Jancis Robinson – Champagne: Navigating Sparkling Wine

I'm now going to talk about sparkling wine and champagne. Champagne does not regard itself as a sparkling wine, it regards itself as champagne and has a team of lawyers dedicated to protecting the name of champagne and restricting it to wine made in the champagne region by the traditional method. So how do the bubbles get into sparkling wine? You probably remember when I was talking about how wine is made, that when the sugar in grapes is fermented into alcohol under the action of yeast, carbon dioxide is given off and it's the fact of trapping carbon dioxide in the bottle that makes a wine fizzy and it's because there's lots of carbon dioxide trapped inside these bottles that you need heavier glass because there's a lot of pressure in there. I think sometimes that people say it's like the pressure inside a tyre of a really heavy lorry and so you have to have thick glass and you've got to have something really powerful to keep the cork in. So there are two ways of provoking that second fermentation and trapping the bubbles in the wine and the first way is what's known as the tank method or couvre-close, sometimes called the charmat method and that is you put fully fermented dry wine into a great big tank, then you add some more yeast and more sugar and the yeast acts on the sugar to provoke a second fermentation and you do it all in a sealed tank so that the second fermentation gives off carbon dioxide and you trap that carbon dioxide into the wine and then under pressure get the out of the tank and bottle it and that applies to this first wine, this Prosecco here. Now the traditional method involves provoking that second fermentation by adding something called the liqueur de tirage, it's a mixture of sugar and yeast and a bit of liquid and you add it to each bottle and then stopper it up, it's very much more cumbersome and once you've done that you lay the bottles on their side to mature in contact with the dead yeast lees which really adds extra flavour to the wine and the longer it's kept on the lees the more flavour the wine will have. It's a process called autolysis and they can be sort of bready or brioche or they add depth to the whole thing because the ideal base wine for a sparkling wine is pretty tart and neutral and then of course it's important to get those dead yeast cells, the sediment, out of each bottle and that's quite a cumbersome process because the bottles have been lying on their side for at least two years, sometimes 12, sometimes more and then you freeze the neck of the bottle and it's just a mechanical process of upending the bottles and expelling the sludge as a pellet of ice and then recorking the wine upright. So that's how you have pristine clear champagne with bubbles in a champagne bottle or like these ones, a wine made by this traditional method in the image of champagne but only that one from the champagne region can be called champagne. So what we have here are the most common sorts of sparkling wine. Most wine regions will produce sparkling wine with varying degrees of success. You kind of want a sparkling wine to come from somewhere reasonably cool because you want the base wine to have quite a lot of acidity. This Prosecco or Prosecco as a category is hugely popular but it's made by the tank method, not by the individual bottle method or the vast, vast majority of it is made in tank and it's much, much less expensive therefore and people absolutely love it. The rest of them are made by the traditional method. Carver, which mostly comes from northeast Spain but there are various other bits of Spain that can make Carver, somehow has lost ground to Prosecco and it can be very inexpensive even though it's made by the cumbersome individual bottle traditional method. Because the quality conscious producers or some of them in Carver country have got frustrated at how difficult it is to sell wine with the word Carver on it, they've come up with a new category which is called Corpinat and that's a new-ish association of some of the finest producers of sparkling wine in Spain. Again, made by the traditional method and often kept on the for many, many years. This Graham Beck South African wine is an example of a sparkling wine made in a still wine region and Cap Classique is the name that is given to sparkling wine made by the traditional method in South Africa. But there are some fine sparkling wines made all over the world, that's just an example. This one rather close to my heart, Nye Timber, Classic Cuvée, is made in Sussex or a lot of the grapes are grown in Sussex and it was the first English wine made in the image of Champagne back towards the end of the last century and it showed English wine growers what could be done, it showed the English public what could be done and ever since then England has been producing more and more and better and better sparkling wine using the traditional method, using the grapes of Champagne, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and sometimes a little bit of Pinot Meurnier which is a sort of relative of Pinot Noir that's quite common in the Champagne region and adds fruit to the blend and it has admirably kept up the quality so it's one of the best English sparkling wines. But now there are dozens of really good English sparkling wines and while being pretty sceptical as usual at first, I've done a number of blind comparative tastings of English sparkling wine with Champagnes at the same price and honestly the English ones often outperform the Champagne. There are great Champagnes, the finest sparkling wines I've ever tasted have all been the top Champagnes but price for price, even though all English wine producers are pretty small so they don't get economies of scale and I know some people think English sparkling wine is far too expensive but it does withstand comparison with Champagne at the same price. And finally we have the biggest selling brand of Champagne, Moët & Chandon or Moët. A lot of people think that you should pronounce it Moët but actually the French and everyone in the company says Moët. Pronounce the T. And it's owned by that huge luxury goods group which is known as LVMH which includes things like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Stella McCartney, Hennessy Cognac, huge huge global company and this is by far the most powerful force in Champagne. It buys up a huge proportion of all the grapes grown in the region and actually for a long time people in the kind of wine know and the wine trade used to be rather rude about Moët because it was sold in such a huge quantity and it used to be rather sweeter than it is today and not nearly as good but the company have really been working on it and I personally think the quality has improved considerably in the last few years. It's a kind of sister brand to Dom Perignon. Most Champagne houses have a luxury cuvee, a sort of super duper top of the line brand and Dom Perignon is the related super cuvee of Moët & Chandon. What I like is that increasingly Champagne producers and sparkling wine producers have a little little tag on the foil which shows you where to undo it neatly and that's that one and one of the most dangerous things you can do with wine is open a Champagne bottle because there is such force in there. The cork can shoot out really really dangerously so when you're opening a bottle of Champagne or sparkling wine always make sure that you're pointing it somewhere not at a person and not at anything that's hugely breakable. This is a weapon and they do say that in the Champagne region there are lots and lots of eye injuries so knowing that it's got a lot of power in it I'm always going to be keeping my thumb on the top and what you want to do is increase the surface area of the wine in the bottle by holding it at an angle, untwisting the muzzle of the cork and then by dint of careful sleight of hand try and get the muzzle off without keeping that there it's not zooming out thank goodness and then what you want to do always at an angle is twist the bottle off the cork not the other way around and you want to do it you don't want to do it like they do at Silverstone like racing drivers do you want to do it very very gently and I can feel the cork coming out and I want to there we go we want to do it as slowly as possible and just a gentle gentle fizz like that so I will congratulate myself by pouring a little bit and again pour it like that so that you're not getting too much froth just very nice and not too sweet