Champagne Part 2

Welcome to Vine to Wine this is your host Linda Moran and today we are continuing our series about Champagne and Sparkling wines and how they are made.

To begin with, all wines are made by a process called fermentation, where yeast converts the grape sugar to alcohol and carbonic gas. In the case of Champagne this is done twice. The second time the fermentation takes place in the bottle. By capping the bottle tightly the gas remains dissolved in the wine until the cap is popped off and releases it.  Chardonnay and Pinot Noir represent the most common still wines used as the base in making a champagne or sparkling wine. Often reserve wines, meaning literally wines kept in reserve from previous years, are blended with the base wine. Next, a mixture of still wine, sugar, yeast and yeast nutrients, are added to each bottle of the blended wine. The wines are topped with a crown cap that has a basket built in to catch the spent yeast sediment in the neck of the bottle, and the wine is left to go through a second fermentation.  This is where the bubbles begin. When the wine has finished its secondary fermentation, the yeast sediment has collected in the neck of that basket beneath the cap. The trick is to get the sediment out and not loose too much of the gas. To do this the bottle’s neck is frozen to solidify the spent yeast and the plug of sediment pops out. The wine is finished with those big corks and a metal cage. This has been a very simple explanation for what is a very long and painstaking method of making wine and one of the reasons that Champagne can be expensive. And thank you for joining me on today’s Vine to Wine.