To be honest I'm tired of this champagne/sparkling wine issue. It's all the same thing. Otherwise what's next, can't call cheese "mozzarella" if it's not made in a certain city in Italy? Or maybe the name pizza should be banned if it doesn't come from wherever it was invented, so all those pizza places the world over will have to rename their product as "cheese on bread."

Champagne is a process, a way of making the product and shouldn't have been locked down to a specific region in France simply because it was named after it.

In the end, apart from the top brands, I have become extremely suspicious of all "champagnes" I haven't heard of previously, simply because there's an extremely high chance that they're complete rubbish. All they need to sell is just have the name, so quality went out the window completely...

Give me good sparkling wine (real champagne) over "champagne" any day...