With the holidays approaching, it's a good time to talk about "Grower Champagnes" or "Recoltant-Manipulant" champagne. While these champagnes are fairly new to Hawai'i, they've been garnering excitement in the U.S. wine trade for the past decade or so.

Growers who have been selling their grapes to the Grand Marques — the "famous brand" champagne houses, such as Krug, Moet & Chandon, Clicquot, Pommery, Roederer and Bollinger — are now crafting their own artisanal champagnes, estate-grown and vinified.

While big-brand name champagnes are excellent, they also have a "house style" that you can count on year after year. To obtain the consistency, grapes are picked early for the highest yield, then blended and manipulated, using techniques such as chaptalization (adding sugar to raise alcohol content) or acidification (increasing acidity).

Part of the charm of drinking wine is to discover new vineyards or growers, and to find the winemakers who craft their wine in small batches to bring out a sense of place in their wine — terroir, the taste of the place. When buying a fine burgundy from France you are looking for a great vineyard site, each one imparting a different quality to the grape. The French controlled branding system has divided up parcels of land and given them ratings such as premier cru or grand cru. So why not look to buy champagne in the same manner as you would buy any other wine? Why send grand cru grapes to a large champagne house just to be blended away into a house style?

The Champagne region is going through a transition, thanks to the boutique champagnes of these Recoltant-Manipulant growers. They make these finely crafted champagnes in smaller quantities, perhaps just a few thousand cases as opposed to the mass production of Moet & Chandon, which puts out 2 million cases a year (200,000 of those being Dom Perignon).

At a recent tasting of these wines put on by Southern Wine and Terry Theise Wines here, I was blown away by the excellence of these champagnes and also by the prices: They cost much less than the big-name "luxury" brands (as low as $50 a bottle). There are no big advertising budgets to add to the bottom line, so it is up to your trusty retailer or the sommelier at your favorite restaurant to help guide you to these phenomenal releases.

Also be on the lookout for something called the special club bottling. You can spot one from the oddly shaped bottle, which is bigger at the base and tapers in at the top.

Growers created this to showcase the best champagne they have to offer. Even these top offerings are lower in price than the big champagne houses.

At Neiman Marcus' Epicure shop where I work, you can find some of my favorites: