If there's one time of year when you don’t need an excuse to pop open a bottle of bubbly, it’s the holidays. But there's usually a tug of war with the wallet: Few of us can afford to uncork champagne for a large gathering, even if our palates point in that direction.

Which is why this surprisingly stylish French fizz is my pour of choice this season. Pale yellow and frothy, it’s rich, deep, round and tartly dry, with a citrusy note to its refreshing acidity. Tasted blind, its burnished notes suggested much pricier bottlings. At under $20, it’s my idea of how to float a party with style.

Outside of Champagne, France produces a large amount of sparkling wine labeled “Mousseux" or "Crémant,” some of it from regions not readily associated with effervescence, like Bordeaux and Burgundy. Many, I find, are pretty indifferent gaseous bottlings -- this is one of the few happy exceptions.

Jaillance is France’s top-selling brand of sparkling wine, and is produced by the Die Cooperative of 225 winegrowers in the country’s southeast. Starting in 1989, the coop began moving toward organic cultivation, and currently about 12 percent of their combined harvests are organically grown. Their range of sparkling wines includes clairette de die, crémant de bourgogne, vouvray, even a chardonnay cuvée.

The Cuvée de l’Abbaye brut is labeled AOC Crémant de Bordeaux, meaning that the grapes can come from anywhere in the Bordeaux appellation, that the wine is produced by the traditional méthode champenoise, and that it has been left on its lees for at least nine months.

This attractive sparkler spends two years on the yeast before being disgorged, and is made exclusively from semillon. Bordeaux’s workhorse white grape is put to inspired use as the base wine, where its lean, slightly green, but succulent character gains character and dimension from additional aging.

Elin McCoy is a wine and spirits columnist and author of "The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste."

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