Speaking of Sparkling…

A reason to celebrate calls for champagne or sparkling wine—a wine that handily agrees with every food and everybody. You can serve the sparkly stuff with prime rib, a rack of lamb or even dessert. Sweeter sparklers, which the French label as doux or demi-sec, are dessert wines. But, depending on the dessert’s sugar content, you could also choose an extra sec or extra dry, which is sweeter than the dry brut or drier extra brut.

Sparkling wine comes in all sizes of bottles. Most buy the standard 750 milliliter bottle or the 1.5 liter magnum, but you can find sparkling wines in a bottle called “Nebuchadnezzar” that holds the equivalent of 20 standard bottles!

For those watching their sugar intake (which is all of us!), below is a sparkling sweetness tally—and why sparkling wines have their given names:

Brut Natural or Brut Zéro (less than 3 grams of sugar per liter)
Extra Brut (less than 6 grams of sugar per liter)
Brut (less than 15 grams of sugar per liter)
Extra Sec or Extra Dry (12 to 20 grams of sugar per liter)
Sec (17 to 35 grams of sugar per liter)
Demi-Sec (33 to 50 grams of sugar per liter)
Doux (more than 50 grams of sugar per liter)