How is Champagne made? From sour base wine to fine bubbles.

A cool region and three grapes

Champagne lies in northern France, about 90 miles east of Paris. It is one of the coolest wine regions in the country, and the grapes struggle to ripen fully. The vines grow on chalk, which drains well and helps give the wines their finesse.

Three grapes dominate: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier. A Champagne made only from Chardonnay is called Blanc de Blancs; one made from the black grapes is a Blanc de Noirs.

The base wine

The process starts with a still wine. Because the climate is so cool, this base wine is light, high in acidity and on its own almost undrinkable. That is exactly what the winemaker wants: the acidity keeps the finished Champagne fresh and allows it to age.

Most Champagne is a blend of different grapes, villages and often vintages. Reserve wines from older years help each house keep its style consistent. A Champagne from a single year is labeled as vintage Champagne.

The second fermentation in the bottle

In the traditional method, the blended base wine is bottled with a little sugar and yeast and closed with a crown cap. Inside the bottle, a second fermentation starts. It creates a little more alcohol and carbon dioxide, and because the gas cannot escape, it dissolves into the wine as bubbles.

The wine then ages on the dead yeast cells, the lees. By law this takes at least 15 months for non-vintage Champagne and three years for vintage Champagne, and many producers wait much longer. Lees aging gives Champagne its typical notes of brioche, toast and biscuit and a finer mousse.

Riddling, disgorging and dosage

To remove the yeast, the bottles are slowly turned and tilted neck down so the sediment collects in the neck, a process called riddling. The neck is frozen, the cap is removed, and the pressure pushes out the plug of yeast. This is disgorging.

Finally, the bottle is topped up with the dosage, a mix of wine and sugar that sets the final sweetness. Brut, the most common style, has very little sugar; Extra Brut and Brut Nature have even less or none. The bottle then gets its cork and wire cage.

The rise of grower Champagne

For a long time, most growers sold their grapes to the big Champagne houses. Over the last decades, more and more of them started to make and bottle their own wine. These grower Champagnes, marked with RM (récoltant-manipulant) on the label, often express one village or even one vineyard.

In this episode of WineMasters, Tracey Dobbin MW and Jeremy Cukierman MW visit Pierre Péters, one of the first growers to make his own Champagne, and discover how grower Champagne brought wine lovers back to the region.