Champagne and Sparkling Wines

Appears in
top 1000The New Making of a Cook
The New Making of a Cook

By Madeleine Kamman

Published 1997

  • About
There are two ways of making sparkling wines. The inexpensive way is to use the “bulk process method” in which indifferent white wines are fermented in large closed tanks and bottled under pressure. Such wines are sold for much lower prices. Such wines can lose their bubbles quite quickly and be very unsatisfactory to drink.

True Champagne in France and a number of extremely well made and delicious sparkling wines in the United States and Australia are produced by the other technique, called the méthode champenoise. In Champagne the weather is quite cold and even fully mature grapes are not always full of sugar; add to this the fact that the soil of Champagne is pure chalk, and you will understand that the wines one obtains to make the sparkling wines are anything but mellow. In California, where the weather is extremely hot and the grapes not grown in the typical chalky terrains, the grapes are collected by the middle of August as soon as their content in sugar is 18 Brix, Brix being a measurement of sugar in the grape juice. Chardonnay and Cabernets, for example, are picked at 23 to 24 Brix.