Champagne vs. Wine

Today, one of my customers asked me the difference between champagne and white wine. The obvious answer, from a consumer's point of view, is the bubbles. But she was asking me from the winemaker's viewpoint, and I had to tell her that I knew that the winemaking process was different, I knew that the process of making champagne is called "champenoise", pronounced SHAM-pen-WAH (when it is done outside of the Champagne region of France), but I also had to admit that I had no idea what the process actually was.

As harvest time is in full swing, and one of our chillers was on the fritz yesterday (a brand new machine costing in excess of ten thousand dollars), our winemaker has been a bit busy lately, to say the least. But I caught him in between chores, and I asked him the same question my customer had asked me.



In a nutshell, here it is:

White Wine - Grapes are picked when ripe, pressed, and the juice is fermented and bottled.

Champagne - Grapes are picked much earlier than for regular wine, pressed, the juice is fermented and then bottled in super-strong pressure-proof champagne bottles. A secondary fermentation, using yeast and sugar, is then instigated inside each separate bottle. Caps similar to beer bottle caps are put on, which trap the expanding gases and cause carbonation. A settling and cooling process is used to remove the sediment from the second batch of yeast, and the bottles are quickly re-closed with champagne corks to retain the carbonation.

So you see, when you look at the prices of real champagne, you're paying for all that extra work that went into the making. It's more than just pumping some air into a bottle of white wine (which is what you're getting when you buy a $9.99 bottle at Jiffy Wines).