You know that favorite Champagne/Sparkling Wine you love? It will blow your mind what it has to go through before it gets to your favorite wine shop ready for you to drink.......

Now, I know many wine professionals think the way sparkling wine is made is an everyday thing. But, seriously, it is really cool and has to go 5 or 6 more steps along than still (not sparkling) wine to arrive to your hometown store to be purchased.

Firstly - lesson time. NEVER CALL SPARKLING WINE CHAMPAGNE UNLESS IT IS ACTUALLY FROM CHAMPAGNE. If a sparkling wine is labeled Champagne and it is not from that region in France, you are breaking the law. OK, now that we have that settled - we are discussing SPARKLING WINE today.

Why does it sparkle/bubble? Because it has extra CO2 in it. Well, Wine Momma, how does it get there??

The Méthode Champenoise (the traditional method from Champagne, France)
Once the initial fermentation takes place in the wine, sparkling wine goes another step further and undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle in which it will be served/sold. With sparkling wine, this means adding several more grams of yeast and rock sugar. Since the carbon dioxide is contained, it makes the wine "bubbly." It then has to sit in the bottle and age for at least 1-3 years. Crazy!

Now, here's the cool part. The bottle, obviously, has sediment in it from the yeast and sugar. In order to get that contained in the bottle, it goes through a process called riddling.

In this stage the bottles are placed in specially built "A" frame racks, called pupitres. This places the bottles at a 45º with the cork pointed down. Every few days the bottles are given a slight shake and turn and dropped back into the pupritres (eventually the angle is increased). The drop back into the rack causes a slight tap, pushing sediments toward the neck of the bottle. This occurs once every 2-3 days for several weeks until the position of the bottle is pointed straight down with sediment in the neck of the bottle.

This is still done by hand in a few very exclusive sparkling wine and Champagne wineries today. 

One of these wineries is my favorite sparkling wine producer, Schramsberg.

This post was actually inspired by this bottle, a 2004 J. Schram sparkling wine (85% Chardonnay/15% Pinot Noir). To put it in a few words, it was decadent elegance to taste this wine.

However, most producers today use machines to riddle their bottles.

Once the sediment is fully contained in the neck of the bottle, the neck is then frozen, and the cap removed. The pressure in the bottle forces out the sediment, and the bottle is quickly corked to maintain the CO2 in the bottle.

Wam, Bam, Yes Mam.....

I am sure we all have great things to celebrate and I hope you are able to do it with a great bottle of sparkling wine. If you live in the South Alabama area, you can find various varietals of Schramsberg sparkling wine at Southern Napa and Red or White. I highly recommend them.   

Cheers!