Surprise, surprise, the wine tastes good. Better than good. Excellent, in fact. It picks up a trophy at the Griffith Show for the best bottle fermented sparkling of the show. You start to scratch your head. Perhaps this is what the Granite Belt should be doing with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Over the next five years you follow this train of thought and the sparklings produced are consistent medal winners. Your opinion is cemented.
Let's come forward to the year 2000. You are now working for Preston Peak. Ashley suggests you have a go at making sparkling wine (known in a previous incarnation as champagne). You leap at the chance. And there it is, this tank of the most precious base wine, ready to be tiraged and transformed into something quite extraordinary. We have no doubts that this wine will be sublime.
When you make a base wine you have to think of the wine as being a coat-hanger for the dress you put on it; too flimsy it won't handle the dress, robustly structured and it will take any number of strange garments. In this case the 'garments' are various methods of adding complexity, such as leaving the wine in barrel on its yeast lees and inducing malolactic fermentation in a portion of the base wine. All of these winemaking methods are sound, as long as the essential character of the wine is not compromised by them and enhances, rather than detracts, from the basic flavours. It's a question of balance, with the right underlying structure.
Making bottle fermented sparkling wine is a time consuming and extensive exercise which should not be undertaken by the faint hearted or the penniless. The basic idea is similar to making home brew beer; that is, you start with a relatively low alcohol base and add yeast plus sugar to it. Then you bottle it as quickly as you can, before it starts to ferment, in a champagne bottle with a crown seal, similar to the old beer bottle closure. The Champenoise refer to this technique as tirage. The wine ferments in the bottle, producing carbon dioxide, but it's in a sealed bottle and the gas can't escape. So it goes back into solution, into the wine. Voila! There's the bubbles..
This is where the home brew analogy diverges from our story. The home brewer has the top off the bottle and is happily glugging away, but the sparkling wine producer, being much more patient, leaves the yeast and the sediment in the bottle for six months at least, sometimes up to five years. What happens is quite remarkable. After about 18 months of sitting in the bottle on the yeast lees the yeast cells start to break down, and undergo a process called autolysis, basically yeast death characterized by cell rupturing. What these cells release into the wine is a complex of amino acids and flavour constituents which tasters often call 'bready' or 'vegemitey'.
It doesn't finish there. When the winemaker decides that the flavour gained by autolysis is right (usually by consuming copious quantities) it's time to get rid of the sediment. Enter the riddling process, where bottles are arranged in a seemingly bizarre configuration upside down on a rack and given a little twiddle every day to encourage the sediment to drop against the crown seal. After about 4 weeks of daily riddling the sediment has dropped entirely into a discreet plug at the neck of the bottle.
Now comes disgorgement, another mellifluent word that conjures up all manner of archaic medical procedures, but what it really means is getting rid of the plug of sediment. Holding the bottles upside down, they are put into a bottle neck freezer where the plug of sediment is frozen. Remember the fermentation in the bottle? Well, it has actually produced around 6 atmospheres of pressure, which is approximately three times the pressure your car tyres hold. So if you flick the crown seal off the bottle the frozen plug of sediment will come flying out, leaving the wine nice and clear but still fizzy. The vast majority of winemakers then add a liqueur, made of sugar and water, or sugar and wine, to balance the acid, dry taste of the wine. Incidentally, it's only at this stage that the decision about whether to make the wine sweet or not is made. If you want sweet, add more liqueur. Most higher quality bottle fermented sparklings are on the drier side and are referred to as Brut. The bottles are topped up if they need it and that's when the champagne cork and the wire is applied.
Sound complicated? You bet it is. And expensive. But, well worth it at the end of the day. And that's why bottle fermented sparkling wines of top quality are worth so much money, as opposed to their inferior counterparts, those cheap carbonated parodies. They are also a lot nicer. Spare a thought for us when we tirage our little prize and remember that in a couple of years you could be drinking a home grown gem.
Remember Hippolyte Serisier? Not many people do, but he was a hero to the early Queensland wine industry. A French man with considerable expertise in winemaking, he consulted to Queensland wineries in the early 1900's, eventually settling in Toowoomba. As early as 1922, Hippolyte Serisier predicted that 'the Granite Belt' will one day produce some of the finest sparkling wines in the world, the soil and climate being ideal for production of these wines.
We have opted for the name of Serisier for our sparkling, a suitable tribute to a man whose name has been long forgotten in the dark recesses of time.
