Wine column: What bottle should you pop to celebrate the arrival of 2024?

This New Year's Eve, do you cheer with real Champagne, Champagne-method bubbly or cheap-and-cheerful Prosecco or Prosecco-style sparkling?

Do you dare to shear off the top of the bottle with a sword?

Do you have a glass just at midnight?

Or, do you sip glass-after-glass all night long?

Whatever you decide, it has to bubble at midnight.

Nothing is more celebratory than sparkling wine.

The resounding pop of the cork is synonymous with 'something special is going on here.'

The exuberant bubbles mirror our abundance and joy.

The bougieness of bubbles goes all the way back to the late 1700s when royal courts in Europe kept the sparkling flowing as a delicious status symbol.

Now that we can all afford a bottle of bubbles, it is the ideal drink to say good-bye to the old year and hello to the new.

It's the drink to share with family and friends to dismiss what's not good in our lives and toast our blessings and infinite potential.

Champagne (only from the eponymous region of France) and Champagne-method wines are made with a second fermentation in the bottle to give it abundant, fine and long-lasting bubbles.

This traditional method creates sparkling wines with aromas and flavours of apple, lemon and fresh-baked croissants.

Prosecco (only from the eponymous region of Italy) and Prosecco-style wines get their bubbles in a second fermentation in a big stainless-steel tank.

The resulting sparkling is still fresh and delightful, but it's not as complex and textured as Champagne-method, and tends to have a lemon, pear and honey profile.

As a result, Prosecco-style sparklers tend to be more affordable than Champagne-method bubbly.

So, without further ado, here's a cross-section of amazing BC sparkling wines at all price points to crack open New Year's Eve.

- Blue Mountain 2014 Reserve Brut ($50) from Okanagan Falls (Champagne-method)

- Blue Mountain 2019 Rose Brut ($40) (Champagne-method)

- Haywire 2017 The Bub ($30) from Summerland (Champagne-method) (in a bottle with a crown cap instead of the distinctive mushroom-shaped cork that tops most bottles of sparkling wine)

- Garnet Valley Ranch 2016 ($50) from Summerland (Champagne-method)

- Narrative XC Sparkling 2022 ($25) from Summerland (Prosecco-method) (fun fact, as you'll see in the photo, this bubbly is in a bottle with a screw cap instead of that aforementioned mushroom-shaped cork under a wire cage and foil)

- McWatters Collection 2017 Brut ($65) from Penticton (Champagne-method)

- Noble Ridge 2017 The One ($40) from Okanagan Falls (Champagne-method)

- Township 7 Seven Stars 2016 Sirius ($80) from Langley (Champagne-method)

- Saintly The Good Sparkling rose ($20) from Oliver (Prosecco-method)

Cheers and Happy New Year!

Steve MacNaull is a NowMedia Group reporter, Okanagan wine lover and Canadian Wine Scholar. Reach him at [email protected]. His wine column appears in this space every Friday afternoon.