Bubbly Bonus

We recently launched the Tatler Dining Guide to Champagne, a digital book encompassing 60 champagnes and several original features based on interviews with more than 25 professionals and champagne lovers from across Asia and beyond. It’s the biggest project we’ve undertaken since I became Tatler Asia’s wine editor in 2019 and we’re all extremely proud of the results.

For anyone who’s ever wondered about the inner workings of wine reviewing or shows, here’s a little “behind the scenes” look at how the Guide came to be:

AN IDEA BUBBLES TO THE SURFACE

In 2020, I started to notice that, despite universally gloomy predictions for champagne, my wine circles were all over it. The number of champagnes available in Hong Kong (and Asia) had exploded, champagne was being watched or accumulated by ever more collectors and increasingly embraced by both professionals and consumers as a “real wine”, ie something they’d enjoy in the same settings as a Burgundy or even Bordeaux, not just out of flutes before dinner. Anecdotally, this appeared at least partly driven by growing interest in fine wine among