Sunday, Dec. 07, 2008
Tom and Jo Chesworth
From the Wine Cellar
It’s the time of year again to order up several bouquets of black-and-silver balloons, let out the tuxedo, take the salwar kameez out of mothballs and air it out, and order the champagne. To be champagne, the wine must be made in the Champagne appellation of France.
The invention of sparkling wine is generally attributed to a monk — Dom Perignon. He made a systematic study of champagne and published his findings. In his homeland in the north of France, the protowine was bottled when it stopped fermenting. Although the wine was not finished, it stopped fermenting in late fall because it got too cold for the yeast, which went into hybernation.
In the spring, when it got warmer, the yeast woke up and went back to work. During the primary fermentation, the wine was in a container from which the carbon dioxide that had formed could escape. The gas could not escape from the corked bottle. Inside the bottle the pressure built up.
Sometimes the wine fermented to dryness before bottling and there was no excess pressure. Sometimes there was only slight pressure in the bottle when the yeast ate the last of the sugar. (As an example of these fizzy wines, try Cavit Lunetta Prosecco at $12 a bottle.)
But often there was considerable gas due to the fermentation. In Perignon’s time, glass bottles were not strong enough for champagne and they exploded in the cellars. Bottles were expensive and most monasteries were poor.
Perignon’s job was to find out how to prevent the secondary fermentation, thus saving the bottles so they could be reused. He decided to perfect the process of blowing up bottles so that he could avoid the procedures that destroyed them. He had, in the process, recorded the method of reliably making sparkling wine — champagne — because that’s what destroyed the bottles. Next, glassmaking got better, and bottles which could withstand the pressure became available.
The problem with the sparkling wines was that the lees (yeast carcasses) were inside the bottle and the wine looked like the water in a mud puddle. Not very appetizing. Before sparkling wine was a viable product, a way of getting the lees out of the wine while leaving the bubbles had to be devised.
A woman named Veuve Nicole Clicquot, a widow (veuve) who inherited and ran her husband’s winery, solved the problem. She developed a procedure called riddling. The bottles were placed in a rack she had designed and then were carefully turned a bit by hand each day. After a complete revolution, each bottle was tipped slightly and placed in the next slot. The process was repeated again and again until the bottles were upsidedown with the lees in the neck. This process takes weeks or months.
The next step is to freeze the lees into slush and chill the wine. The bottle is then opened and some of the gas in the wine blows the slush out of the neck. Because the wine is chilled, most of the gas remains dissolved in the wine.
The widow began marketing the first modern champagne. Her winery is still in the business and you can taste the product, Clicquot Yellow Label Brut, at $47 a bottle. G. H. Mumm Cart Classique is a less expensive champagne at $36 a bottle.
At the end of the 20th century, the gyro-pallet replaced the riddling rack and the labor cost decreased. The price of quality sparkling wine dropped. But champagne, of course, maintained its cost because of its reputation.
However, you can get comparable wine at less cost. A California-made Mumm Napa Brut Prestige costs $20, and a New York-made Korbel costs $15. A cava from Spain, Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut, costs $12. An Italian Spumante Elmo Pio Asti costs $11.
All these wines are almost identical, so if you want to serve a sparkling wine but are not interested in paying a premium for the reputation of the winery or the place where the wine was made, you can have your festive bubbly at reasonable cost.
If you find that you don’t care for the austere brut wines, you can get a sweeter, more fruity demi-sec or semisweet wine. We won’t tell anyone you’re drinking a slightly sweet wine. We like them too. Happy holidays.
Jo and Tom Chesworth are both AWS-certified wine judges and can be found in the winecellar@7ms.com.
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