Sparkling Surprises! All about champagne.

But first, what is wine?

To understand what champagne is, first you have to know what wine is. Wine is fermented grape juice. Imagine you had some sweet grape juice and came across some yeast. When you add the two together, that yeast is going to eat up the sugars in the grape juice, resulting in a liquid that is less sweet and more alcoholic. When the yeast are allowed to eat all the sugar in the grape juice the result is a “dry” (not “sweet”) wine as sugars are consumed and the byproducts of alcohol and carbon dioxide are produced.  

SUGAR + YEAST = ALCOHOL + CO2

If you pause that fermentation process or add more yeast and sugars, you have an opportunity for bubbles. There are several different methods for capturing these bubbles (asti method, tank method, ancestral method, transfer, continuous, doise…) but I’m going to focus on the traditional method (in French “methode traditionnelle”) from here on. The traditional method is the method used in Champagne for making their champagne sparkling wine. Note: the capitalizations!

Champagne is wine that has had a secondary bottle fermentation

They start with a dry highly acidic wine: made from some combination of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and/or Chardonnay grapes. This wine is added to a bottle along with some more sugar and yeast, called “liqueur de tirage”, capped with a crown cap (like a beer bottle cap) and let age. While aging, the wine maker uses either a manual or machine-based process to “riddle” the bottles, turning and inverting the bottles slowly over time to move the dead yeast to the neck of the bottle. The dead yeast is called “lees” and how long the bottles are let to age in this state is referred to as their time “on the lees” or “sur lie” in French. 

Lees produce biscuity yeasty flavors you might notice in the wine

The lees, as they start to break down, result in chemicals that produce a textural feel in the wine and some yeasty and biscuity flavors as well. This adds to the wines’ complexity and helps balance the natural acidity. The longer the wine sits on the lees it may also take on some cheese or buttermilk-like flavors and aromas. In Champagne this is done for a minimum of 12 months, however most champagne houses, especially high quality brands, will leave them on the lees for much longer. 

But “lees” are dead yeast, ew! 

Drinking your champagne with all those dead yeast cells floating around probably wouldn't be so pleasant. It would be cloudy at best, perhaps slightly chunky. So wine makers do something else after “riddling” the lees to the neck of the bottle.

Fun Fact: The riddling board was invented in 1818 by the late Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the “grand dame” of what we know as Veuve Clicquot. 

Manual riddling by hand using a board	Automated riddling using a gyropallatte

The lees are then expelled in a process called “disgorgement”. Disgorgement involves freezing the necks of the bottles and popping off the crown cap so the pressure of CO2 in the bottle pushes the frozen yeast plug out. It’s a slightly messy process! If the wines are left on the lees for a very long time (no standard length of time) they are considered “late disgorged” wines. 

This video shows the disgorgement process and also a peak into the dosage, corking and caging.

“Dosage” me up with sugar!

As a final step in wine made using this method, the bottles are topped off with additional liquid, a cork and cage added. That additional liquid can be more dry wine, or more dry wine with sugar added for sweetness. This is called “dosage” (say this with a French accent and the emphasis on second syllable as in “dose-AGE”). The wine is the labeled with a term that indicates how sweet it is as a result of the dosage. In increasing orders of sweetness with brut nature referring to the driest with no dosage added: 

• Brut nature

• Extra brut

• Brut

• Extra dry

• Dry

• Demi sec

Not all “champagne” is champagne

Technically, only sparkling wine made in the Champagne region of France using the traditional method described above can be labeled “champagne”. France is very serious about this! In fact in 1994 they decreed that the term “methode champenoise” could not even be used to describe wine from outside the region, we had to convert to using “methode traditionnelle”. In the US and California, we call our traditional method bubbles “sparkling wine”, in other parts of France they label it “Cremant”, in South Africa “Cap Classique”, "Cava" in Spain, and so on…

All this, thanks to Dom Perignon! Not! 

I saved the best bit of historical trivia for last. It is a modern myth that the late Dom Perignon invented champagne. In fact, Dom Pierre Perignon, monk and cellar master of the abbey at Hautvillers was tasked with trying to rid wine of the 1700’s of pesky bubbles and cloudiness caused by a paused fermentation in colder vintages. The monk lived and worked in Champagne until his passing in 1715. It was not until 1728 that winemakers in Champagne were permitted to sell wine in glass. Prior to that, they were using wooden barrels which could not contain the CO2. The first documented hint that he is associated with the champagne we know today came almost 200 years after his passing, in a marketing brochure for the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris, he’s referred to as “the father of champagne”. And history was created. Or not. 

Happy SIP’ing! Follow me on instagram for an announcement of a virtual session on Sparkling wine that I will give soon!