Wel-Welcome?
Welcome to our—welcome to our first episode?
She sounds very unsure.
Welcome?
So welcome to our first show.
Yes, welcome.
It’s about food.
And drink.
This episode is about champagne.
Or sparkling wine.
Both.
Because champagne is a sparkling wine from a specific region produced in a specific way.
Hey Jason, it’s Lauren.
Yeah, uh, hey.
Anney, Anney and I were wondering if you could send us to the Champagne region of France
to—yeah no, totally, yeah.
Thanks, okay.
Bye.
Aren’t there some wineries in North Georgia?
We couldn’t sell the boss on a trip to France, and obviously, nothing can replicate the exact
conditions (soil, vines, climate, and water) in Champagne’s wineries.
Those wines are protected by labeling and marketing laws in many countries, to assure
customers that when something says it’s champagne, they’ll know what to expect.
But the specific guidelines for creating champagnes, from vine to bottle, are adapted and used
all over the world: the method champenoise.
So we went to a winery in North Georgia that produces sparkling wines.
Yes, there’s wine in them thar hills.
Why a winery in Georgia?
This is where we live.
First and foremost.
Dahlonega is a pretty special and unique place.
We call it the Goldilocks zone because it’s not too high, not too low, gives us some great
topography to plant some grapes.
We wanted to know if we could make some quality wine here and I think we have.
If you’re going to grow vinifera which is the top wine grapes in the world which grow
in France and Europe and they’re probably the oldest grapes in the world in which wine
has been made from, this is a good area to grow it in Georgia.
What goes into the Georgia Cuvee are chardonnay, pinot brac and pinot noir, and in our Georgia
cuvee rose sparkling gets the addition of merlot at dosage.
The grapes are harvested earlier in the year, typically around early August, the acid’s
a little bit higher, the wine’s a little bit brighter and fresher.
They’ll be pressed and made into juice.
We use the method champenoise which is the traditional method of making sparkling wine.
So the first step in bottling our Georgia cuvee is to bottle the base wine and we’ll
weigh out the encapsulated yeast, pour them into the bottle.
The bottles are placed onto the filling machine to lift it up and open up the filler and the
wine goes into the bottle to a set level.
Then we will seal the bottle with a crown cap so that the CO2 can develop in the bottle
under the secondary fermentation.
So the first step we’re doing here is taking our rose out of the neck freezer.
The neck has been frozen and all the yeast lees have been solidified.
We’ll go to the disgorger next.
The disgorger is what blows all the yeast out, it’ll pull the crown cap out, all the
yeast lees get dumped out into a bucket.
Then it goes onto the dosage machine, where the dosage is added.
Take it off of the dosage machine, put it onto the
corker where the sparkling wine cork is inserted.
And then onto the wire hood to keep the cork in there.
Then we’ll give the bottle a couple little shakes.
Stirs up the dosage, place it into the case to age further in our cellars.
When we cork it, it’s a special cork for sparkling wines that you use.
There’s a tremendous amount of celebration and tradition associated with wine and pulling
the cork is one of those things.
How much bigger it is in diameter, but once it gets in there and is compressed and is
not going to want to expand anymore, it’s still fresh right now, it wants to expand
out and that’s why you get that mushroom shape when you pull it out.
It has a wire hood that captures that cork and without the wire hood the cork would eventually
blow out.
It is quite a dangerous process.
You’re dealing with really high pressures.
As the wine has fermented and the yeast has done all the converting of alcohol into sugar
and CO2, the yeast will slowly break down, it’s a process called autolysis and it will
add a yeast-y bread-y flavor to the wine.
The longer it sits the little bit more that you will get out of the yeast.
We use an encapsulated yeast in our wine.
It shortens the riddling process significantly—wait, what’s riddling?—the riddling process
is when we’re trying to remove the yeast from the bottle so you have a clear, a clear
wine.
We eventually want to get the bottle to the small end’s upside down and all the yeast
has settled down into the neck of the bottle.
There are a lot of challenges.
First of all we have to pay particular attention to our growing season.
We have a lot of mildew and fungus issues we have to deal with.
We’re in Georgia, in a remote area.
Everything that we have to source comes from California or Italy or France.
There’s nothing here that really supports our industry so everything has to come in.
We’re pretty small.
Everything from picking the grapes to processing it to filling the bottle to putting the yeast
in, we even weigh it out one at a time with a little scale, everything is by hand.
We love wine and want to show the world that we can do some good things in Georgia.
We haven’t been known for our wine, you know, Georgia’s known for peaches and peanuts
and things like that.
We hope that soon wine will be on that list and we’re working hard for it.
When we finish up our Georgia cuvees, we want nice fine bubbles to come out of the bottles,
we want a very nice nose whether it be cherries or strawberries from our roses, we get oranges
or lemons out of our Georgia cuvee blanc, and a pretty color as well and clarity.
Sparkling wine has been relegated to celebrations which is a mistake because it’s great and
you should drink it everyday.
Great with fried chicken, try it sometime.
Hmmm.
That is really—that is really good.
Want to go see a guy open a bottle of champagne with a saber?
I got in touch with a master sabeur who happens to live in the Atlanta area (which is also
the location of HowStuffWorks’ home base).
He took us out to Yonah Mountain Vineyards to talk about the history and culture behind
champagne -- and sabering.
I’m Harry Constantinescu and I saber champagne.
How did this become a thing?
They used the capitol of Champagne to crown the kings of France.
Napoleon himself went to military school close to that region and this is where he met with
Remy Moet, which later will take over the Moet Chandon House.
And he would stop with his generals prior to a battle in the Champagne region just to
celebrate with champagne.
A young officer from Napoleon’s army frustrated with the fact that he couldn’t control his
horse with one hand and open a bottle of champagne with the other one after a night of party,
he pulled his sword and beheaded a bottle with the stroke of a blade.
Everybody thought that this is a great way to open a bottle of champagne.
This is how champagne I guess and the noble art of sabrage became associated with royalty,
with aristocracy.
The czar’s of Russia were drinking champagne also.
It started to become very expensive so it was a symbol.
This is not what it is in the champagne region.
They drink it there just as a regular wine.
It doesn’t have to be a celebration or a birthday to open that bottle.
In the past seven, eight, ten years, I’ve seen more and more people trying to learn
about sabrage and how it’s performed.
I came to find out that there’s a certain window where you can safely perform sabrage.
First of all the temperature is very important.
The point where you hit the bottle is also very important.
Every bottle will have two seams.
One seam on one side and one on the other side and then there’s a glass lip where
the bottle is closed.
The point where you want to hit is where the seam meets this glass lip.
This is where you want to hit it in order to have a clean cut.
In the Champagne region they actually had a really hard time two, three hundred years
ago trying to figure out why the bottle explodes and how to make a better bottle to keep all
of that, all that pressure.
They actually were trying to make a still wine because of the temperature being so cold
there it would start fermenting in the spring time and the bottles, the way they were made
at the time, they would explode.
But eventually they started to perfect what is known today as champagne or the method
champenoise.
I opened bottles of champagne in the past with all kind of objects.
Everything that has edge, metal, it’s not going to go on one stroke.
This again is just for playing, it’s not really sabrage.
If you’re, I don’t know on a deserted island and all you have is a bottle of champagne
and a nail clipper, how you going to open it?
Well I guess you could use the traditional way.
Anney.
Lauren.
You have professed to me that you are slightly terrified of opening bottles of sparkling
wine.
Do you want to do it right now?
On camera?
Ohhh.
You can get it.
You say that now but when you’ve lost an eye you’ll be singing a different tune.
You’re going to take the foil off.
There’s a wire cap, otherwise known as a muselet.
That is holding that cork in.
From all the pressure that might—from the six atmospheres of pressure that are inside
that bottle.
Yeah let’s open this right now.
Untwist the twisty bit.
Okay and it’s going to explode after I do this.
No.
When does the explosion happen?
You’re going to take the towel.
Get a good grip, I would recommend getting grip with your non-towel hand.
Kind of brace it, yeah?
Okay.
Alright and then just grab, grab the cork with your toweled hand.
Uh-huh.
And then just sort of wiggle.
Just kind of—[scream].
I could have been nice and poured it for her but—You could’ve.
Think about wines in dimensions.
You have two-two-dimensional wine.
Everything they have to offer is in front of you.
Then you add the dimension of depth.
And then there’s wines very rare but when you find them you will know them that you
add the dimension of time.
You are just not at the table anymore, you are elsewhere.
Those are what I call four-dimensional wines.
Each individual has his own portal to the fourth dimension through wine.
What does it for me won’t do it for you.
There are quite a few out there, you just have to find them.
So what have we learned here today?
Don’t be intimidated by champagne?
Or sparkling wine.
Try it with whatever you’d like, however you’d like—whenever you’d like.
Thanks for joining us.
Oh!
Mm-hm.
Yes.
There are people watching this.
There is more fried chicken.
Oh really?
And more sparkling wine?
There is more sparkling wine.
Interesting.