With the holiday season fast approaching, I thought a quick refresher on champagne and sparkling wine was in order. I have never heard a complaint at a party that too many people brought bottles of sparkling wine, and nothing is more festive than popping the cork on a bottle of bubbly.

Sparkling wines are made all over the world — notably Germany, Italy, the U.S., Spain — and, of course, all over France, with the epicenter of the sparkling wine world being Champagne. There are so many different styles of wines and price ranges to choose from that everyone is sure to find something to suit their needs.

Without getting into too much detail about the production of sparkling wine, the most common method is called method champenoise, which entails inducing a second fermentation in the bottle. The wine is made in the same manner as any other still wine until it reaches the bottle. Once the wine is bottled, a mixture of still wine, sugar, and yeast is added to induce the second fermentation. It is this second fermentation that makes sparkling wine sparkle. Carbon dioxide is produced then and is incorporated into the wine through aging.

Roses get their pink tinge in a couple of different ways. One way is by leaving the must — unfermented grape juice — in contact with the grape skins for a period of time to extract the red color from the skins. A second way is by blending red wine with the white wine before the secondary fermentation.

The grapes used to produce sparkling wine vary as much as the styles and regions where the wines are produced. Some of the more common grape varietals used are: in Champagne, chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier are the only grapes permitted; in cava production from Spain, they use parallada, chardonnay, xarello, and macabeo to name a few; in the U.S., chardonnay, pinot noir, pinot meunier, pinot blanc, and gamay are used.

It will be helpful if you know a few key terms used to describe champagne and sparkling wines. First, the level of dryness is described by words like brut, sec and demi-sec. Brut on the label means the sparkling wine is dry in style, sec is medium sweet, while demi-sec is sweet. Blanc de blanc is French for "white from white," meaning the wine is made entirely from white grapes. In the case of Champagne, a blanc de blanc is 100 percent chardonnay. Blanc de noir means "white from black" — only black grape varietals are used. Again, in the case of Champagne, pinot noir and/or pinot meunier would be used.

One more key to selecting sparkling wine is whether it is vintage, nonvintage (NV) or multivintage (MV).

Vintage sparkling wines usually are made only in the very best years, especially in Champagne.

That being said, it seems that almost every year some producer is making vintage Champagne. Nonvintage or multivintage wines are blends of several different vintages and represent a house style rather than expressing a specific vintage character. The different house styles range anywhere from elegant and fruity to robust and oaky.

A few of my favorite sparkling wines available here: