Champagne

Its the bubbles that make Champagne unique.  Mèthode Champenoise means first a dry wine is produced using the same methods as in all other areas of the world---but the wines of Champagne are highly acidic because the grapes don’t get fully ripe.  Then, the wine is placed in bottles where sugar and yeast are added, so a second fermentation can occur in the bottle.
 

Bottles are capped (with stoppers similar to those in beer) then placed in racks in the cool cellars of the Champagne house (wineries are referred to as “houses” in Champagne).  Yeast consumes the sugar in the bottle and creates CO2.  With nowhere for the CO2 to go, it dissolves into the liquid, where it stays until the bottle is later opened.  When the sugar is completely consumed, the yeast cells die and float to the bottom of the bottle.
 

Dead yeast cells (what are called lees), are removed by placing the bottles upside down in racks, at an angle.  The bottles are slowly rotated allowing the lees to collect in the neck of the bottle.  This process is called Remuage.  Traditionally this was done by hand and a skilled Remueur could do 40,000 bottles a day.  Today, more often it is done by machine. Once ready, the necks of the bottles are dipped into a freezing brine solution which freezes the lees into a solid plug.  The crown cap is removed and the pressure of the CO2 emerging from the liquid forces the plug out of the bottle.  The bottles are then topped off with a a bit of sweetened wine called “dosage”, which allows for a bit more fermentation in the bottle.  It is the corked with the traditional cork and wire cage and allowed to rest.  A very few Champagne wines are made using no dosage, allowing for a drier finished wine.

Champagne is a single Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée. As a general rule, grapes used must be the white Chardonnay, or the dark-skinned "red wine grapes" Pinot Noir or Pinot Meunier. Due to the gentle pressing of the grapes and absence of skin contact during fermentation, the dark-skinned varieties also yield a white wine. Most Champagnes are made from a blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, for example 60%/40%. Blanc de blanc ("white from white") Champagnes are made from 100% Chardonnay. Possibly the most exquisite, and definitely the most expensive of these is grown in a single Grand cru vineyard in Le Mesnil-Sur-Oger for Salon. Blanc de noir ("white from black") Champagne is pressed from Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier or a mix of the two.
 

Several other grape varieties, although permitted for historical reasons, are rare in current usage. The sparsely cultivated varieties (0.02% of the total vines planted in Champagne) of Arbanne, Petit Meslier and Pinot Blanc, might still be found in modern cuvées while the directives of INAO make conditional allowances according to the complex laws of 1927 and 1929, and plantings made prior to 1938. The complete list of the nine actual and theoretical varieties reads Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Arbanne, Petit Meslier, Pinot gris (in Champagne named Fromenteau), Pinot de juillet and Pinot rosé. The Gamay vines of the region were scheduled to be uprooted by 1942, but due to World War II, this was postponed until 1962.

Most of the Champagne produced today is "Non-vintage", meaning that it is a blended product of grapes from multiple vintages. Most of the base will be from a single year vintage with producers blending anywhere from 10-15% (even as high as 40%) of wine from older vintages. If the conditions of a particular vintage are favorable, some producers will make a "Vintage" wine that must be composed of at least 85% of the grapes from vintage year. Under Champagne wine regulations, houses that make both vintage and non-vintage wines are allowed to use no more than 80% of the total vintage's harvest for the production of vintage Champagne. This allows at least 20% of the harvest from each vintage to be reserved for use in non-vintage Champagne. This ensures a consistent style that consumers can expect from non-vintage Champagne that doesn't alter too radically depending on the quality of the vintage. In less than ideal vintages, some producers will produce a wine from only that single vintage and still label it as non-vintage rather than as "vintage" since the wine will be of lesser quality and the producers have little desire to reserve the wine for future blending.

Prestige cuvée

A cuvée de prestige is a proprietary blended wine (usually a Champagne) that is considered to be the top of a producer's range. Famous examples include Louis Roederer's Cristal, Laurent-Perrier's Grand Siècle, Moët & Chandon's Dom Pérignon, and Pol Roger's Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill. Perhaps the original prestige cuvée was Moët & Chandon's Dom Pérignon , launched in 1936 with the 1921 vintage. Until then, Champagne houses produced different cuvées of varying quality, but a top-of-the-range wine produced to the highest standards (and priced accordingly) was a new idea. In fact, Louis Roederer had been producing Cristal since 1876, but this was strictly for the private consumption of the Russian tsar. Cristal was made publicly available with the 1945 vintage. Then came Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne (first vintage 1952), and Laurent-Perrier's Grand Siècle 'La Cuvée' in 1960, a blend of three vintages (1952, 1953, and 1955). In the last three decades of the twentieth century, most Champagne houses followed these with their own prestige cuvées, often named after notable people with a link to that producer (Veuve Clicquot's La Grande Dame, the nickname of the widow of the house's founder's son; Pol Roger's Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, named for the British prime minister; and Laurent-Perrier's Cuvée Alexandra rosé, to name just three examples), and presented in non-standard bottle shapes (following Dom Pérignon's lead with its eighteenth-century revival design).

Blanc de blancs
A French term that means "white of whites", and is used to designate Champagnes made exclusively from Chardonnay grapes. The term is occasionally used in other sparkling wine-producing regions, usually to denote Chardonnay-only wines rather than any sparkling wine made from other white grape varieties. A famous example is Ruinart.
 

Rosé Champagne
The rosé wines of Champagne are produced either by leaving the clear juice of black grapes to macerate on its skins for a brief time (known as the saigneé method) or, more commonly, by adding a small amount of still Pinot noir red wine to the sparkling wine cuvee. Champagne is typically light in color even if it is produced with red grapes, because the juice is extracted from the grapes using a gentle process that minimizes the amount of time the juice spends in contact with the skins, which is what gives red wine its color. Rosé Champagne is one of the few wines that allows the production of Rosé by the addition a small amount of red wine during blending. This ensures a predictable and reproducible color, allowing a constant Rosé color from year-to-year.

Due to the comparatively high risk and cost of using the saigneé or 'skin contact only' technique, there are very few producers who habitually do not add any additional red wine. These include Laurent Perrier, Louis Roederer, and Guy Charbaut.
 

Level of Dryness
This refers to the amount of residual sugar per liter. The different levels include Extra Brut, Brut Sauvage, Ultra Brut, Brut Integral, Brut Zero 0.6 percent, Brut 1.5 percent, Extra Dry, Extra Sec 1.2 to 2.0 percent, Sec 1.7 to 3.5 percent, Demi-Sec 3.3 to 5.0 percent, and Doux (sweetest) 5 percent and up.
 

Size of Bottle
One thing that is a little trickier about champagne is the size of the bottle. Consider: a quarter-bottle is 6.3 fluid ounces; a half-bottle is 12.7 fluid ounces; a bottle is 25.4 fluid ounces; a magnum is 50.8 fluid ounces; 2 bottles Jeroboam are 101.6 fluid ounces; 4 bottles Rehoboam are 147 fluid ounces; 6 bottles Methuselah are 196 fluid ounces; 8 bottles Salmanazar are 304.8 fluid ounces; 12 bottles Balthazar are 406.4 fluid ounces; and 16 bottles Nebuchadnezzar are 508 fluid ounces.
 

Vintage
As with any wine, quality varies across the years, in harmony with the quality of the grapes harvested that year and the weather of the harvesting season. Unlike many wines, however, one needn't sample decades worth of champagnes to identify a good year. Champagne is typically held for up to 5 years by the manufacturing house, but when it is eventually released for purchase, it should be consumed within 2 years. Choosing a relatively young champagne, therefore, is not considered gauche.

Also, champagne is often blended across years. For a champagne to be considered of a particular year's vintage, at least 80 percent of the grapes used in producing it must have been harvested in that year. The remaining 20 percent of the grapes, therefore, can be from other years. Vintners will, accordingly, often blend their champagnes with the "greatest hits" from across the years, which leads to a more uniform quality of beverage. This is yet another reason why choosing any particular vintage of champagne is not that important--all those of a given marque are quite similar.
 

Champagne Regions
Bollinger Ay; Charles Heidsieck; Reims Krug; Reims Moet et Chandon; Epernay G.H. Mumm; Reims Joseph Perrier; Marne Ruinart; Reims Taittinger; Reims Veuve Cliquot-Ponsardin.