Champagne & Sparkling Wines

Sparkling wine is a wine with significant levels of carbon dioxide in it making it fizzy. more...

The carbon dioxide may result from natural fermentation, (either in a bottle, as with the méthode champenoise, or in a large tank designed to withstand the pressures involved, as in the Charmat process) or as a result of carbon dioxide injection.

The United States is a significant producer of sparkling wine: California in particular is famous for its rosé sparklers. Recently the United Kingdom has started producing Champagne-style wines. Sparkling wine is usually white or rosé but there are many examples of red sparkling wines such as Italian Brachetto and Australian sparkling Shiraz, some of high quality.

Some wines are made only lightly sparkling, such as vinho verde in Portugal — such wines are often called frizzante or pétillant, or simply semi-sparkling wines. Sparkling Wines as opposed to Semi-Sparkling wines must contain more than 2.5 atmospheres of Carbon Dioxide as at sea level and 20 °C.

Terminology

While this section is entitled "Sparkling Wine", strictly speaking it deals with effervescent wines, of which sparkling wine is one type. An effervescent wine is defined as a wine which releases carbon dioxide bubbles at its surface and the term includes the following wine types:

Sparkling wine, Vin mousseux. This is defined as a wine which, in a closed container at 20 °C, has an excess CO2 pressure greater than 3 bar, which must originate exclusively from the secondary fermentation of a still base wine after the addition of the liqueur. Fermentation can take place only in the bottle or in a closed tank. Sparkling wines must be aged in the producing winery for a certain minimum period starting from the onset of secondary fermentation (prise de mousse).

Read more at Wikipedia.org