Most Romantic Sparkling Wines

It's Valentine's Day once again, and this year you're doing it right. Dinner is cooking away in the kitchen, the candlelit table is set, the flowers are in water, and the gifts are ribboned and wrapped. Your partner is on their way home, and if all goes to plan, they're liable to fall in love with you all over again. While your meticulous planning and effort are likely to woo your one-and-only, a relationship like yours deserves some special recognition. It deserves a proper toast. True, a great bottle of champagne is nothing to scoff at, but perhaps this occasion calls for something even more exceptional fizzing away in your flutes. If trends hold this year, a good number of you will be pouring rosé, the dry, bubbly, salmon-colored phenomenon that's swept the sparkling wine world over the last decade or so.

Most Romantic Sparkling Wines (Slideshow)

The new sparkling rosé ain't your mother-in-law's jug-handle white zin. Fear of the pink wine has abated recently, due in large part to serious winemakers taking blush colored wines seriously. The result has been a spate of pink sparkling wines that oftentimes trump their white counterparts in flavor and complexity. There has been such an influx of these wines in the market — demonstrating a vast diversity of flavors, grapes, winemaking methods, and growing regions — that it can be hard to tell what's what.

There are only two cardinal rules:

• The drier, the better. Pink wine has a bad rap largely because of the saccharine Kool-Aid that's been masquerading as drinkable since the 1960s. The Brut Rosé, and those sparklers made in its image, are definitely the way to go. While you may find some bright fruit flavors at the front of your palate, the sugar quickly dissipates with a dry, often tannic finish. 

• For the most part, you get what you pay for. I'd say this is true more so for sparkling rosé wines than it is for traditional champagnes. While a $12 bottle of Frexienet Brut will suffice for a run-of-the-mill toast at an office party, you're in much riskier territory in that price range for a rosé.

The list in our slideshow, with something for every budget, is but a sampling of all that's out there to try, but it does offer fantastic alternatives to the plain-jane champagne to which we're all so accustomed.