Vintage Wine,It’s an L. Mawby Blanc de Blancs sparkling wine, and all i could find on the bottle was en tirage april 2007, and degorgement december 2009. it said it was made using the methode champenoise.
how do i find the vintage of this wine?
July 21st, 2011 · 2 Comments · Wine
Tags: blanc de blancs·degorgement·mawby·methode champenoise·sparkling wine·tirage·vintage wine
Liz // Jul 21, 2011 at 10:19 pm
En tirage is when additional grapes are added to the wine to create a 2nd fermentation. This is what gives the champagne the bubbles. So you would have had grapes picked probably in 2006 and used to make wine. In 2007 more grapes are picked and added to the wine changing it from wine to champagne or sparkling wine. In 2009 the champagne is degorged which is just when they remove the crud and sediment from the champagne. They hang the bottles upside down and all the crud sifts down into the neck of the bottle. They freeze the neck of the bottle and break it off and take the crud away and replace the neck. Methode champenoise just means the whole champagne process was made in the bottle. This is way better than making it in a big vat because in a big vat the wine loses lots of carbon (bubbles) so then they pump it full of CO2 to make up for the lost bubbles and it doesn’t taste as good.
zotdirector // Jul 21, 2011 at 10:19 pm
It may not have a vintage. Not all traditional method sparkling wines have a vintage which means they are blends of multiple vintages. This is likely as it has only been aged on the lees for about 3 years which would be a very short amount of time for a vintage sparkler.
In regards to the above answer, she is correct in most of her information however I’d like to clarify that a wine made by the traditional method (methode champanoise) is not inherently better than a sparkling wine made by the charmat (or tank) method. It largely depends on the style and grapes used. Many grapes do not benefit from aging on the lees (dead yeast cells) such as Italian Prosecco