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We have made our still cuvee wine, and we have induced a second fermentation in the bottle. Our sparkling wine has aged long enough to give us lots of bubbles as well as that yeasty-creamy character that marks good Champagne. The secondary fermentation also brought the alcohol up to the 11 ½-12 ½%, the level we expect from a sparkling table wine. So let’s finish it up and get to the good part: drinking it!
The first thing you need to do is to prepare the dosage: a little wine or brandy to which you have added just a touch of dissolved sugar. This will add a bit of sweetness to the wine, and that, in turn, will help balance the high acidity. Have your dosage ready in a bottle or pitcher that will allow you to pour it directly into your bottles of bubbly. Chill the dosage well, because you’ll be adding it to highly carbonated wine, and you don’t want a small eruption to rob you of all those bubbles you worked so hard to put there!
If you have followed my method so far, you will have your bubbly in champagne bottles capped with crown caps. The bottles will be upside down in a case, and the yeast sediment will all have settled on the inside of the cap. What follows next is the part that stops most folks from making their very own bubbly. The French call it disgorgement: disgorging the cake of yeast sediment so that the wine will be crystal clear rather than cloudy.
There are various ways of doing this. This is how I have chosen to proceed. My freezer will allow me to set a few bottles upended on the bottom shelf. If you have a tall side-by-side fridge, yours probably will permit this also. Alternately, if you have a chest freezer, you could simply place the cases into it. Before removing any bottles from their case, make sure you are wearing safety gear. You should at the least be wearing heavy gloves and strong, shatterproof eye lenses. Better yet: use a full-face mask and a heavy coverall or slicker. An exploding champagne bottle can hurt you badly.
When the bottles have been in the freezer long enough to freeze a solid plug in the bottle’s neck, the time has come to carefully move the first bottle outside—PLEASE—and set it down in a rack or carton that will continue to hold it upside down. Pick up the bottle in one hand and a good, reliable bottle opener in the other. Engage the opener on the cap, and then, in one smooth movement raise the bottle to the horizontal, pointing away from you (and anyone else!), while popping the top. If all goes well, the plug of ice, filled with sediment, will fly out of the bottle. Continue your smooth movement until the bottle is nearly upright and press your thumb down firmly over the bottle’s mouth. Slowly release the remaining hiss of pressure and set the bottle down.
Quickly top up your bottle to about ¾” from the top with dosage and cap with another crown cap or with a proper Champagne-style closure. The classic Champagne cork needs a special floor corker, but you can use the plastic corks with no additional equipment. If using the natural or plastic corks, these must be wired down securely.
That’s all there is to it! There’s really no need (and nothing to be gained) by further aging your wine, so you may begin to use it right away. Have some friends over and watch their disbelief when you pour them each a glass of foaming, super-spritzy, crystal-clear bubbly of your own making. Salud!
Charlie wrote:
I am following your sparkling wine series with interest. What I was wondering is this: why can’t we just do like the home beer brewers do? When the primary fermentation is done, just pour wine into a Champagne bottle, or a beer bottle for that matter, add a little “priming” sugar, and then, after it has carbonated a couple weeks later, just be careful not to disturb the sediment when you pour a class.
Charlie,
That’s a good question! The main answer is we are making wine rather than beer. The still wine has to age long enough to become fully clear, which is at least several weeks. Add to this length of time the alcohol level of your base wine (about 10%) with that of a typical beer (about 5%). This means that the amount of viable yeast in the wine is probably very low. Just adding sugar is unlikely to start a second fermentation, and if it does, the yeast will probably not be strong enough to complete it. You will probably end up with flat, sweet “Champagne.”
Another consideration is the sur lie (on the lees) aging that gives Champagne-style wines their special flavors and aromas. Real Champagnes are aged in the bottle for up to five years before they are disgorged.
As for using beer bottles, please DON’T…unless you are making just a lightly spritzy vino. Sparkling wine has too much pressure for most beer bottles. As for dispensing with disgorging altogether…well that’s up to you. I have enjoyed a number of my own sparkling wines without disgorging them. However, they are always cloudier than a bottle-conditioned homebrewed beer, because the beer yeast is much more flocculant than the prise de mousse yeast we use to bottle ferment our bubbly.
Dan
I recently enjoyed a bottle of Breaux Vineyards’ 2000 Merlot. This is a nicely concentrated wine, with rich fruit, espresso-coffee tones from toasted oak, and a better tannic structure than one typically finds in Merlots. This isn’t cheap wine, but, to me, well worth the ca. 25 bucks a bottle it cost me. Virginia Merlots continue to improve, and this is the best I’ve tasted yet. A really nice Bordeaux-style red!
Comments? Questions? Write me at dan.mouer@verizon.net
Also, see: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CentralVirginiaWinemakers/
Copyright 2004 L. Daniel Mouer