Champagne Explained: The difference between Sparkling Wines|Champagne | Cava | Prosecco | California

Hi! Welcome back to Spill the Wine. I know it's been a minute since my last video, but if you've been following my shorts, you can tell I've been a little busy drinking some wine. I thought it'd be a great time to talk to you about sparkling wine. At the end of the unboxing when I showcased the Brilliant Brut, the sparkling wine from France, it got me thinking, do people really know the difference between the sparkling wines? A lot of people just think champagne is champagne. Anything with bubbles is champagne. That's not the case. It gave me the idea to talk about this today and to give you more details on the intricacies involved in the sparkling wine making process. We're going to go through a few types of sparkling wine. You have champagne, prosecco, which is home to Italy, cava, which is home to Spain, and then sparkling wine you can see from California. So let's get to it and get to know sparkling wine. So to start with, this is the most basic way to describe sparkling wine. So sparkling wine is the opposite of a still wine. The still wines are just the non-fizzy wines, which would be your merlots, your rosés. Anything without bubbles is a still wine. Now a sparkling wine is the fizzy bubbling wine, and that is due to the addition of carbon dioxide to the wine. Sparkling wines are usually a white or a rosé, though in my research for this video, I did find that there could be sparkling red wine. And if you think sparkling wine isn't a that you're used to or haven't really seen before, think again. Next time you're at a restaurant or next time you're looking at a bar menu, look at the wines and look through the pages. You'll see very clearly that there are sections for white, red, even rosé, and there's always a section for sparkling wine. Sometimes, because in the U.S. a lot of people just use champagne as a misnomer for all types of sparkling wines, they will use those names coupled together, champagne and sparkling wine. But hopefully in this video, you'll learn that there's actually a difference in sparkling wine. Sparkling wine is actually a whole other umbrella, a category of its own. Another thing I want to talk to you about to understand sparkling wines is dryness. One thing you may have seen when I talked about the sparkling wine in the advent calendar unboxing is the brilliant brute. The brilliant brute right here, people may think that brute is the type of wine, which in a way it is, but not. It's a sparkling wine, but brute actually signifies the type of dryness level in a sparkling wine. It does not necessarily mean that's the name of the bottle or the name of the sparkling wine, because that would be the Prosecco, a Cava, or a Champagne. Brute just simply defines the dryness. There are three common dryness levels you should know when it comes to any type of sparkling wine. You'll see this in a Prosecco, a Champagne, and a Cava, or even the California one. There's brute nature, which is the driest of the dry, and then there's extra brute, which is just another term for extra dry, and brute, which is the most basic level of dryness, and the most common you'll see in a Prosecco, a Cava, and just across the board of sparkling wines. Okay, so let's get to it. Let's just already debunk Champagne, the most famous and widely known type of sparkling wine. So much so, as I said, that in America, so many people just talk about Champagne as if it's encompassing all sparkling wines. In a way, think of it as when people ask for a tissue, a lot of people will also just say, oh, can you pass me a Kleenex? I know I'm guilty of that too. Kleenex is not every single tissue brand, but for some reason, because it's the most famous tissue brand of all, people just use that as a replacement to say tissue. This is what Champagne is for sparkling wine. I'm here to give you a little more education on why that is. So Champagne is actually a region in northern France, and that region became very popular for growing a specific wine grape, producing this specific type of sparkling wine. There are three types of wine grapes used in producing Champagne, the first one being Chardonnay, as well as Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, the only two red grapes in the region. The three varieties alone account for about 99% of the region's planting. The only sparkling wine made in this region can be called Champagne. Even an inch out of that region, and it's not Champagne anymore. The French are very protective of this in their name. They went up in arms when the California sparkling wine company Corbell started promoting their bottles as California Champagne. That's a tactic to make it seem like this bottle is also Champagne when it's actually not. Again, they're just replacing the Champagne term for sparkling wine. If you're curious about what this intense winemaking process is like, let me describe it to you. In order to make Champagne, we'll use method is the traditional method. It involves two separate rounds of fermentation, one in a tank or barrel, and the second in the bottle itself. The in-bottle fermentation imbues the wine with its characteristically fine persistent bubbles. In Champagne, the second in-bottle fermentation is followed by a minimum aging period of 15 months, and in that period, the wine comes in direct contact with the yeast cells. This might be a little too much scientific knowledge for you, but the yeast releases different compounds that modify the wine's analytic properties, donating roundness and its characteristic aroma and flavor. Whenever you drink a bottle of Champagne and think about the aroma, think about the dead yeast. And while this method can be adopted all over the world, and it certainly has, wine will still end up tasting different, hence why it's not called Champagne. That is mostly due to the terroir. Terroir. Say that five times. But this word refers to the soil, the climate, and overall just the temperature that the grape grows in. So as you can imagine, because of this very intensive winemaking process, that does give the Champagne bottle overall a higher price point. That's why some of the more popular Champagne brands you know out there, like Moet and Chandon, those Champagne bottles are usually on the higher side. The average price point for a bottle of Champagne is around $40, and most of those bottles are non-vintage or an NB. So that's another thing to keep in mind when you're looking and shopping for sparkling wines. Non-vintage equates to less expensive, but that doesn't mean a non-vintage wine is in good quality. If you really care about your sparkling wine being from that region and calling it Champagne by its name, there are some bottles out there that are under $50. But just be aware that if you're going to try to buy Champagne, you end up spending at minimum $30 to $40. I will share some Champagne bottles below in the description so you have an idea of what kind of bottles are out there. So if you think that Champagne is pretty inaccessible because of its price point, there's actually another wine out there that produces a sparkling wine using the exact same method, but you can get at a much more affordable price point, and that is the Cava sparkling wine produced in Spain. Cava is made the exact same way as a Champagne, but with different grapes. Some people may think that Prosecco is the close second to Champagne, but actually Cava is much closer in taste versus a Prosecco. Cava pretty much rivals Champagne. It's fresh and vibrant when young, and it offers seriously good value for your money. And some people really consider Cava to be widely underrated, and to be honest, I myself didn't really know what Cava was or heard of Cava sparkling wine until only recently. But in doing research for this video, I'm actually quite convinced that Cava might be a more of a go-to sparkling wine. The three main grapes involved in producing Cava are the Macca Vieux, the primary grape used, the Xarelo, and then there's other grapes that could be added, which would be the Chardonnay, a Pinot Noir. For the styles of Cava, you'll find a variety as well. So if you like more of a pink Cava, you can go for the Cava Rosé. If you want a real dry Cava, there's the Cava Brut Nature or just the Classic Brut. And I did not know this, but there's also a Vintage and Aged Cava, which actually is a little more nutty and toasty in taste. If you want to visit Spain one day and look at where Cava is produced, one of the most popular regions is Benidez and in the Ebro River Valley in Rioja. And if you're thinking that Cava still may not be as widely produced as other sparkling wines, in doing my research, I found out that there are 200 producers that are currently regulated under the Cava Consejo Regulador. Another question you might be asking is, how is Cava so cheap when it's made just in the same process as Champagne? Well, the fact that it's not in Champagne. As I mentioned before, Champagne is a very regulated region and they're very protective of the fact that only Champagne bottles coming from that region can be called as such. One thing that is of high value is the land there. Spain has land that is cheaper in price and hence the grapes that are grown there are at a much lower cost versus France. The average price of a Cava bottle is $17. Plenty of options at different price points. Let's talk about a sparkling wine made using the other method, if anything, is actually more commonly used and that is called the Charmat method. Charmat method is also commonly known as the Tank method. This process skips months of in-bottle secondary fermentation in favor of a pre-bottling second round of fermentation in a large stainless steel tank. Instead of having the second in-bottle fermentation of 15 months, everything is just put into this big tank. This process is much less expensive and it takes much less time. The king of this winemaking process is the Prosecco, which is from Italy. I'd say Prosecco is probably second in terms of commonly known sparkling wines. Prosecco, as I said, is from a northeastern part of Italy. It's produced in a large area spanning nine provinces. In the Veneto, which is the most popular region, Anna Champagne is named after the region Champagne. Prosecco is named after the village of Prosecco, which is in the province of Trieste. Most Prosecco wines are produced in a dry, brute style. It's generally light-bodied, vibrant, fresh, highly aromatic, and a crisp wine. Because of the process in which it's made, it does lend to have a broodier smell and taste than it actually is. But it's also why so many people enjoy to drink it so much. There also tends to be less persistent bubbles. So maybe next time you try sparkling wines, do a comparison side-by-side between a Cava and a Prosecco or Champagne and a Prosecco and you can see that difference. Now, even though people like to use Prosecco and Champagne kind of synonymously, they couldn't be more different. It's made only using Prosecco Glara grapes. The grape was actually brought over to Italy from Slovenia. In 2009, Italian winemakers decided to re-market the grapes as Prosecco grapes. Because the Charmant method is a process that takes much less time, it's also less expensive. Hence why so many people, I would say, in the U.S. buy Prosecco more than Champagne. The average bottle of Prosecco is actually at a very affordable price at $12, but that's not to say that there aren't premium Prosecco wines out there. In 2017, a brand called Casanova set out to raise the standard of Prosecco, releasing a Prosecco DOC covered with Swarovski crystals, priced at the very humble amount of 1,250 euros or 1,411 U.S. dollars. If you're interested in trying Proseccos, one of the more popular Proseccos I've seen is La Marca and it's the bottle with the blue label, which kind of stands out among the other sparkling wine bottles. I will also include other options in the description so you can learn about other Proseccos out there. The last type of sparkling wine I'm going to talk about are the California sparkling wines. Out of all the sparkling wines I could talk about in the U.S., why California? As many might know, California is the wine country of the U.S. While I do recognize, though, that many other states do produce their own wine, but in California alone there are more than 300 wineries that produce sparkling wine. The traditional wine grape varieties in California sparkling wine include the Chardonnay, the Pinot Noir, similar to France, but many other varieties are used as well. The history of producing sparkling wine dates back to the Korbel brothers producing sparkling wine according to the Champagne Method. Now, if you recognize the name Korbel, that's probably because you've seen their wine bottles in a lot of stores. Korbel wine, I found out, is the first U.S. producer to release a California Brut Champagne. They are, in fact, the first mover in sparkling wine in California. I bet you're also thinking, why do I keep using Champagne to describe Korbel? Well, Korbel does call itself California Champagne. Why is it allowed to do that? In doing some more research, apparently it's in accordance to an agreement signed in 2005 where the U.S. and the E.U. allow producers to continue using the term Champagne along with Chablis and Sherry on their labels if they were already using those names before the agreement. Now that we're done talking through all the different types of sparkling wines out there, bought that sparkling wine and you're ready to open it, what glass do you use? I'm also thinking about doing another video about this to talk through the different types of wine glasses to use for white, red, and a sparkling, but I think everyone can guess that a sparkling wine glass uses a taller, thinner shape. The most commonly used is the flute. Thanks to their height, they're great for viewing the sparkling wine. You can see the bubbles. The downsides of a flute glass is that it's very fragile, so be careful when you're pouring it. And fun fact, depending on its size, a Champagne or sparkling wine bottle can fill between six to ten flute glasses. That's it for today. I hope you learned something valuable in this video, and the next time you go shopping for sparkling wine, you'll know a thing or two about it. Whether it's Prosecco, Cava, or a classic Champagne, you really can't go wrong when it comes to bubbly wine. Let me know if you try any of the bottles that I recommend below. Happy New Year! Thanks for watching. Consider liking and subscribing, and Salud!