Good bubbles lift your spirits just by gazing at them in the glass – isn’t it the bubbles in the wine that are important rather than the flavour? Well, creating good bubbles requires skill, patience and money but the flavour and acidity of the grapes really matters. All around the world winemakers have tried to match Champagne but have failed because they simply can’t grow grapes with the same characteristics; England, however, looks as though it can.
In a way, sparkling wine is one of the most industrial of all wines. It relies completely on human intervention, and there are a whole series of mechanical activities that need to take place if you are to end up with a delightful, limpid, foaming glass of guaranteed happiness at the end of it all. And if it’s such an interventionist wine, reliant on the chemist and the technician, does the exact type of grape juice matter, or can’t the chemist adjust it according to what he requires? Does the grape variety matter when the juice is going to be so played about with? And surely the precise vineyard doesn’t really matter. Does it?
Well, luckily it does. The grape variety and the climate it grows in and the soil of the vineyard are of supreme importance. And, interestingly, being unable to fully ripen your grapes is a matter of massive importance, because the natural high acidity in such grapes is crucial for the vivacity, the liveliness, the excitement and the thrill that a glass of fine fizz gives.
Champagne has been thought of as the world’s top sparkling wine for 300 years and more. All round the world people have striven to recreate the flavours and the textures of Champagne – and they have failed. Even using precisely the same grape varieties, the same methods of production, the same machinery – they have failed. Because the one thing other countries have failed to reproduce is the actual taste and character of the Champagne grapes themselves. And for that, you needed the windy, rainy, stormy vineyards huddled around the Marne Valley to the north-east of Paris, where there wasn’t enough warmth to ripen grapes enough to make a decent still wine, red or white, but where, as the pale summer sun slipped toward a damp, chilly autumn, Chardonnay and Pinot were just ripe enough, had just enough sugar, to ferment into a thin, lean acid wine which human ingenuity would transform into a cascade of golden bubbles and sumptuous flavours. Nowhere else seemed to be able to provide such marginal grapes. Until now. Champagne’s nearest wine neighbour shares the same soils, the same grape varieties, and now, almost the same weather. England. Champagne is getting warmer, perhaps too warm. England is getting just warm enough.
It’s quite probable that England was the first ever major market for sparkling wine. It certainly wasn’t France. The Champagne wines were very popular at the French court of Versailles in the 17th century, where Louis XIV, the Sun King, thought they were good for his health. He did live an awfully long time, and he was on the throne for 65 years. But he hated bubbles in his wine, and the chief job of the winemakers supplying the court was to try to remove any bubbles in the wines before they got to his royal lips.
This wasn’t easy. Vintages were generally late on the chilly slopes around the Marne Valley. And winter closed in very quickly, often before the wines had finished fermenting. The cold meant that the yeasts couldn’t continue working. So you usually had a pile of barrels full of wine that hadn’t finished fermenting, and if you tried to sell these to the king of France he’d have your tête on a plate.
Help was at hand. Good old England. Each spring these barrels would be shipped to London, unfinished. As the weather warmed up, the wine started fermenting again and for a few weeks the London pleasure gardens were awash with sparkling wine – or rather still-fermenting wine. Everyone had a lot of laughs and monumental hangovers. Just for a few weeks? This was far too much fun for it to merely last a few weeks in spring. Luckily England was the one place in the world which was fitted out to prolong the pleasure. England had adopted coal as a fuel before any other nation – chiefly because the country was running out of trees. Coal burns far hotter than wood, so glass made in a coal-fired foundry is far stronger than traditional European glass. The French rather enviously called this new glass, which was so much stronger than their delicate stuff, le verre anglais.
The cidermakers of Gloucestershire were early adopters of this strong glass. They put dry cider into the bottle, added a couple of raisins and a walnut-sized lump of sugar, banged in a cork and the whole thing began re-fermenting in this strong glass bottle which could cope with the pressure – and the stopper could also cope because it was cork. The rest of Europe had the lost the knowledge of cork as a brilliant hermetic seal. England, friendly with Portugal, the main producer of cork, since the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, was the only place that still knew the secret. Sparkling cider became known as ‘the English Champagne’ in London society.
It took a man called Christopher Merret, an English physician and scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society, to demonstrate in 1662 that what worked for cider could work for wine: strong English glass bottles filled with wine that had been shipped in barrel from Champagne, add a little sugar, and then push in tight corks tied down with twine – and wait. Wait for six months, one year, two years – the wine would have re-fermented inside its bottle, and when you pulled the cork, there would be an explosion of foam and froth and fun – all year round, not just for a few head-banging weeks in the spring.
So does all this mean you can say the English were the ones who invented Champagne? Well, sort of yes and no. Dom Pérignon, the French winemaker monk who is supposed to have invented the method of a second fermentation in the bottle, creating bubbles in 1698, was one of the chief people trying to get rid of the bubbles. But he did respect those hardy English bottles, and in the 18th century he and others slowly began to turn Champagne from being a still wine into a bubbly one. After which Champagne never looked back and by the 19th century had become world famous as the finest fizz ever created.
And England? It’s all very well taking barrels of French wine and making it sparkle. But what about English wine? Wasn’t there a rush of interest? It doesn’t look like it. England was in the middle of a little ice age in the 17th and 18th centuries. Planting vineyards wasn’t uppermost in people’s minds. A few vineyards were established in places like Surrey, and some did produce some sparkling wine, but none of the vineyards lasted long. One guy called Charles Hamilton at Painshill made what he thought was pretty good fizz, but he found it difficult to persuade many people to share his view – ‘Such is the prejudice of most people against anything of English growth.’ It wasn’t until the 21st century, our own century, and probably not until its second decade, that such opinions of our home-grown wines began to fade.
So what’s the secret to making great sparkling wine? Well, despite all the gadgetry which I’ll talk about in a minute, you simply must have the right grapes. All over the world people have tried to make Champagne-like fizz but are let down because they can’t grow grapes with the right flavour. Ideally they should be the Champagne varieties of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, although Seyval Blanc makes a pretty good, rather individual base wine, too. They should be planted somewhere with a cool climate that barely allows you to ripen them, preferably on chalk or sandy clay soils, although gravels and even heavy clays have shown perfectly good results. And if you want somewhere that fits this bill, southern England – especially on the chalky North and South Downs and the Thames Valley and on the greensands and sandy clays that crop up a fair bit in Kent and Sussex – is ideal. From a virtual standing start with Nyetimber in the 1990s, over 70 per cent of English grapes are now the Champagne varieties.
Fine. That’s nature. What about the interventionist human hand? Well, right from the beginning, nature is being manipulated. In Champagne, two-thirds of the grapes are black, and well over half of the English ones are too. Yet they mostly make white wine. The crucial thing here is that the juice inside the black grapes is colourless, so if you press them very, very gently, you can coax out half, maybe more of the juice before the squashed skins begin to stain them pink and red. The best sparkling wine presses are shallow and shaped like a big circular disc. Other good ones are more rectangular but use a great inflatable cushion to slowly massage out the juice. The best wineries have one of these two. Gentleness is everything. If you squeeze too hard you start getting sappy tastes, resinous tastes, chewy textures and all the delicacy you’d hoped for is gone. But these later ‘pressings’ of the grapes can have lots of flavour and are often used as the basis for really tasty still white wine blends. Chapel Down make their excellent Flint Dry wine by using Chardonnay pressings mixed with whatever else they’ve got.
So you’ve got your juice; any heavy sediment has been removed. Let’s go. Time to ferment. Usually this is done in a stainless steel tank where you can control the temperature. Some people use a few oak barrels. There’s even a concrete egg or two and an earthenware Georgian kvevri. But mostly stainless steel is best, because you generally want a purity of flavour. Fermentation in oak barrels will add richness to the wine – some of the more expensive wines benefit from this. There are highly efficient cultured yeasts on the market – the same ones as used in Champagne – that guarantee a quick, problem-free fermentation. That’s what most fizz makers want. So most wineries use these cultured yeasts. Some let the numerous yeasts that live in the vineyard and in the winery (wild yeasts) do the fermentation work, saying it’s more natural. Maybe it is. Maybe it can give wine with more character. But maybe it’s less consistent and more likely to add wild flavours to the wine. Natural yeast or cultured? It’s neither better nor worse, but in sparkling wine, most producers prefer the cultured yeast.
The fermentation is finished. You now have wine, but with no bubbles. So what next? In England the acid level of the wine is often fairly high and the sharpest effect is from malic acid. This is a green raw acid that can be delightfully mouthwatering in young table wine like Bacchus, but in sparkling wine the less assertive tartaric acid is the one most winemakers like. So they will frequently reduce the malic acid by inducing a bacterial conversion of malic acid to the much softer, creamier lactic acid. This is called malolactic fermentation, but it isn’t really a fermentation – it doesn’t create any alcohol – it’s a bacterial conversion.
You may want to put some of your wine into barrels for a few months to soften it up. And you’ll have various vats and tanks, big and small, with different batches of wine from different grape varieties, from different blocks of vineyard, or from different picking dates. You might be making a wine from a single harvest – a vintage wine. You might be making a non-vintage or multi-vintage blend of the wine of several different harvests. You might be trying to separate off your very best batches into a ‘prestige cuvée’. And obviously you may have decided to make some pink wine. But whatever your ambitions you’ll have to draw samples from all the vats and barrels, put them up on the tasting table and try to blend together a liquid that will be your ideal sparkling wine in two to five years’ time.
If this sounds like fun – well, it’s very rarified fun. The new wines are young, acid, unformed; and there might be so-called ‘reserve’ wines from several older vintages as well to consider for your non-vintage blends. But winemakers often see this blending, which frequently takes place in the icy dog days of winter, as one of the great challenges – and great joys – of their year. I’ve tried it a few times and it’s tough, trying to see into the future, when an uplifting balanced golden wine cascading with bubbles and laughter will flow into the glass, yet all these samples are raw, rough to taste – and they still have no bubbles.
The classic method of making wine sparkle is by creating a second fermentation in the bottle of this dry still wine. It won’t start fermenting again by itself – you’ll have to encourage it. So you put together what the French call a liqueur de tirage, basically a mixture of a precise amount of sugar and yeast; you then add this to the still wine blend in the tank – give that a really good mix to integrate the sugar and yeast (you could add the yeast mix direct to the bottle, but it’s usually done in the vat) – and then you bottle this brew, snap on a crown cap and you wait.
You’ve added yeast and sugar to wine. Scientifically, it has to start a new fermentation. This will produce about one degree more alcohol – and vast amounts of carbon dioxide. But your wine is in a hermetically sealed bottle. Where can the gas go? Luckily, carbon dioxide is a very soluble gas so the whole lot dissolves in the wine and creates immense pressure. That was why the invention of really strong glass for bottles in England way back in the 17th century was so important for the birth of a sparkling wine world. They could withstand the pressure.
Ideally this second fermentation takes place slowly in cool conditions, with the bottles on their sides. It may well take a month or two, and as the yeast cells finish their job of fermenting, they die and drop to the bottom of the wine, which, with the bottles horizontal, is along the side of the bottle. This creates a sticky sludge (though some modern yeasts aren’t sticky), and this sludge has a fantastically important part to play. As those dead yeast cells gradually decompose they undergo an enzymatic reaction called autolysis which releases all the flavours and chemical components in the yeast into the wine.
This is crucial for quality. Since an English sparkling wine is sure to be made from acid base wine, this ‘autolysis’ is the natural way to let the wine develop the flavours of cream and roasted nuts, brioche and croissant crust that are the joy of fine sparkling wine. All those flavours are in the yeasts, but they need time to seep into the wine. Most experts reckon the wine must lie there for at least 18 months for this gastronomic decomposition to occur. Top producers often leave their wine on the lees sediment for three, four or five years. If you whip a wine off its yeast lees before they have begun to decompose, you lose the chance of any richness in your wine. This ‘autolysis’ transforms an acid sparkling wine into a mouthful of delight.
But it won’t look that appetising if the glass is full of the sludge of decomposed yeasts. Time for some more human ingenuity, invented, obviously, by the Champagne producers. You have to dislodge that yeast sludge, get it down to the mouth of the bottle, and then somehow remove it without losing half a bottle of foaming wine at every attempt. In the 19th century the Champagne companies invented a method of gradually taking each bottle from horizontal to standing on its head over a matter of months. Armies of men would methodically work through the vast cellars, upending the bottles bit by bit and giving them a gentle knock as they did so to dislodge the yeast. At the end of the process, called remuage or riddling, all the bottles would be standing on their heads with a lump of sludge sitting in the neck above the cork. You can still do this process by hand, obviously, but producers nowadays employ machines called gyropalettes. These are cages containing up to 500 bottles which are computer-controlled and which methodically shake and upend the bottles over a matter of days rather than months. Not so romantic, but not so many workers calling in sick with arthritis of the wrist.
But we’re not finished. We’ve got a cellar full of bottles standing on their heads with the necks blocked with sludge. Ah, another French invention – disgorgement. With a lot of practice, you could probably learn how to flip off the crown cap and turn the bottle upright all in one, and just lose the plug of sludge, not loads of wine. But there’s now a machine to do this. The bottle necks are submerged in freezing glycol solution, then upended mechanically with almost no loss of wine except for the frozen plug of dead yeast cells. So at last you have bone-dry sparkling wine.
You can leave it bone-dry, but very few producers do because it can feel a bit abrasive and lack charm. So usually a little dosage of wine, sugar and sometimes a dash of brandy are added, which lets you imperceptibly sweeten the wine. If you do want your fizz to taste slightly sweet – and several wineries like Nyetimber, Hattingley Valley and Ambriel do make a bit of slightly sweet demi-sec fizz – well, you add a bit more sugar. And then you bang a Champagne cork in, tie it down with a wire cage and you’re done. You should probably age the wine for a few months to let it settle down after all this palaver. You can age it for several years if you like. But you’ve now made yourself a beautiful bottle of traditional method English sparkling wine.
If you look on the back label of a bottle of English sparkling wine, some now include the date the wine was first put into bottle to start its second fermentation and the date of disgorgement. (This was first done in Champagne in 1985 by Bruno Paillard.) The second date shows how long the wine has rested on its lees, or yeast cells. A longer time usually means a richer, more complete, more rounded wine.