The Wine's the Thing
Mitch Kornfeld
12/29

Hello Carbon Dioxide; Happy New Year


New Year's Eve is upon us so it's time to talk about sparkling wine. Just how sparkling wine came to be the wine of celebration is one very good question. To find the answer, if there is a definitive answer, would probably take a few weeks or even months of research, and seeing as how I have a matter of days to get this in, it just isn't going to happen this time, not that I won't try taking a stab at it. I look at it this way; still wine (non-sparkling) has been around for thousands of years. The oldest known wine residues are about 7,500 years old.

Sparkling wine has been on the scene for a mere 400 years. Apparently the stuff has been very cool from the very beginning. The famous story is of Dom Perignon, who was a cellar master in the Champagne region from 1670 to 1715, and his description of his first successful batch. It gets repeated by the Champagne publicists to this day and probably always will. As he emerged from his cellar with a wide grin on his face and a particularly rosy glow to his cheeks the venerable monk was asked what he had been doing. His reply was, "I have been drinking stars." It's a nice story. Even I repeat it. A little publicity, a little hype, a different and unique, and let's face it, very good product, and there you have it. The wine of celebration. At this point let's try today's quick quiz. What's the name of the oldest sparkling wine Appellation in France? The answer will be at the end.

What makes sparkling wine unique are the bubbles. Those festive stars, as pretty and tongue tickling as they are, are but bubbles of pure carbon dioxide. How the carbon dioxide gets into the bottle is where it gets interesting, and there are three different ways to do that. The first and easiest way is simply to inject CO2 gas into the wine just as they do with soda and seltzer. The problem with this is that the resulting sparkling wine resembles the two aforementioned beverages just a little too much. The bubbles are too big, too coarse, fail miserably at their job of caressing and tickling the tongue, and dissipate too quickly. A wine made in this way falls into one of the two well-delineated and universally recognized categories of sparkling wines (at least they're universally recognized as such in the U.S. and Canada), pouring wine and drinking wine. The pouring type makes its annual appearance in the autumn of each year and is most closely associated with winning the professional championship of an old game played with a tapered wooden cylindrical club and a horsehide-covered spheroid. If you work in the Bronx and your name is Joe, Paul, Bernie, Mariano, Derek, or Constantino, you are on intimate terms with the stuff. If you happen to be Alex Rodriguez you are never going to know its joys until your team gets a pitching staff with an E.R.A. under 5.00, 25 million a year or not. Needless to say I don't recommend that you drink pouring wine.

The antithesis of the $2.99 sparkler is a wine made by the authentic methode champenoise. It's a laborious process that requires two separate fermentations. First the original wine, called the base wine, is made. Next the base wine is put into a bottle, along with some yeast and some food for the yeast, i.e. sugar. The bottle is then capped and the secondary fermentation begins. The yeasts eat the sugar for nourishment and in the process leave three things behind, alcohol, carbon dioxide, and in the end, dead yeast cells. The amount of alcohol is small and is easily factored in. The CO2 is, of course, what you want. The mass of dead yeast, well you do want it for a while, but eventually you have to get rid of it and that's where a lot of the labor comes in. 

To get the yeast out of the bottle, and it is the actual bottle that you will eventually buy and (hopefully) enjoy, the bottle must be turned daily, sliding the mass of yeast down the bottle neck, until it lays on the cap of the now upside down bottle. The process is called "riddling," and when done the traditional way, by hand, takes about six weeks. A lot of real champagne is still made this way and it's one reason why it costs so much. The neck of the upside down bottle is then carefully placed in brine, which is another name for saltwater, which you may remember freezes well below 32°F/0ºC. The brine is chilled and the dead yeast freezes to the cap. The bottle is then righted and the cap is removed. The pressure from the now sparkling wine forces the plug of frozen dead yeast (isn't this romantic?) out of the bottle. The bottled is then topped up with a reserve wine that has usually been mixed with some sugar, then corked, wired, and labeled. Expelling the yeast is called "disgorgement," and it takes place anywhere from one to several years from the time the secondary fermentation begins. The longer the wine rests on the yeast, or "on the lees," ("sur lie" in French, though the wines are anything but surly) the yeastier and toastier the wine becomes.

This is an added element of complexity, flavor, and interest, and is a definite plus for a sparkling wine. Also, the longer the time for the secondary fermentation and the longer the time on the lees, the tinier the bubbles get, and the tinier the bubbles, the longer they last, and the longer they caress your tongue and tickle your senses.

To make the bubbles last longer, and to partake in their full visual delight, you must have a proper sparkling wine glass. These glasses are called "flutes," or "Champagne flutes," and as the name implies, they are tall and slender. Do NOT use the glasses known as "coupes." You know what they look like. You've seen them at plenty of weddings and Bar/Bas Mitzvahs. They're short with a narrow stem, sometimes a hollow stem, which would be good, but they open up into a shallow, almost flat bowl. The shallow bowl is perfect for exposing a large surface area of the wine to the air thus dissipating the bubbles that were so laboriously put in (and which you had the honor of paying for). The coupes would give much better service if they were used for the sherbet. The only thing actually good about them, and I've seen and heard this more than once, is that they were supposedly modeled after Marie Antoinette's breasts. Being able to say with a wink "There's the Marie Antoinette glasses again" is always good for a chuckle. 

So forget the coupes. Get some good flutes. Watch the bubbles rise in a long stream from the bottom of the glass up to the surface, bringing the bouquet up to the top of the glass where your olfactory apparatus takes it all in as a prelude to enjoying the bubbling elixir itself. Then you take a sip, and hold it in your mouth as the tiny bubbles caress your tongue and dissolve into a seamless satisfying lingering aftertaste. That's the idea.

The third way to make a sparkling wine is by something called the "Charmat Bulk Process." It's a shortcut, just as the name implies. The secondary fermentation (and the primary for that matter) takes place in a large tank, hence the "bulk" moniker. The best thing about the bulk process is its use of economies of scale. The stuff is cheap, but it's a couple of rungs beneath a wine made by the methode champenoise. If you are going to mix it with orange juice, make some other concoction, or pour it over fruit, fine. Otherwise stick to the methode champenoise wines. The back label of the bulk process wines will usually say either "Charmat Bulk Process," or "Charmat Process," or "Bulk Process," but they may also legally say "Fermented in the Bottle." A methode champenoise wine might say "Fermented in this Bottle," but you rarely see it anymore, the producers preferring methode champenoise or "Champagne Method." This is an important point. Beware of the "in the bottle" nomenclature. It's code for the bulk process and it's just not as good as the champagne method.
 
Now that we've gone through how they are made, we're going to go about choosing some, or one. Over the years when I have just met someone and they've found out that I have an interest in wine they would often ask, " What's a good wine?" It's entirely too broad a question. Once, some years back, I came across a wine writer (I can't remember which one) who said the best answer for this question was, "For what price? For what purpose?" Those questions are particularly relevant for sparkling wines because they can go for anywhere from $2.99 to $299.00, and you might need quite a few bottles on the night of December 31st. If you ask me what's a good Champagne I might say, "the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Brut," and fine it is, but it's about $30 a bottle. If you need three cases for a party you're looking at $1,000 worth of wine. If in response to my two questions you said, "I need three cases of sparkling wine for New Year's Eve and only a handful of the people coming really know anything about wine," I might say, "Try the Piper-Sonoma Blanc de Noirs. It's a methode champenoise wine, made from Pinot Noir. It's fruity, has a nice festive pink color, and plenty of bubbles. It's about $13 a bottle, maybe a third of the price of something like a Veuve Clicquot. Do yourself a favor, go down to a wholesale restaurant supply place on the Bowery on Saturday, and pick up a case of Champagne flutes. Best investment you'll ever make." 

If you were to ask me what sparkling wine to get for just the two of you, and is French Champagne really better? I'd say, yes it is. You get more depth of flavor, more complexity, and more finesse with real French Champagne. (Champagne is of course a place name. A wine from anywhere else is not Champagne. In France a sparkling wine from outside of the Champagne district is called a "vin mousseux." In Italian it's "Spumante," in German it's "Sekt," etc.) In choosing a Champagne you have to decide if you like a lighter bodied or fuller bodied wine. In the light bodied style I always liked the Taittinger La Francaise. It has real elegance and finesse. The Charbaut is good too. In a medium bodied wine the Moet et Chandon Brut Imperial is a good choice. For fuller bodied I like Veuve Clicquot, Louis Roederer, and the Gosset Brut Excellence. I've only had one glass of the Gossett but I was very taken by it.

If you were wondering about the word "Brut," it literally means "unmodified." In practice it means a dry but not bone dry Champagne. (Dry just means the absence of sugar.) A Brut Champagne can have up to 1.2% sugar added. Most Champagnes are Brut. The other type of Champagne you commonly see is called "Extra Dry," which, confusingly, means slightly sweeter than Brut. An Extra Dry Champagne can have a sugar content between 1.2% and 2.0%. The Moet White Star is probably the most commonly seen Extra Dry Champagne. In the U.S., I don't know if Brut and Extra Dry have the exact same legal meaning as far as sugar content is concerned, but the terms are used the same way and mean the same thing in terms of style of wine.

In France there are three varieties of grapes used in the Champagne district, all others are illegal. They are our old friend Chardonnay, our old friend Pinot Noir, and a variety called Pinot Meunier. The lighter bodied Champagnes tend to have a higher proportion of Chardonnay in them, and the fuller bodied wines contain juice from the two black grapes. Pinot Meunier is actually the most widely planted variety although Pinot Noir is better in quality. Pinot Noir acreage will pass Pinot Meunier in another decade or two if present trends continue. The latest scientific evidence points to Pinot Meunier as one of Pinot Noir's parents. Can you name the other parent? Answer at the end.

In the U.S. the sparkling wine scene is interesting largely because five Champagne houses, having run out of room in Champagne, have set up operation in California. The foreign competition has surely made the native California producers take notice and they are making better wines. This is obviously good for us consumers. The five Champagne houses are Moet et Chandon, Mumm, Piper Heidsieck, Louis Roederer and Taittinger. Their California branches are, respectively: Domaine Chandon, Mumm Napa Valley, Piper-Sonoma, Roederer Estate, and Domaine Carneros. Generally the Champagnes have more depth and complexity, but the California wines have more fruit. In terms of absolute quality the Champagnes are better but they are usually $10 more than their California counterparts. If you like a fruity wine and cost is a consideration then one of these French/Californians would be the wine for you. I've always been partial to the Roederer Estate. I'm also partial to Blanc de Noirs and I like the Domaine Chandon and the Mumm Napa. A bottle each of a French and California sparkling wine made by the same company can be instructive, interesting, and fun, but it may be a little tricky to pull off if you're hosting a New Year's Eve party.

California doesn't have the legal restrictions concerning grape varieties that they do in Champagne, but the better producers mostly use Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. There is a little Pinot Meunier planted, and sometimes a little Pinot Blanc makes its way in, but that's okay.

Lastly I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words about those top-of-the-line luxury Champagnes. You know the names. Dom Perignon, Louis Roederer Cristal, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, Pol Roger Cuvee Winston Churchill. Those guys. Are they that good? Well they are excellent, no doubt about it, but not to dodge my own question, no. I can't help it. Maybe I'm just too middle class, but for me price has to enter into the equation. Let me put it another way. These wines are three and four times the price of their firms' regular non-vintage Brut. Are they better? Yes. Are they three or four times better? Absolutely not. Save your money and get the three or four bottles of the Brut instead. New Year's Day is an arbitrary one in the 365 deal. Have that luxury Champagne on a real occasion, preferably when there's some money coming in. Maybe when you get a nice Christmas bonus or if you marry or divorce Alex Rodriguez.

Answers to today's quiz: The oldest sparkling wine Appellation in France is Blanquette de Limoux. It's in southern France near Spain. The wines are supposed to be just a little behind Champagne in quality, but they're half the price. You probably won't find one on Saturday, but with a little searching one should turn up.

The other parent of Pinot Noir is Traminer. There's not much Traminer around anymore as it has been almost completely supplanted by Gewürztraminer, the spicy Traminer. Gewürztraminer is a clonal selection of Traminer. If you knew that one I'll buy you a drink, unless you got it from the same place I did, the Navarro wine newsletter. Navarro is one of my two favorite wineries. They're an excellent operation in every way and their wines are worth searching out. They're at www.navarrowines.com. Happy New Year.

© Mitch Kornfeld 2000 All rights reserved


Previously by Mitch Kornfeld...

Wines for Christmas (12/22/00)

Nouveau Beaujolais, Etc. (11/24/00)

Going to a Tasting 101 (12/01/00)