Not Everything Sparkling Is Champagne
On 8 March, International Women’s Day, I was on Cristina Ferreira’s programme on SIC to talk about wine with women. The invitation grew out of the surprise I sprang on my friend José Fidalgo on the same programme a few weeks earlier. I took up the challenge and chose a selection of wines to bring along, so we could hold a tasting during the conversation — joined by two women who love wine, Bárbara Norton de Matos and Isabel Saldanha. During the conversation, the subject of Champagne came up. I had brought a bottle of the sparkling Monte Cascas Reserva Bruto Távora-Varosa 2013, and the moment they saw it, the word “Champagne” was in the air. I took the chance to explain that not everything sparkling is Champagne. Only sparkling wine made in the French wine region of the same name is Champagne.
Today the Champagne region is the strongest “brand” in sparkling wine in the world. But that recognition is nothing new. It was mentioned as far back as 1676 in Sir George Etherege’s play “The Man of Mode”, and it quickly became a success in both England and France. Its effervescence made it an extravagant wine that awakened all five senses and, even then, was very expensive, becoming fashionable among the aristocracy.
Making Champagne was always difficult — at first because it was uncontrolled and producers did not understand the mechanism of the second fermentation. Back then, during harvest the wine did not fully finish fermenting.* When it was bottled in spring, it ended up fermenting the sugars still left inside the bottle. In autumn, the bottles that withstood the pressure from the carbon dioxide released by fermentation, without leaking or bursting, were effervescent.
It took about a hundred years to understand this effervescence and turn it into a controlled way of making sparkling wine. The process uses a base wine whose first fermentation is complete — that is, with no sugars left to ferment — placed inside special bottles, with special closures, able to withstand the pressure of a second fermentation that takes place “trapped” in the bottle. For that fermentation to happen in the bottle, you add to the base wine enough yeast and sugar to ferment and give rise to the effervescence and the mousse that define a sparkling wine. The process isn’t simple, but the excellence of the final product makes it worthwhile.
Here in Portugal, since the early twentieth century the regions of Távora-Varosa and Bairrada have used the method developed in Champagne, which we call the traditional method. And we have already shown we can hold our own in the extravagant world of sparkling wine. It may not be Champagne. But it is sparkling wine — and very good sparkling wine at that.
* the conversion of the sugars in the grape must into alcohol, with the release of carbon dioxide.
From the page to the glass
- 1808 Espumante Brut Nature — Traditional method, twenty months on lees, no sugar at disgorgement.
