The best way to ring in the New Year is with a flute of bubbling champagne. Call it what you will – prosecco, Asti or champagne – the sparkly, bubbly beverage is raised to celebrate the New Year.
Champagne is also an area in France known for producing the best sparkling wine. The Treaty of Madrid calls for labelling any bottle of sparkling wine ‘champagne’ an outright taboo, unless produced from that very region.
High-end champagnes such as Dom Perignon only use grapes harvested from a single year, whereas the norm in preparing champagne can be either from an amalgamation of grapes gathered from several vintages or from crops during a specific year.
Bubbly Terms 101
Prestige cuvee: A proprietary blended wine, which is the best of a producer’s range of champagne.
Blanc de noirs: It is, essentially, a white wine. The champagne uses black grapes entirely in its preparation.
Blanc de Blancs: This type of champagne uses Chardonnay grapes in its preparation.
Rose champagne: Pink champagne is another name for this type of champagne, and gets its distinct flavour from soaking the skins of black grapes in the wine and/or blending it with tiny amounts of red wine.
The cost factor is the main motivation for people to celebrate only special occasions such as the New Year, with Champagne. If you are not familiar with sparkling wines, choosing the right one can be a daunting task. The choices are endless and most people, unfamiliar with the basics, end up choosing one only because of the attractively packaged bottle.
Making Champagne
The production process is no different to any other type of wine. Prior to preliminary fermentation, it is important to press the grapes, after which the acidic yield is then blended and bottled along with yeast and sugar which creates bubbles via carbonation. This creates a secondary fermentation inside the bottle.
