Your ultimate guide to sparkling wines: from how bubbles form to understanding Champagne, Prosecco, and Pét-Nat styles. Find the perfect sparkling wine for any occasion.

“Champagne is one of the elegant extras in life.”

-Charles Dickens

Sparkling wine is wonderful, isn’t it? It truly is a versatile everyday wine. You can have it for breakfast[i], lunch, dinner, and every hour in between. It pairs well with most foods and always looks elegant. It comes in many styles, so it’ll never bore you. It’s the first choice for any celebration[ii]. I mean, is there anything more iconic than the popping sound of uncorking a bottle during a wedding or for the victors at the end of a race?

The whole world likes sparkling wines, and the whole world of wine makes wines in this style. But what is sparkling wine? How does it get its bubbles? Read on to find the answers to those and many other questions. Let’s dive in!

What is Sparkling Wine?

To keep it simple, sparkling wine is regular wine with carbon dioxide trapped in the bottle. It is, of course, this CO₂ that gives these wines their bubbles.

Carbon dioxide is the natural byproduct of fermentation. Well, one of them. The other being alcohol. See, yeasts start munching on the grapes’ sugars, converting them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When wine is fermented in large vats the carbon dioxide dissipates into the surrounding air. Most sparkling wines, then, require winemakers to trigger a second fermentation. This can happen in a sealed tank or directly in the bottle.

But we’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s discuss bottling the wine before the first fermentation is complete.

The Ancestral Method for Sparkling Wines

Does Pét-Nat ring a bell? This style’s stock seems to be on the rise. I see more producers offering their version and more wine drinkers purchasing this style. But that’s my experience, and your mileage might vary. Are you familiar with this style? Pét-Nat is short for Pétillant Naturel, or “naturally sparkling (bubbling)”, in English.

Producers bottle the wine before the fermentation is complete; therefore, the yeast is still eating sugars. So, these wines are naturally effervescent without undergoing further processes. Many wines of this style fall under the natural wine category because of that minimal intervention during the winemaking process.

Now, I remember having Frizzante[iii] wines in Italy and bubbly Vinho Verde wines from Portugal made in this style many years before I first came across the Pét-Nat term, which today we use to encapsulate them all.

The Charmat Method to Make Sparkling Wine

Now we’re getting into Sparkling proper! In this method, winemakers allow wine to fully ferment and then induce a second fermentation inside sealed stainless steel tanks. They add the wine in these pressurized tanks along with a mixture of sugar and yeast known as Liqueur de Tirage[iv].

Producers keep the wines in the tank for a little over a week to allow for the second fermentation to complete and then filter and bottle the wines under pressure to retain the bubbles.

It’s very likely that you’ve had sparkling wine made with the Charmat method in the past. Prosecco is the better known one, but there are other bubblies made this way, including Lambrusco, Spumante from Asti[v], and many other affordable sparkling wines from the New World. This method is more cost-effective than the alternative.

Speaking of which:

The Champenoise Method and The King of Sparkling Wines

You can’t talk about sparkling wines and not mention Champagne. How could you, right? What other wine can make you taste the stars[vi]? Well, let’s talk a little about it here.

First, Champagne is a region, and this is why every other sparkling wine in the world can’t use that name[vii]. Also, winemakers use a different process to make Champagne. It’s called the “Champenoise”, or the “Traditional” method. In this case, the second fermentation is done inside the bottle. The Liqueur de Tirage is still added, but this time to each bottle instead of a large tank.

This is a labor-intensive process. Not only is the Tirage added to every bottle, but each one is stored in an incline (45° angle, with its neck facing down) and must be rotated individually so that the lees accumulate at the bottom of the bottle. Today, there are machines that automate the turning process, but some producers still do it by hand. Every day or two each bottle is rotated ⅛ or ¼ of the way. This process continues for several weeks.

Now, Champagne is the king of Sparkling Wines, no doubt about it. But it’s not the only one made this way. Spanish Cava and Italian Franciacorta are both made using the traditional method, as are many other wines worldwide. In Spain they use their own varietals for Cava, but in Franciacorta they use Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, same as in Champagne.

Let’s Talk About Sweetness in Sparkling Wines

You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that some sparkling wines are sweet, while others are bone dry. If you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess that if the winemakers stop the second fermentation before it’s complete, the wine will have residual sugar. Could we say, then, that the sweetness of sparkling wines is determined by how soon this second fermentation was stopped? I’ve talked about this elsewhere, when writing about the different wine styles.

Well, not exactly. See, producers adjust the sweetness of the desired finished sparkling wine by adding a syrup of wine and sugar. The reality is that to maximize bubbles, winemakers allow the secondary fermentation to be completed. Of course, this results in too-dry, too-acidic wine. Sugar is needed to balance the flavors and to define the style.

Sparkling wines are indeed categorized by sweetness. How much sugar, technically called dosage[viii], is added, defines the type of bubbly in the bottle. The following graph by Wine Enthusiast is worth more than typed words:

The Last Drop

I don’t want to say I dislike sparkling wines (I know some of you will find my house and come to it with pitchforks if I do), but it’s fair to say I don’t buy if often. However, I do recognize it’s the skeleton key to food pairings. If everybody orders something different and you still want to find that one wine that’ll pair well with everything, then just order sparkling wine and you’ll be fine.

I can’t imagine receiving a New Year without popping a bottle of Champagne. I won’t call this a “family tradition” because I feel that we’re not unique in doing so. However, my father always buys a bottle a week or so before Christmas, and it’s just sitting there, refrigerated, until after dinner in New Year’s Eve. I even remember taking one with us to a hill behind my parents’ house to see the city’s fireworks and drinking it straight out of the bottle. Is there a better way to start a year? Sparkling wine is festive and sophisticated at the same

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Footnotes

[i] As seen in posh brunches, sometimes mixed with orange juice and served as mimosas.

[ii] Even athletes celebrate with some bubbly after running faster, jumping higher, being stronger, or scoring more points than their rivals.

[iii] These wines are a style in their own and can be made with different methods. Frizzante wines are known for their light effervescence.

[iv] Liqueur de Tirage is a solution of wine, sugar (typically sucrose) and a yeast. It’s used for both the Charmat and the Champenoise methods.

[v] The Charmat method, by the way, is also known as the Martinotti method, after Federico (you guessed it) Martinotti, who developed and patented a fermentation method using large tanks in Asti in 1895. The equipment was later developed by Eugene Charmat, which is why we can use both names interchangeably.

[vi] “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars”. Dom Pérignon supposedly said this after trying their Champagne. It’s a beautiful quote, but it’s likely an apocryphal story.

[vii] The more seasoned of my readers might remember that this was not always the case. France (and Champagne in particular) have been fighting to protect their DOC designation for well over a century, and they’ve largely been successful because of the various trade agreements they’ve signed. Famously, it was agreed that a few producers in California could still use Champagne in their labels as long as they added a geographical indicator (like California Champagne). This was the concession made in the EU-US trade agreement signed in 2006.

[viii] It is also called Liqueur d’Expédition, but dosage is easier to pronounce, isn’t it?

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Cover Image: Bubbles in a Sparkling Wine glass. Photo by Joonas Kääriäinen.