Oh Thanksgiving, a time to eat too much and
then complain about it.
Instead of the annual friendsgiving I’ve
been hosting for who knows how long, I ventured to places that remind me how
much I need to work on my French. I met my one true love for the first time,
baby Charles. Charles turns 1 year old in about a month, and I didn’t even drop
him. I also celebrated the beautiful union of my university roommate and her
one true love (other than me, obviously).
What do these two events have in common?
(*other than the fact that I held off ugly crying at both)
Sparkling wine, people. Charles’ beautiful
mother’s drink of choice is Prosecco, and I think every bride drinks sparkling
on her wedding day. Even if it is non-alcoholic, you know homegirl has something
bubbly in her glass to instagram. Luckily, I love this bride, so I made sure
she had at least one beautiful bottle of bubbles. I gave it to the MOH along
with strict instructions not to cut it with orange juice, because there is a
limit to my generosity.
So, to all my favourite people, here are
some basics on bubbly; because you are a bunch of basics. RELAX, I’m joking.
Sit down and drink your PSL as you’re flipping out over the 30-second teaser of
Adele’s new song.
I would just like to clear up right now,
before we go any further… IF IT HAS BUBBLES, IT IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY CHAMPAGNE. On the note of Champagne, a very specific region in France, here is a song to set the mood for the rest of the entry. I listened to it in first year of university, at the ripe old age of 17...
There are different ways to make sparkling
wine. Generally there are 4, but one of them only makes garbage because it is
literally just injecting the wine with C02 like soda; so I am going to discuss
3.
I am not even going to use the fancy terms
for them, you can Google that if you want. THE THREE T’s! May I present you
with…
Tank. Transfer. Traditional.
I would normally say something like “You
know when you’re baking bread and…” but you’ve never made a damn bread loaf,
stop kidding yourself. So I will say this, you know when you haul into a pizza
crust and there are air pockets? (we are talking normal crust here, none of
this thin crust garbage) That is because of the yeast. Yeast eats sugar, and makes air bubbles.
These air bubbles either end up baked into your pizza crust (why the hell do
people even eat thin crust?), or trapped in a bottle of wine.
What I am trying to say is, you take some
grape juice and ferment it to make wine. Then you have a bunch of wine that you
made and then high five yourself for being a champion. You then decide you want
bubbles, and so you add a little more sugar, throw in some yeast, and seal that
baby up like a Y2K bomb shelter. The yeast gets the munchies on the sugar, and
makes air bubbles, but they are trapped. Therefore, the wine then went through
a secondary fermentation. Poppin’
bottles = releasing pressure = what up bubbles.
There are differences between the methods,
but they all take the yeast to make more bubbles (ie: they all go through a
secondary fermentation). All have their own pros and con’s, just different.
started wearing' less and going out more, glasses champagne out on the dance floor, hanging with some girls I've never seen before....
Tank Method
Make your wine, put it in a super intense
super heavy duty thick walled tank, add your yeast to the tank, and then once
the bubbles appear, filter and bottle it under pressure directly from the tank.
This is great for holding onto fruity
aromatics of wine, it is also generally the cheapest method. The most common
wine you see coming out of this method is Prosecco.
Transfer Method
Make your wine, put it into bottles, THEN
add yeast and seal the bottles. You can mostly just leave the bottles to hang
out, it isn’t that picky really. Once you have the desired amount of yeast
contact, and secondary fermentation has occurred, you dump all the bottles into
one of those super intense pressurized tanks again. Once in the tank, it
filters out under pressure and is then bottled for sale.
This method is cheaper than Traditional
method, and used for much more mass production. You get more yeasty character
within your wine, since all the yeast goes through the secondary ferment in
bottle. This is how a lot of Australian and American sparkling wines are made.
Traditional Method
Make your wine, put it into bottles, add
your yeast into the bottle, and seal that baby up. Then it goes through this
intense process called riddling,
which was traditionally done by hand by creepy cave dwelling people, but is
more commonly done now with machine. Basically you add the yeast, and over
many, many months (generally more than a year, how much longer is dependent on
where you are) you turn the bottle upside down. You know those puzzles that you
would see on Survivor challenges where you have to turn a piece 8 different
ways before you can turn it back to make it fit? It is reminiscent of that. It
is a series of clockwise, and counter clockwise turns to bring the bottle from
the side, to upside down. Once the bottle is upside down, thanks to the dance
of turns you and the bottle did, all the yeast will be in the neck of the
bottle as well. Once that is the case, the neck of the bottle gets flash
frozen, and popped open. By flash freezing, you are keeping the yeast in where
the cap of the wine is, and it just kind of flies out, but you are able to keep
most of the pressure and wine in the bottle and just ditch the yeast. This
process is called the disgorging of
the wine. I remember it because the clump of yeast looks disgusting, but they
make a gorgeous wine. I am basically a scientist incase you can't tell by my
super descriptions and technical ways of remembering fancy terms. Once the
yeast flies out, most places then top of the bottle a bit to make sure it is
nice and full for sale, and cram a cork in it. Literally.
This is the most expensive and
time-consuming way of making sparkling wine. It also allows for the most yeast
contact with the wine, and a little more control of the whole process since it
never returns to a tank. This is how you see a lot of Spanish sparkling wine
get made (Cava), anything from South Africa labeled ‘Methode Cap Classique’,
and, you guessed it, Champagne.
Champagne is sparkling wine, but not all
sparkling wine is Champagne.
Champagne is the name of a place, so if
you’re not from that place you can’t pretend you are. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Americans who
pretend you’re Canadian when you travel. Or, when you do something stupid,
Canadians who pretend you’re American when you travel. (*admission: I have
used the phrase in a French speaking country ‘Jes suis habitee en Texas’
pronounced that way when trying to get out of a jam. It worked.)
Why does everyone say they are drinking
Champagne? Kick ass branding, that’s why. Like tissues are tissues, not
Kleenex, and searching something on the web is searching, not Googling. Just
amazing branding. So stop it, because I am judging you, and you are wrong, and
the people from Champagne will likely be as offended as the people from Texas
are after reading my admission (I am sorry about that, but I do speak enough
French to think they were literally trying to sell me. I wish I was joking.)
So please, stop saying you’re drinking
Champagne, because you likely aren’t unless you swim in $100 bills as a
pre-dinner work out.
So how about this for a deal, I will work
on my French so I don’t have to pretend to be American, and you will stop
calling your sparkling wine, Champagne?
All my love,
M
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