Chilling the Champagne

Chilling your Champagnes in the freezer will ruin their aromas and flavours, so plan ahead with buckets of ice and coolers for chilling.

The Champenois often use large coolers that take several bottles at a time to chill their champagnes.

How to chill Champagne
In a Champagne bucket: a bottle from your cellar plunged into a mixture of water and ice should reach the right temperature in 15 to 20 minutes.
In the refrigerator: lie the bottle down on the bottom shelf for three or four hours before serving; you can leave it there even longer, provided that the temperature remains constant; this way you will always have a ready chilled bottle to hand.

The right temperature
Champagne is best drunk chilled but never iced. The younger and livelier the Champagne, the cooler it should be served (8ºC). A mature or vintage Champagne will be perfect at 10ºC. Over-chilling will mean that the wine is too cold to release its aromas and flavours.

Reading Champagne Label

Learn to tell the difference between a brut Champagne, a vintage, a rosé, a blanc de blancs, a prestige cuvée,...

Behind all these different names hides a different wine with different characteristics and tastes. Each wine depends on choices made during the three stages of production.

The blend:
It is at this stage of the production process that the taste and character of Champagnes are determined. In Champagne the blending process takes place on three levels: the blending of still wines from different growing areas, of the three grape varieties and of different years

Dosage:
At the end of the aging period, the winemaker removes the yeast deposit from the bottle and adds a solution of wine and sugar. The addition of sugar, according to the different wines, allows the Champenois to create a scale of ‘sweetness’ from extra-dry to sweet.

The label:
The label carries the following information:
- The Champagne Appellation
- The brand or name of the producer
- The level of dosage: e.g. brut, demi-sec, …

Serving the Champagne

When it comes to serving Champagne the choice and preparation of your glassware is very important. If there are no bubbles in your glass, don’t believe that your Champagne is flat, change the glass and watch the difference…

Which glass?
To fully appreciate a Champagne wine you must give it the glass it deserves. Its volume and height must be enough to allow the bubbles the space to form and rise to the surface, whilst allowing the temperature to remain as constant as possible.
The ideal shape is that of a tulip, the Champagne saucer is one to avoid as the aromas and bubbles have too much space and are soon lost into the air.
The thickness of the glass also has a role to play, especially on the lips where its finesse heightens our sense of taste.

How to wash the glass?
Rinse the glasses in hot water without any trace of washing-up liquid, let them drain until dry, then store them upright sheltered from dust. The residues of washing-up liquid can inhibit the formation of the bubbles.

The Champagne method

Getting the bubbles

You start off with your base wine, blended to the style you want. You bottle it; and when you bottle it you add some yeast and sugar to each bottle. The wine ferments, and the carbon dioxide is trapped in solution in the wine.

You then leave the wine to age on its lees (the sediment of dead yeast cells) for a while. (The action of the dead yeast cells is called yeast autolysis, and gives good Champagne its bready smell.) Easy. But fermentation, as we have seen, produces a sediment of dead yeast cells, and your problem now is to get the sediment out of the bottle without losing the fizz.

Riddling, or remuage

You place your bottles in pupitres, wooden racks which hold them at an angle of approximately 45°, then every day you give them a sharp shake and tilt them a fraction more so that the sediment gradually slides down the bottle.

Eventually the bottles are upside down, and the sediment has collected on the cork. The whole process is known as remuage, or riddling.

It can be done mechanically these days by computerised metal crates called gyropalettes which turn the bottles by a programmed amount every so often. Because gyropalettes work at night,

the whole process can be done in a matter of days instead of the two or three months that is the case with manual remuage.

Disgorging

The next trick is to get the cork, and the sediment out. How do you do this?

Easy: it's called disgorging. You freeze the necks of the bottles by putting them in a shallow bath of freezing solution, and in a matter of minutes you have a sediment sorbet in the necks.

Another machine whips out the cork, tops up any wine that has been lost, and adds the dosage.

Dosage

This is sugar dissolved in the wine used for topping up: most dry sparkling wine has a few grams per litre of residual sugar. This is necessary because of the lean, acidic base wine that is usually chosen. It's perfectly possible to find even Champagne that has no dosage at all - such wines have names like Brut Nature or Brut Sauvage - but they are often something of an acquired taste.

Transfer method

Here the second fermentation takes place in bottle, as with the Champagne method, but instead of going through all the rigmarole of riddling and disgorging you empty the contents of the bottles into a large tank (pressurised, of course), filter the wine, add the dosage and bottle.

It may not produce quite the finesse of the Champagne method, but it's not bad.

Port, Madeira, Vins Doux Naturels.

With port, sweet Madeira and France's Vins Doux Naturels you add the brandy during the fermentation, while there is still a lot of sugar left in the must. The brandy kills the yeasts, leaving you will wine that is very sweet, and with the addition of the brandy, pretty alcoholic as well.

Sherry, and more Madeira.

In sherry and dry Madeira the process is the opposite. Here the wine is left to ferment out to dryness before the brandy is added - so all sherry is naturally dry. Sweet sherry is made by adding sweetening wine before bottling.

Others

In some wines the brandy may simply be added to unfermented grape juice. This is the case with Pineau des Charentes. Alcohol is also added to part of the unfermented grape juice used for Australia's liqueur Muscats and Tokays.