Ninety-nine percent of English sparkling wine uses the méthode traditionnelle — the same process as Champagne. Understanding it is understanding why the wine tastes as it does.
10 min readThe winemaking year begins at harvest, typically in late September or October in southern England. The Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier are picked early — deliberately, before they would be harvested for still wine — to preserve the natural acidity that gives traditional-method sparkling wine its backbone. The fruit is pressed gently, whole-bunch, to extract the pale juice without colouring it from the skins. The resulting base wine is lean, crisp, and would be unpleasant to drink as it stands: this is intentional. Its severity is precisely what the subsequent process requires.
This is where the winemaker's art is most fully expressed. Different parcels of wine — from different varieties, different vineyard sites, different ages — are tasted and blended to create the assemblage that will form the base of the final sparkling wine. In non-vintage wines, reserve wines from previous years are incorporated to add complexity and maintain the house style. In vintage wines, only fruit from the specified year is used. The skill of the assemblage is the skill that separates the merely good from the genuinely great.
The assembled base wine is bottled with the addition of the liqueur de tirage — a precise mixture of wine, sugar, and selected yeast. The bottle is sealed with a crown cap (like a beer bottle), and the yeast consumes the sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. Because the bottle is sealed, the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go: it dissolves into the wine, creating the pressure — approximately 5–6 atmospheres — that will eventually express itself as the persistent mousse in the glass.
Once the second fermentation is complete, the wine rests on its lees — the dead yeast cells — for a period that determines much of the wine's character. The legal minimum for non-vintage English sparkling wine is nine months on lees; the finest producers typically age their wines for eighteen months to three years, and prestige cuvées may spend four or five years in the cellar before release. During this time, a process called autolysis occurs: the yeast cells gradually break down and release compounds that give sparkling wine its biscuity, brioche-like, toasty complexity. The longer the ageing, the more of these compounds are present, and the more developed the wine becomes.
To remove the lees from the wine, they must be collected in the neck of the bottle. This is achieved through riddling (remuage), in which the bottle is gradually rotated and tilted over weeks or months until it is vertical with the crown cap pointing downward and the lees collected in the neck. Modern wineries use gyropallettes — mechanical riddling cages that turn hundreds of bottles simultaneously — but some traditional producers still perform this by hand, one turn per day, six weeks per batch.
With the lees collected in the neck, the bottle neck is briefly submerged in a freezing brine solution. The lees freeze into a plug, and when the crown cap is removed, the pressure expels the frozen plug cleanly, leaving the wine behind. The bottle now contains clear, sparkling wine with no sediment.
The small amount of wine expelled with the frozen plug is replaced by the liqueur d'expédition — a mixture of wine and sugar that sets the wine's final sweetness level. Brut wines (the most common style) receive very little or no added sugar; extra-brut wines receive none; demi-sec wines receive significantly more. The choice of dosage is one of the final creative decisions of the winemaking process, and it profoundly affects the wine's character on release and its potential for ageing.