Thankfully, it’s almost impossible to attend a holiday party during the myriad of festivities over the month of December without being offered some “Champagne.” It would be unlikely for you to find yourself in Sonoma Valley or Napa Valley drinking wine with effervescence and hear it being referred to as Champagne given the fact that California wineries produce comparably wonderful sparkling wine locally, so there is little reason to import and pay so much extra for French Champagne. But outside of the region, you’ll often be offered “Champagne”, yet there is a better chance that you will be enjoying a beverage with a misnomer given that the Champagne appellation of France only produces about 8% of the world’s sparkling wine, and anything not produced there is technically, not Champagne. But let’s not get snooty about it; let’s just get a little more insight.
The person most credited with inventing Champagne was a French monk, Dom Perignon. But that’s not entirely accurate, as carbon dioxide in wine was not something that Dom Perignon produced with intention or by accident, and fermentation from yeast and the gas from such in wine can be evidenced in writings dating back to the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Instead, Dom Perignon spent his days trying to get rid of the carbonation which often resulted from wine production in the Champagne region of France. He was given the task of studying this phenomenon and he systematically set about recording the results. Wines were bottled in the fall, and the fermenting would stop as the season changed into winter given that yeast requires heat to be active. When spring and warmer temperatures returned, the yeast would begin a secondary fermentation process, creating additional carbon dioxide. The problem was that bottle production techniques at the time were insufficient to contain the gas and the bottles would explode in cellars, often causing chain reactions and decimating whole productions, losing both the wine produced and the expensive bottles.
Dom Perignon’s intention was to understand the reactions thoroughly enough to find a means of eliminating or controlling the unwanted activity so that the monastery’s resources weren’t going to waste. His approach was to intentionally create this fermentation in order to better understand it and control it. While doing so, he discovered how to produce a controlled sparkling wine product that would become, Champagne. Mated with improved glass making, stable, carbonated wine became a reality. A byproduct of the process though was yeast carcasses, lees, which produced a muddy wine. The person who solved this problem was Nicole Cliquot, a widow (Veuve) who inherited her husband’s vineyard, which today is known as Veuve Clicquot. She placed the bottles in a rack that she designed whereby “riddling” was born. She would turn them a little every day and move them along a rack that would tip them gradually upside down until over a period of many weeks, the lees would gather in the bottle’s neck. The trick to removing the lees without releasing the gas was accomplished by freezing, which turned the lees into a slush that could be removed by opening the bottle, but given that the wine is chilled, most of the carbonation stays dissolved with the liquid.
Champagne production was perfected in this area of France, thanks to the wonderful contributions of these two and the contributions of their techniques made their way around the world in time. So even if the same traditional techniques are utilized, called méthode champenoise (second fermentation in the bottle) - even produced in France but beyond the Champagne region, producing sparkling wine and labeling it Champagne is highly discouraged, and most countries, illegal. So that is the reason that wineries found in the United States, even those in California’s wine country owned by French firms such as Mumm using the original methods, call that product in California, sparkling wine. In Spain, it is called cava, in Italy, Spumante from the Asti region, in South Africa, Cap Classique, and Germany and Austria, it is called Sekt. And in France, if it is made outside of the Champagne region, it is called Cremant.
No matter the country of origin, the brand name, or the general name by which it’s referred, when you find yourself enjoying this effervescent wine, the production techniques might be quite similar, but within each winery, you will likely be afforded a range of sweetness according to the sugar content. The following scale will give you a guide to help identify what works best for your palette, from the sweetest to the driest, as you find yourself going through the various holiday offerings of sparkling wines:
Sweetest
- Doux > 50g per liter
- Demi-sec 33 – 50g per liter
- Sec 17 – 35 g per liter
- Extra-sec 12 – 20 g per liter
- Brut < 15g per liter
- Extra-Brut < 6 g per liter
- Brut-Zero, or Brut-Natural < 3 g per liter
Driest
