The guys were down in the cellar yesterday disgorging and dosaging another "batch" of our Reserve Sparkling Wine. I thought I'd use this as a great time to explain the process a little better...
Disgorging and dosaging: a wine story in photos
There are a few different methods to make sparkling wines (known better as Champagne, although legally only wines made in the Champagne region of France can be called that). We choose to use the méthode champenoise or method traditionnelle (traditional method) in which the secondary fermentation process that actually creates those bubbles is done inside the bottle. This creates a much more elegant style with finer bubbles (its also a lot more work, but hey, we like the end result better).
After the primary fermentation has finished (that’s when the yeast convert the sugars in the grape juice to alcohol), we bottle the wine with more yeast and sugar, put a bottle cap on, then lay the bottles on their side in a metal cage for secondary fermentation. Secondary fermentation then creates the carbonation which gets trapped in the wine.
Bottled bubbly hanging out in cages
After the yeasts have converted the sugar to CO2, they settle to the bottom of the bottle (now we call them “lees”).
Lees in the bottom of the bottle.
The longer the lees sit inside the bottle at this stage, the yeastier, creamier, and nuttier the aromatics and flavors of the wine becomes.
For the next step, the bottles need to be turned upside down to allow the lees to settle in the neck of the bottle so we can remove it cleanly. This is the process called “riddling”, which is a slow process of turning and tilting the bottles until they end up upside down.
Bottles sitting upside down in riddling rack
When we are ready to disgorge and dosage the wine (disgorging is extracting the lees from the bottle and dosage is a mixture of the base wine and some level of sugar which sets the final class of sparkling wine, i.e. brut), we need to chill the wine down to help with a cleaner disgoregement. We move the bottles from the riddling rack (above) to our plastic bins fitted with an insert to hold the bottles in place:
For our Reserve Sparkling Wine, all of the above has happened since the fall of 2009 (most of that time was spent with the bottles on their sides in the wire cages, 2 years to be exact). The last step (moving the bottles into the bins above) was done about 3 weeks ago. Now the fun begins...
Yesterday the guys finished off a little more than 450 bottles. This is the process of disgorging and dosaging and here's how it happens.
Cornel carefully moves the bottles, one at a time, from the plastic bins to the machine that will remove the bottle cap and the pressure inside the bottle will force the lees out.
Cornel places the bottle so the lever is under the bottle cap:
You can see the foam spraying out from under the hood on this shot:
After the disgorging, the bottle of bubbly gets the dosage added to it. Cornel attaches the bottle onto this contraption which holds and measures the dosage:
This is the dosage. Here's how we made it. We opened a handful of those sparkling wine bottles, dumped the contents into beakers, added a small amount of sugar (it is a brut style, so legally it can have 0-12 grams/litre), and stirred until the sugar was completely dissolved.
A set amount of this dosage gets added to every bottle. The machine measures out the amount (i.e 20 mL) and adds it to the bottle. This insures consistancy of the sparkling wine from bottle to bottle.
The bottle then goes over the Dawie or Tim who pour the base wine into each bottle to fill it up to 750 mL.
We then seal the bottle up. Traditionally corks are used at this point, but we like the cleanliness and ease of the crown cap (aka beer cap).
The bottles then get cleaned off and stacked again in cages so we can move them around.
The last step is that every single bottle gets hand labeled, both front and back labels. From here we put them in 6-pack cases and they are (finally!) available for sale.
Yup, making sparkling wines is very labor intensive, but we have a great clilmate for making these wines here in Northern Michigan, and we here at 2 Lads absolutely love the final product. This intensive production method also helps explain why we make such small amounts of our sparkling wines. If you're a fan of Sparkling wines, please stop by, we'd love to talk to you, over a glass of bubbly, of course.
