Best Champagne in the U.S.? Discover rare grower Champagne from fatcork.
Sure you can visit the Champagne region in France — and you absolutely should — but a delicious glass of the world’s most extraordinary sparkling wine can be found much closer to home. In fact, it can be on your doorstep in 48 hours.
Where is the best Champagne in the U.S.? Look no further; it’s fatcork.
Based in Seattle, Washington, fatcork is a boutique grower Champagne club, bottle shop and tasting room partnering with small, independent producers to import the world’s best Champagne from France. We sell directly to consumers all over the U.S. through our website, quarterly Champagne club and in-person Champagne tasting room.
At fatcork, we pride ourselves on offering a robust selection of rare, low-dosage, small-producer grower Champagnes you can’t find anywhere else in the U.S. And here’s how we do it:
Fatcork has one of the largest selections of grower Champagnes in the U.S.
Since our beginning in 2010, we have grown our portfolio to include 23 unique producers, several of whom are exclusive to fatcork in the U.S. In fall 2026, we are adding five new producers!
We only sell grower Champagne.
What is grower Champagne? It’s Champagne made by the same people who also grow the grapes and tend the vines. It accounts for only 15 percent of exports, and though it’s gaining popularity outside of France, it can be hard to find in the U.S. How many growers make their own Champagne? Out of more than 16,200 growers in Champagne, fewer than 5,000 produce their own Champagne with grapes they cultivate on their own land. These small, family-run Champagne houses make wines in small quantities with methods that have been passed down through the generations.
The Ruppert-Leroy team works long days in their biodynamic vineyards in the Aube.
Unlike the well-known Champagne Grandes Marques that blend wine to achieve the specific product consumers have come to expect, grower-producers embrace their unique environment, nurturing what nature provides with Champagne made with sustainable and biodynamic practices. The resulting wine is unique and expressive of the individual vineyard from which its grapes come. We think it’s the best way to enjoy Champagne.
We personally vet each of our producers.
Wondering what we look for in a Champagne producer? When searching for producers to bring into our portfolio, we look for an amazing family first. The families we work with have traditions and knowledge they’ve gathered through the generations, but they’re also open to evolving. They know every inch of their vineyards and care deeply about the land and keeping it natural and healthy.
Pictured above: The Redon family with fatcork founder Bryan Maletis in their 95-year-old chardonnay vineyard in Trépail.
“Once we feel the family connection, once we feel the love, once we feel the singular focus of work in the vineyards, only then do we sit down to taste their Champagne to see if it fits into our fatcork family,” says Bryan Maletis, founder of fatcork.
Nurtured over more than 15 years, our personal relationships with producers give us intimate access to their Champagnes. Many save a portion of their very small production for us, and we’ve worked closely with several of our producers to develop very low-dosage Champagne that they make exclusively for us.
Fatcork uses a direct-to-consumer business model.
Four times a year, we place orders for Champagne with our producers, and they ship pallets packed with their bottles from their cellars directly to our temperature-controlled Champagne cave in Seattle. Without a middleman or distributor in the way, fatcork controls the shipping process — always at a steady temperature — from beginning to end.
We care about packaging, too!
When Champagne is ready to leave our cave, our eco-friendly, insulated packaging ensures it gets to customers in tip-top shape. Our dissolvable Green Cell Foam insulation provides up to eight hours of thermal insulation, and our boxes meet the International Safe Transit Association's drop and vibration performance benchmarks.
Cheers!