California Bubbly

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California bubbly can’t be called Champagne, because Champagne is a geographic designation — it’s a region in northeast France. But most sparkling wine in California is made in the “Champagne method,” known across the pond as the méthode Champenoise.



What makes the Champagne method (also sometimes called the “traditional method”) different from other methods of making fizzy wine? Essentially, this process is characterized by a secondary fermentation that occurs in the bottle. A wine is bottled after its primary fermentation, and then, over the course of several years, a series of complicated events — including little yeast additions, extensive aging, very careful rotations of the bottles, and a final addition of sugary wine — is inflicted on each bottle individually. The result tends to be a rich variety of flavors and an extremely fine bead of carbonation, more precise and bracing than any other type of sparkling wine.

Methods

There are other ways to make bubbly. The Charmat method, used in Prosecco, involves a secondary fermentation in tank, rather than in the bottle. The ancestral method, used for pétillant naturel, is achieved simply by bottling the wine mid-fermentation, to trap carbon dioxide inside the bottle. Neither of these represents a major category of California wine, though funky, cloudy pét-nats have lately become an object of wine-geek obsession.



California Champagne-method sparklers tend to use traditional Champagne grapes, too: Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. A third grape, Pinot Meunier, is often used in Champagne but is less common in California. And some trivia: Schramsberg does have a little bit of an obscure white grape called Flora, a cross of Gewurztraminer and Semillon, that they use in their sparkling wine.



Due to its production costs and its up-market prestige — as the beverage of fancy celebrations — Champagne-method bubbly, from here and abroad, rarely comes cheap.



Our sparkling wine tradition is indebted to Champagne not only stylistically, but also economically. Many of the major California sparkling houses were founded by famous French companies: Domaine Carneros, by Taittinger; Domaine Chandon, by Moët & Chandon; Mumm Napa, by G.H. Mumm; Roederer Estate, by Louis Roederer; Piper Sonoma, by Piper-Heidsieck.



Beyond the French-owned wineries in California, there are several founded by our own native sons — for example, Schramsberg, Iron Horse, J and Scharffenberger — that have been making wine in the method Champenoise for decades.

Producers

The total roster of California sparkling producers is pretty small relative to the enormity of the California wine industry, largely because the knowledge, equipment and capital required for Champagne-method wine production is, to put it lightly, insane. Those barriers have historically kept many smaller producers from investing in sparkling wine production, though there is a growing chorus of new, small-scale, Champagne-method bubbly producers, including Lichen, Caraccioli and Ultramarine.

Major California regions:

Napa Valley, Sonoma County, Marin County, Anderson Valley

Word to know:

Dosage. Pronounced like it’s French (doe-SAHJ), dosage, sometimes called a liqueur d’expedition, refers to the wine-and-sugar mixture that’s added to a bottle of sparkling wine at the very end of the production process. It happens after disgorgement — when the lees, or dead yeast cells, that have collected in the neck of the bottle are expelled. (No one wants a bunch of dead yeast cells in their bubbly.)



But what, precisely, the dosage consists of determines the taste of the wine. Small amounts of sugar may still result in a dry-tasting wine if the sugar is balancing high, tart acidity. Wines labeled “demi-sec” or “doux” will have quite a bit of sugar and will taste sweet. “Brut” and “Extra Brut” wines taste dry. Wines labeled as Brut Nature or Brut Zero, which have no dosage added, will taste drier still, and possibly a little too austere for some palates.



Regardless of what you read or believe, my semi-learned experience tells me just TWO things: drink what you enjoy, and what you can afford. The rest, as my esteemed colleague, the former SG said, is mental masturbation!!!!!


Side note: If the French think their bubbly is so good, why do they insist nobody else can use the champagne name? Who cares if it is so good?

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