I always say if you want wine to drink top wines like Champagne or Brunello, you gotta be prepared to pay for it. Apart from a few rare exceptions, the quality wines from those areas start in the $60+ range. Sure, $30 Champagnes exist, but they’re not any good. They are mostly industrial sized companies who buy fruit (or already crushed juice) in large volumes at bargain prices from sometimes hundreds (if not thousands) of growers and just make money entirely through economies of scale, not through producing quality. Generally speaking, the land prices in these famous regions are so high that the overhead really precludes any producers from making inexpensive wines. And by basic supply and demand, when regions get enough hype, they can justify increasing their prices.

But even if having a $25 budget for quality Champagne is an impossible task, it’s very possible to get an outstanding bottle of great Traditional or Champagne Method sparkling wine in that price range. Same goes for alternatives for many other famous wines like Burgundy, Sancerre, or Brunello di Montalcino. So today we’re going to look at some alternatives to famous expensive regions that really compete in quality and style at fractions of the price.