SMALL-PRINT CHAMPAGNE

When buying French Champagne, read the fine print. The very fine print.

Look for two letters, all caps—“NM,” for example, or “CM” or “RM”—in the most wee font size possible, somewhere on either the front or back label, often close to the address of the producer.

These little letters will help you score terrifically delicious Champagne at a fair price. Of course, by themselves, they tell only a very short story. Here’s the rest:

The Champagne market, in the main, is the enterprise of two different camps of big players. The first consists of what are called “the grandes marques,” houses such as Moët & Chandon, Roederer, Veuve Clicquot and a raft of others. The second group are thousands of grape growers who sell their grapes to the grandes marques and, who, because they own far more vineyard land than do the grandes marques even as a cluster, very much control the price of the base wine.

(Champagne, the wine, is itself made of a plethora of wines, various grapes and, often, vintages that, combined, all undergo a second fermentation in the bottle. The base wine begins the charge.)

The grandes marques function as négociants (French for “middlemen”), buying up grapes from the farmers and making them into Champagne. Other négociants, not associated with the big houses, also midwife Champagne. Sometimes they buy base wine and sell it to smaller Champagne houses; sometimes they broker bottles that already have undergone their second fermentation. Altogether, the 200+ négociants in Champagne corner close to 90 percent of the total Champagne market.

Are these numbers neutral? No, they’re scary. Because the vineyard area of Champagne is geographically set, with no room to expand in quantity, so much control of a product in such great demand too easily leads to the natural tendency to shortchange, especially on quality. Does this mean that a wine such as Pommery’s Brut Royal or Roederer’s Brut Premier is less of a wine than it’s touted to be?

I will say that both aren’t what they used to be, especially at $50-$60 a bottle. And an honest Champagne lover couldn’t deny that a wine such as Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label (c. $75) has become the Micky D of Champagne—as in “several billion served”—but a drab drink all in all. Not to mention the balderdash of $300 for a bottle of Moët’s Dom Pérignon (annual production, in excess of 4 million bottles). Please.

For the same (or, indeed, much less) money, much better quality Champagne issues from other producers. So, now, to the very fine print. The letters “NM,” “CM” and “RM” are your guide to finding the really good stuff.

NM: Stands for négociant-manipulant (or négociant-manipulateur), the majority of Champagne produced. It is négociant-derived and offers a huge variation in quality. It can signify anything that comes from a grande marque to a defunct négociant whose (private) label is still in circulation. In other words, and to look at it another way, “NM” stands for “caveat emptor.”

RM: stands for “récoltant-manipulant” (or, loosely translated, “grower-producer”) is someone who grows the grapes and then makes the Champagne from them—cradle to capsule, as it were. A happy nickname is “farmer fizz.”

These are fewer than 1/10th of all Champagne produced but offer the best chance for the consumer to purchase a truly great bottle of bubbly. Caution: some of these smaller producers do not measure up, perhaps because they do not possess the resources to make such a complicated wine. Trusting your selling or recommending source—a talented, experienced wine merchant, for example—is most important here.

And: CM stands for “co-operative de manipulation,” a winemaking facility that produces wines or Champagne for its members, of which there are close to 150 firms. Very variable, but three of the better-tasting, better-value examples are Nicolas Feuillatte (the elder of the group), Mailly, and Jacquart.

Finally, of occasional supply is RC, for “récoltant-co-operateur” and is, basically, a house that buys back from a co-op producer finished wine or Champagne to label under its own name.

I cannot find (or be told) an answer to the question why these two important letters are set in such miniscule typeface in the first place. I suspect that it has to do with wiggle room engineered by the large and politically powerful houses. In short, the big NMs don’t want you to find too many of the better quality RMs.

I also think the wee font is due to the way Champagne labels are printed. Little French fairies sit at their desks all day long penning the letters onto Champagne labels. They merely have small quills, that’s all.