| 1 - Make still dry wine in the normal way.
2 - (Assemblage) Blend many different wines together to produce your House Style. Each firm has its own style and you may have to blend up to 50 different wines to achieve perfection.
3 - (Triage) Add cane sugar and yeast to the bottles and store in cool cellars.
4 - The Second Fermentation happens over a long period. It produces CO2 gas which dissolves in the wine. The pressure is 70psi which is the same as in a double decker bus tyre! You also get dead yeast cells left in the bottle.
5 - Mature the wine. In Champagne this must be for a minimum of fifteen months and for finer wines, is much longer.
6 - (Remuage) Before the wine can be released, the fine silt of dead yeast cells needs to be removed. This is done by placing each bottle horizontally in racks and turning it little by little, until they are upside down. This takes about two months.
7 - (Degorgement) This is the process for removing the sediment which is now on the cork. The bottles are suspended in a freezing salt solution which traps the sediment in an ice pellet. The top is whipped off and out shoots the ice plus the frozen sediment.
8 - (Liqueur díExpedition) The wine is then topped up. At this stage it is bone dry but its style will be changed to suit the market with the addition of wine sweetened with sugar. The cork is then wired down and the bottle will be labelled.
Many other people make sparkling wine this way around the world. The term you will see on the labels is often ëTraditional Methodí or ëSecond Fermentation in Bottleí. |
