Production of sparkling wine

All champagne is sparkling wine, but not all sparkling wine is Champagne. Originally considered a wine fault, the sparkling aspect actually came to be accepted as a special, delightful characteristic.

Sparkling wine is a style wine equated with celebration, romance, luxury and decadence.

There are four methods of producing sparkling wine are: Charmat or Cuve Close, Transversage, Carbonation and methode champenoise. They all aim to produce a clear wine containing bubbles of carbon dioxide. Many sparkling wines are made by the method champenoise, which is the traditional method of making champagne.

All wine goes through a fermentation process that turns the grape juice into an alcoholic beverage. During this fermentation, yeast cells transform sugar into ethyl alcohol, they produce carbon dioxide gas. The carbon dioxide is allowed to dissipate in the first fermentation.

There is a secondary fermentation after the wine is bottled and capped. This time carbon dioxide remains trapped in the bottle, that’s why there are bubbles in champagne.

In order to produce a crystal clear sparkling wine, the remaining dead yeast must be quickly removed and this technique known as the ‘Champagne method’ and often appears on wine labels as ‘methode champenoise’.

The sparkling wines attain their full maturity in the third year after being bottled and will lose nothing of their sparkling quality within a dozen year.
Production of sparkling wine