The price seems to vary so much between suppliers and it’s difficult to know how much to spend.

Comparing the cost of Cristal Champagne is not easy because many sites seem to sell slightly different bottles and vintages.

The best way to find the price of Cristal Champagne is to check off some key features to make sure you are comparing like-with-like.

Here are some of the key points to think about:

• Bottle size – all champagnes come in varying bottle sizes from a piccolo or quarter bottle to the massive 30-litre Melchizedek.
• Vintage – the quantity of champagne produced in a year and the flavour of the grapes determines price.
• Packaging – Plain bottles are cheaper than presentation or display cases for gifts
• Delivery – Factor in the merchant’s shipping costs as these back-end charges, plus other hidden costs like card charges can make cheap Cristal Champagne a lot more expensive than expected

If you cannot find like-for-like Cristal Champagne, you can always work out the cost per glass by dividing the volume of the bottle by an average Champagne flute of 200 millilitres.

Now you have established the Cristal Champagne product you are buying, comparing costs to find the best price should be easier.

After all, you would expect the great Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne to taste the same for the vintage regardless of the supplier – and the price.

That means if you have to ask the price, you can’t really afford to drink Louis Roederer’s champagne in that iconic clear bottle with a yellow cellophane wrap and gold branding.

Cheap Cristal champagne is a misnomer – by the nature of the brand, it’s all expensive but you might find a bottle or two of Cristal at ‘best price’ if you search long enough and hard enough.

You may save a few pounds, but if you can afford to drink Cristal champagne, you are probably not that worried about how much you pay for one of the world’s finest wines.

It’s like buying a Ferrari while counting the pennies to pay for fuel and insurance.

Champagne lovers can pay up to £10,000 for a six-litre Methuselah bottle of Cristal from Harrod’s in London’s West End, as one of just 10 allocated to the UK market.

For drinkers of more modest means, a standard bottle of Cristal champagne starts at around £125 – £150.

Comparing prices is not straightforward – you have to consider vintage and volume.

Some years provide a bumper grape harvest that leads to increased production. The law of supply and demand can push the price down for that year.

Then comes taste. Louis Roederer’s finest Cristal champagne may be the drink of choice for rappers, movie stars and the wealthy, but the taste may just not be to your palate regardless of the cost.

Cristal is a blend of only the best chardonnay and pinot noir grapes from Louis Roederer’s exclusive range of vineyards, combined in the proportion that will achieve the unique Cristal flavour. The recent 2002 vintage Cristal, for example, is a precise blend of 55% pinot noir and 45% chardonnay, using harvests from the Montagne de Reims, Vallée de la Marne and Côte des Blancs vineyards.

This attention to detail gives Cristal its utterly distinctive taste, a heady combination of sugary flower notes and citrus tones, often remarked upon for being both delicate and powerful. Wine tasters for international magazines and journals invariably rate Cristal among the best of champagnes, with some particularly fine vintages scoring 100/100 for quality in review articles.

Most connoisseurs would balk at the idea of mixing such an exquisite champagne into a cocktail or otherwise diluting the flavour. And yet, there are others with a more laissez-faire attitude who are firmly of the opinion that if you have paid for such a fine drink, you should be free to enjoy it in whatever way you see fit.

There is a wide variety of champagne cocktail recipes that have been developed to enhance and build upon, rather than overpower and mask, the flavours of fine champagnes such as Cristal. These include:

“Blue Velvet”, also known as the “Bismarck” — a blend of champagne and stout beer, usually Guinness. This delicious tipple is traditionally prepared by half filling a tall champagne flute with chilled stout, then floating the Cristal or other champagne on top. This drink was created in the Brooks’s Club in London, to mark the death of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, in 1861.

“Blow Blue Bubbles”, or sometimes just “Blue Bubbles” — an ounce of blueberry schnapps poured into a champagne flute then filled up with champagne. A splash of Blue Curaçao is sometimes also added to enhance the colour.

“Nelson’s Blood” — usually a straightforward mix of champagne and tawny port in a 5:1 ratio, although some more modern variations include a measure of rum and/or brandy, and blood orange juice.

As you can see, when it comes to a champagne of Cristal’s quality, the choice is yours and however you choose to have it, you can be assured of an exquisite drink.