We all drink and love Sparkling Wine, don’t we? But have you ever asked yourself how the sparkles get in the wine? Well, here is the answer
There are two different types of Sparkling wine:
1. the real Sparkling Wine (also known as Champagne) and
2. the Pearl Wine (just slightly sparkling)
Let me begin with the less expensive one, the pearl wine:
One takes a wine with at least 7% alcohol and adds carbon dioxide (same process as the production of fizzy water) This process is easy, quick and not expensive.
The contrary is the real Sparkling Wine. It is only allowed to call it Champagne, when it is produced in a certain region of France, the ‘Champagne’. In Germany and Austria there are even strict laws for the production of Sparkling Wine!
For the manufacture of Sparkling wine, a normal wine is taken. Then one adds yeast to every bottle and let it all ferment. The sparkles are a result of natural fermentation.
After the wine is fully fermented, one has to get the yeast out of the bottle. But how? Well, the bottles get jogged slowly from the horizontal to the vertical. In the older days this process was a handmade one, but today there are also machines for it. When the bottles reached the vertical direction the yeast is completely situated in the bottleneck. Shortly afterwards follows a process called “Degorgieren“: the bottlenecks get frozen and the ice-yeast-plug is shot out. Then the bottles get refilled with the so-called “Dosage“, which is a sugar-wine-solution. With this Dosage it is possible to sweeten the Sparkling Wine to the perfect taste. After all that the bottle is closed with a Cork and that all gets fixed with that little wire thingy called Agraffe. Et voilà! We have our high quality sparkling wine.
This above described process is the German one to make ‘Sekt’ the technical terms might differ in other languages.