Moet & Chandon Champagne Brut Imperial NV

If you’ve ever had Champagne at a wedding, odds are good it was this. Moet has been at it since 1743 and is by a wide margin the largest house in the region, which means Brut Imperial is assembled from a hundred-plus base wines drawn from across Champagne, plus reserve wines from earlier years to hold the house style steady bottle after bottle. Pinot Noir supplies the body, Meunier the roundness, Chardonnay the lift. It isn’t trying to be a grower’s terroir statement, and it doesn’t need to be – the job is consistency, generosity, and a label everyone at the table recognizes instantly. On that count, almost nobody does it better.