La Vie en France: Champagne for Dummies

In the past few months I've visited 4 or 5 different champagne cellars around town. I've been learning so much about how champagne is made, that I think that I need to document it, there's no way I'll remember this in a few years! Of course nothing can be called "champagne" unless it's made in this region. These pictures are from a really small producer that I visited a few weeks ago, so I'm sure that some of the process is a little different for the big producers. Here's what I got so far:

1. 3 different kinds of grapes are picked by hand (never with machines here), the names of which are Chadonnay, Pinot Meunier, and Pinot Noir, which are grown in different parts of the region.

2. The grapes are pressed right on the site of the vineyard, they have to press them quickly so that the skin from the two dark-colored grapes (pinot meunier & pinot noir) doesn't mix with the juice of the grape. Champagne is always the color of white wine, even though 2 of the grapes that they use look as though they'd make red wine from the outside.

a grape press, the sides collapse and gently press out the juice

3. The juices are separated into different vats like you can see below, and they are always separated by grape, so the juice from the three different grapes is kept separate. They then prepare the juice for fermentation, and let it sit until it turns into wine.

4. After all of the juice turns into wine, the most important part happens. There are designated people for each champagne company for this part: the tasting. They taste all of the wines and decide what combination of the 3 wines they can use to create the same taste that their company's champagne is known for. For this part, they also need to use their "reserves" of wine, which each company keeps from several other years. This way they can find the right way to combine all of the wines to have the same taste. That's why every time you drink a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, it tastes the same, year after year, even though every year produces different grapes and tastes. It's also why there's never a year written in champagne bottles, since it's a combination of different years. There's one exception though, if there's an exceptionally good year and wine from only that year is used, the year will be marked on the bottle, the bottle will be much more expensive than regular champagne and called "vintage."

5. Once they combine the wines to get the right taste, they are combined and put into champagne bottles. They then add yeast and sugar, and cap them with beer caps. They let the bottles sit for a minimum of a year and a half, and this is when the second fermentation happens and the bubbles form.

6. The champagne is now ready, but there's one problem. The second fermentation leaves a small sediment in the bottle. If you just put the bottle upside down, the sediment won't fall on it's own. What they have to do is a series of specific rotations back and forth and slowly inclining the bottle to get the sediment to fall to the neck of the bottle. This is called "le remuage." They rotate the bottles either by hand or by machine. By hand it takes about 3 weeks, rotating all of the bottles each day to a specific degree. And of course there are machines that do it, which take much less time!

rotating by hand

the rotations everyday, imagine having this as your job

the machines

7. Once the sediment falls into the neck of the bottle, they freeze the neck of the bottle, and open the bottle cap. The ice cube formed at the top contains the sediment, and it pops out of the bottle because of the pressure. They then add a little bit of liquor (the amount depends on the type of champagne they're making) and cork the bottles!