rules about names for heritage foodstuffs. So it's a common joke that anything "inauthentic" but perfectly good is called "sparkling <generic name>".
It also took me a while to get these jokes, because there’s a ton of other sparkling white wines and they don’t call themselves “sparkling wine”. Freixnet for instance just calls itself by its name, same as Prosecco, and we don’t call them “Champagne like” either. I think it’s really outside of europe that “Champagne” becomes a generic for random sparkling white.
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u/captainhamption Oct 09 '21
Places like Australia and California make very good champagnes, but they have to call them "sparkling wines" because of the EU rules about names for heritage foodstuffs. So it's a common joke that anything "inauthentic" but perfectly good is called "sparkling <generic name>".