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Procudures of Making Sparkling Wines
Champagne Fermentation Process:
- Harvest grapes
- De steamed and Crushed – Remove harsh taste stalk and break the grape’s skin.
- Gently pressed – To separate grape juice from grape solid. As Champagne is very elegant, thus hardly pressed juice will not be recommended for high quality products.
- Alcoholic Fermentation – To turn grape sugar into alcohol, resulting a still dry base wine. Very few houses use barrel vat, whereas most houses use stainless steel tank.
- Malo – Lactic Fermentation (optional) – To soften the sharp acidic taste. Few houses use this method for Champagne.
- Blend for Champagne base wine – To make the quality from each release consistent and to maintain the style of the house
- Preparation for Second bottle fermentation – To bottle the base wine with additional sugar and viable yeast. The amount of the additions needs to be accurate. This bottle is also called tirage.
- Bottle fermentation (second fermentation) – The additional yeast in the bottle will ferment the sugar in the bottle, which creates fine bubbles in the final products.
- Bottle aging – Champagne required minimum 15 months aging after second fermentation. This is to add complexities and harmonies to the wine.
- Riddling – To collect lees from the second fermentation in the Tirage bottle for disgorgement.
- Disgorging – To remove the lees created by second fermentation from the bottle.
- Dosage – To top up the volume lost from disgorgement. The addition of sugar syrup liqueur to balance the wine
- Reseal the bottle with champagne cork and wire – The finish of champagne/Method Traditional sparkling wine.
Second Fermentation in Tank:
- Harvest grapes
- De steamed and Crushed – Remove harsh taste stalk and break the grape’s skin.
- Gently pressed – To separate the juice from grape solids. As sparkling wine is very elegant, thus hardly pressed juice will not be recommended for high quality products.
- Alcoholic Fermentation – To turn grape sugar into alcohol, resulting a still dry base wine. Very few houses use barrel vat, whereas most houses use stainless steel tank.
- Malo – Lactic Fermentation (optional) – To soften the sharp acidic taste. However, few houses use this method for sparkling wines.
- Blend the base wine – To make the quality from each release consistent and to maintain the style of the house
- Preparation for second fermentation – transfer dry base wine, sugar and viable yeas into a tank.
- Second fermentation – Alcoholic fermentation to create bubbles. It is a more economical method for second fermented sparkling wine.
- Filtration – to remove the solids created in second fermentation under pressure.
- Bottling – To seal the sparkling wine under pressure for either further storage or releasing into market.
Carbonation method:
- Grape Harvest
- De steamed and Crushed – Remove harsh taste stalk and break the grape’s skin.
- Press – To remove the juice away from grape solids – skins and seeds.
- Alcoholic Fermentation – To turn grape sugar into alcohol, resulting dry still base wine.
- Malo-lactic Fermentation (optional) – To softer the sharp acid taste. Rarely used for skarkling wine production.
- Finning and clarify base wine – to stabilize the base wine, removing any chemically and micro biologically unstable matters.
- Carbonation and bottling – To add bubbles into still wine, and thus, to bottle the carbonated sparkling wine for release.
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