Why Louis Roederer is the World’s Most Admired Champagne Brand
For the seventh consecutive year, Champagne Louis Roederer has been named the World’s Most Admired Champagne Brand by Drinks International. We explore why this family-owned house keeps winning — and what it means for the Champagnes you’re drinking right now.
There’s a number in the Champagne world right now that deserves a moment of quiet contemplation. Not a disgorgement date, not a dosage figure, not the altitude of a grand cru parcel on the Côte des Blancs. The number is seven.
Seven consecutive years at the top of Drinks International’s World’s Most Admired Champagne Brands list. Seven years of an independent panel of sommeliers, Masters of Wine, retail buyers, wholesalers, bar managers and specialist wine journalists casting their votes, and arriving at the same conclusion. Seven years of a family-owned domaine in Reims quietly, methodically, resolutely refusing to be dethroned.
For the 2026 edition of the awards — now in its 13th year, with a 40-house list — Champagne Louis Roederer has once again been crowned number one. And with Krug and Bollinger completing the podium for the third consecutive year, the top four hasn’t shifted since 2024. That kind of stability at the apex of the world’s most competitive sparkling wine category is, frankly, astonishing.
Let’s explore how they got here, why they’ve stayed, and what this means for the bottles you should be reaching for.
First, a Word About the Award Itself
Not all wine accolades are created equal. Some are pay-to-play. Some reflect a single critic’s palate on a Tuesday afternoon. The Drinks International Most Admired list is neither of these.
To collate the annual results, Drinks International polls several hundred of the world’s most knowledgeable Champagne voices. Each voter is asked to nominate five brands they most admire, in descending order of preference. The criteria cover quality and consistency across the full range, branding strength, price-to-quality ratio, how much the voter genuinely respects the house, and how the brand stands relative to its category peers.
This isn’t a consumer popularity contest. This is peer recognition. It is the wine world equivalent of your fellow surgeons voting you the best in your field — not because of your advertising spend, but because of what you actually do at the operating table.
Over the 13-year history of the initiative, Louis Roederer has topped the list seven times. That’s more than 50 per cent of the competition’s entire history at number one. For a family-owned house that doesn’t have the LVMH marketing machine or the Pernod Ricard distribution network behind it, that achievement is something else entirely.
A Family Business. Not a Footnote — A Feature.
There is a tendency in modern commerce to treat “family-owned” as a quaint descriptor — the kind of thing you put on a label to suggest authenticity without necessarily delivering it. At Louis Roederer, family ownership is the very engine of the enterprise.
Founded in 1776 — making it one of the oldest continuously operating Champagne houses — Roederer has been guided by the Rouzaud family for generations. Today it is in the hands of Frédéric Rouzaud, the seventh generation of the family to lead the house. That continuity matters enormously. Decisions at Roederer are made with a timeframe that publicly listed companies simply cannot access. When you are stewarding something you intend to pass to your children and grandchildren, you think differently about the soil, the vines, the reserve wines and the style of the house.
The cellar master who has shaped the modern Roederer identity is Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon — a figure of enormous influence in contemporary Champagne. Lécaillon has been the intellectual and practical architect of Roederer’s response to the most pressing challenge facing every house in the region: climate change. More on him shortly.
The Climate Change Question — and Roederer’s Remarkable Answer
Here is where this story gets genuinely fascinating, and where the “Educate” part of our philosophy at Liquidity earns its keep.
Champagne is warming. This is not a contested statement. Average harvest dates have shifted earlier by two to three weeks over the past 50 years. Grape sugar levels at harvest are higher. Natural acidity — the spine of great Champagne, the thing that gives it its electric freshness and its capacity to age — is under pressure. The traditional playbook that produced the Champagnes we know and love is becoming increasingly unreliable.
Most houses have responded by adjusting dosage, tweaking blending ratios, or simply hoping for cooler vintages. Lécaillon’s response at Roederer was more radical, more considered, and ultimately more generative. He put it plainly and provocatively when the fifth consecutive award was announced: the rules learned at school are now largely irrelevant. The house has had to relearn and question many things in the pursuit of freshness.
What does that relearning look like in practice? It looks like this.
Biodynamic and organic viticulture at scale. Roederer controls approximately 250 hectares of vines, making it one of the most vineyard-rich of the grande maisons. Of those, 135 hectares are now certified organic — more than half the estate. The house abandoned herbicides over two decades ago, well before the broader regional ban came into effect in 2025. The pursuit of healthier soils, greater biodiversity and more resilient vines is not a marketing programme at Roederer. It is a survival strategy with decades of investment behind it.
The research vineyard. Under Jean-Claude Rouzaud and Lécaillon, Roederer established a dedicated research vineyard — ten hectares grown specifically to test and refine techniques for a warmer future. In 2013, they purchased a site near Reims at Bouleuse specifically to grow rootstocks wholly suited to Champagne soils, reducing dependence on external nurseries and giving the house genuine long-term genetic self-sufficiency. This is not a winery hedging its bets. This is a winery building a future.
The Collection multi-vintage cuvée. Perhaps the most visible expression of Roederer’s climate adaptation strategy is the Collection series, which replaced Brut Premier as the house’s non-vintage flagship. Now in its fifth iteration — Edition 246 — Collection is a masterclass in blending philosophy. Rather than simply assembling the best available wines from recent harvests, it incorporates perpetual reserves going back decades, and deliberately prioritises freshness and site expression over uniformity. Each edition is numbered, dated, and conceptually distinct. It is a non-vintage wine that openly celebrates the idea of vintage variation rather than hiding from it.
Brut Nature. The house’s zero-dosage expression is Lécaillon’s most uncompromising statement — a Champagne made without the addition of any sugar at disgorgement, relying entirely on the quality of the base wine to deliver balance and pleasure. In a warming climate, where dosage has traditionally been used to soften excess acidity, a house confident enough to eliminate it entirely is making a very loud statement about the health of its grapes.
Coteaux Champenois. The most recent addition to the Roederer portfolio is perhaps the boldest indicator of how the warming climate is reshaping Champagne’s possibilities. Coteaux Champenois is the appellation for still wines from Champagne — historically a curiosity, produced only in the warmest years when grapes reached sufficient ripeness without the second fermentation. Lécaillon recognised that the changing climate was now delivering those conditions with increasing regularity, and rather than filing that observation away, he launched a still wine programme. Named Hommage à Camille in honour of the great-grandmother of Frédéric Rouzaud, who led the house with such distinction after the death of her husband, it is simultaneously a tribute and a declaration of forward momentum.
Cristal: The Cuvée That Started Prestige Champagne
No account of Louis Roederer is complete without pausing on Cristal — one of the most storied, most misunderstood and most extraordinary wines in the world.
The origin story is the stuff of Champagne legend. In 1876, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was so captivated by the wines of Louis Roederer that he commissioned a unique cuvée for the imperial court. He insisted it be presented in a flat-bottomed, clear crystal bottle — eliminating the traditional punt — so that bodyguards could see that nothing had been hidden in the indentation. Paranoid? Perhaps. The result? The world’s first prestige cuvée, and a wine that has never lost its lustre.
Today, Cristal Brut and Cristal Rosé are the twin pinnacles of the Roederer range. Both are crafted from a single vintage, from the house’s finest parcels, predominantly from the Montagne de Reims and the Côte des Blancs. Lécaillon has progressively refined both wines, expressing ever more precisely the site character of the specific parcels from which they are assembled.
Cristal is aged for a minimum of six years before release. In exceptional years, it is held back further. When it does arrive at your table, it carries with it not just the flavours of chalk and citrus and brioche that you might expect, but an almost architectural precision — the sense of a mind at work, balancing tension and generosity in a way that very few winemakers anywhere in the world can achieve.
The Full Range: More Than Just Cristal
One of the things that makes Roederer genuinely admirable — rather than merely famous — is that the quality imperative runs through the entire portfolio, not just the prestige cuvée.
Collection 246 is the current edition of the non-vintage flagship. Built on a foundation of three primary varietals (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier), with a significant proportion of perpetual reserves, it is the everyday ambassador of everything Lécaillon believes about Champagne. It is the wine that reaches the greatest number of people. That Roederer chooses to invest so heavily in its quality — rather than coasting on the margins of a high-volume, lower-spec expression — speaks to something important about the house’s values.
Brut Vintage is produced only in years the house considers genuinely exceptional. When it appears, it offers a counterpoint to the Collection — the same house, the same philosophy, but with the latitude of a single exceptional year rather than the discipline of multi-vintage blending.
Blanc de Blancs Vintage is Roederer’s pure Chardonnay statement — a wine that showcases the chalk-driven minerality of the Côte des Blancs parcels, with the finesse and tension that only great blanc de blancs can deliver. For those who love the electric precision of Champagne’s most cerebral style, this is a revelatory wine.
Rosé Vintage completes the vintage picture. Made from Pinot Noir with a measure of still red wine added during blending — the traditional assemblage method — it combines the structure of the black grape with the precision of white wine Champagne winemaking.
Brut Nature sits outside the vintage framework, appearing when conditions allow Lécaillon to achieve the balance he demands without any dosage adjustment. It is a wine for those who want Champagne stripped to its absolute essence.
And now, Coteaux Champenois Hommage à Camille — the still wine that represents Roederer’s most recent evolution, and the house’s statement about what Champagne might become in the decades ahead.
What Seven Years at the Top Actually Means
Think about what it takes to sustain this level of recognition across seven consecutive years. The world changes. Tastes shift. New houses emerge. Established houses stumble. Political events, economic pressures, and vintage variations all conspire to create movement in the rankings. And yet: Roederer. Number one. Again.
Journalist Giles Fallowfield, who has overseen the Drinks International awards since their inception, captured it well when the sixth consecutive award was announced: reaching the summit is an achievement; staying there requires constant vigilance, unwavering investment and a genuine capacity for innovation.
That capacity for innovation is not merely technical. It is philosophical. Lécaillon has fundamentally repositioned the question Roederer asks of itself. It is no longer “how do we make the same great Champagne we’ve always made?” It is “how do we make the greatest Champagne that this particular moment in time — this particular climate, this particular set of parcels, this particular vintage character — allows?”
That is a harder question. It is also a more honest one. And the world’s best Champagne professionals, voting with their professional reputations every year, keep arriving at the same answer about who is answering it most compellingly.
Why This Matters for Champagne Lovers in Australia
Here at Fat Cork, we are Champagne obsessives. We believe — as we always have — that Champagne is not a category reserved for grand occasions. It is a wine of extraordinary complexity and versatility, capable of expressing place, season and philosophy in ways that no other wine quite achieves.
Louis Roederer’s consistent excellence matters to Australian Champagne lovers for a simple reason: it sets the standard. When the most knowledgeable Champagne professionals in the world name a house their most admired for seven consecutive years, they are pointing at something instructive. They are saying: this is what rigour looks like. This is what long-term thinking produces. This is what happens when a family makes decisions for the next generation rather than the next quarter.
If you have never opened a bottle of Collection, or discovered what Cristal tastes like when you give it the time and attention it deserves, or explored the mineral precision of the Blanc de Blancs, then the 2026 award announcement is as good a reason as any to begin that journey.
The bubbles are waiting. The glass is ready. And at the summit, as it has been for seven remarkable years, stands Louis Roederer.
Bravo, Champagne Louis Roederer. Bravo.
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