Bubbles are the shit. If you don’t think you like sparkling wine, you need to sleep around some until someone does you the way you want, because bubbles are the answer! Bubbles will eat your lunch, tell you how good it was, and you will never be hungry again. Bubbles will make the roads safe for cyclists. The revolution will not be televised, but it will have bubbles in it. Bubbles will make your life look like it does in the magazines. Bubbles will make you weightless and bullet-proof. Bubbles will make your teeth tango like there’s Dancing With the Stars in your mouth and everyone’s invited. Whatever’s wrong with your life, there’s a bubble to fix that. Whatever’s right, there’s a bubble to celebrate it. Drink your bubbles! Drink them, I say!

If your paltry excuse as to why you don’t drink Champagne and other sparkling wines is that you don’t know anything about them, here’s another installment of IDK (I Don’t Know) Wine to the rescue. Cowboy up, people, because it’s December and the bubbles are coming for YOU!

Champagne is sparkling wine that only comes from the Champagne region of France. There are lots of other places they make sparkling wine, and in our attempt to be precise here at Wine Scamp Industries, I will refer to sparkling wine that does NOT come from Champagne as any number of things, but I will not call it champagne. That’s imprecise and just, well, mean.

Important things to remember about sparklers: (1) They match with any food, even eggs. Any difficult pairing of wine and food can be solved with bubbly. Heavier foods will want pink sparkling, and lighter foods will want white. (2) It’s impossible to be unhappy when drinking sparkling wine. Life is too full of hardship as it is, so drink bubbles frequently, not only on special occasions. (3) Not all bubbly is expensive. There is perfectly drinkable sparking wine out there for less than $20 per bottle. Look for “methode traditionelle” (traditional method) or “methode champenoise” on the label for an indicator of higher quality.

Warning: what follows is a semi-exhaustive discussion of sparkling wine, which may tell you more than you ever felt that you needed to know about the subject. You will come out the other end with enough knowledge to purchase a decent bottle of bubbly in the store or at a restaurant. Proceed with care.

Sparkling wine is just table wine with carbon dioxide trapped in it, that’s all. When the wine is released from the corked or capped bottle, the carbon dioxide escapes in gorgeous, intoxicating (not literally) bubbles. You can create sparkling wine by carbonating table wine or through the methode champenoise, the “Champagne Method.”

“Come quickly… I’m drinking stars!”Dom Perignon supposedly said this sometime toward the end of the 17th century, upon discovering that some of the bottles of his wines had lots of bubbles in them. He had little to no idea how he got those bubbles in the bottle (the first time was A Big Mistake), and no one was really able to reliably make sparkling wine every time until around 1829, when the methode champenoise was born.

Methode Champenoiseis the real shit, people: the stankiest of the stanky green, the emperor among kings, the real live boy of the marionettes. Basically, it goes like this: grape juice is fermented, and made into normal wine. Wine is poured into bottles, and then a small amount of sugar and yeast is added to the bottle, which is quickly capped. The yeast cells act like little Pacmans (Pacmen?) and eat up all the sugar that was put in the wine (nom nom nom). As a byproduct of consuming the sugar, the yeast produces carbon dioxide. Since the bottle is under pressure, the CO2 doesn’t escape, but instead dissolves in the wine itself. The yeast cells eat up all of the sugar, and then starve to death, sinking to the bottom of the bottle like little dead sea monkeys (except much smaller, and not shrimpy in any way, and now we call them the lees). The wine will now sparkle.

Ew, dead yeast cells, yuck. Well, not to worry: they’ve got a clever way to get this stuff out of the wine (because it makes the wine cloudy, not because it hurts anything) without letting all the bottles out. Inspired, really.

Riddle me this, Batman: So the key is to get all the lees into the neck of the bottle so they can be quickly removed. This is accomplished by the riddler. This guy is responsible for turning each of the bottles of bubbly one quarter turn every day for about 2 weeks until the bottles are all pointed down and all the lees are in the neck. A skilled riddler can turn 20,000 to 50,000 bottles per day. They do have machines for that now, but some sparkling wine houses still do it by hand, many of them in Champagne. The renowned Widow Clicquot is credited with inventing this technique, by the way.

Now it’s magic time: the bottles are all dipped, neck down, into liquid nitrogen or something else super-cold, and the necks are frozen. This traps the lees in a ice pellet of wine. Then they turn the bottles right side up and the bottle cap is removed. POW! The pressure in the bottle shoots the frozen pellet of wine out of the bottle, possibly across the room. The now clear wine is topped off with a dosage, which is a mix of wine and some sugar, depending on the style of bubbly being made, and the traditional fat cork is wired onto the bottle. Presto! Sparkles, anyone?

Now, if it doesn’t saymethode champenoise on the bottle, it didn’t go through all this hullaballoo. There are other ways to get the bubbles in the wine, including what’s called the charmat method, in which that second fermentation happens in a huge 500- to 1,500 gallon tank, and lots of wine is sparkled at once. Then it’s pumped off the lees and bottled. This is the cheaper bubbly that one might prefer to mix with juice or liquor, although sometimes it’s quite drinkable.

Where in the world? The most expensive sparkling wine you will find will come from Champagne, and be vintage. The step down from there is non-vintage sparkling, in which still wines from many different years will be blended to create a certain flavor profile, and then Ye Olde Methode Champenoise will ensue.

California has been making sparkling wine since the 60s, and there are many French houses with wineries in CA as well, like Domaine Chandon (Moet Chandon), Mumm Cuvee Napa (dur, Mumm), Scharrfenberger (Clicquot) and Roederer Estate (the Cristal people). Native California companies that are not owned by French houses include Schramsberg, J Wine Company and Iron Horse.

If it’s sparkly, French and not from the region of Champagne, it’s called Cremant. Other places to find great bubbly include Australia, where they even make sparkling Shiraz, and Italy, with their Prosecco (usually made by the charmat method), Spumante, and Franciacorta. Bellavista Franciacorta, a sparkling wine made in Italy via methode champenoise, is one of my favorites. Then there’s Spain, of course: you can find some great deals in cava, the Spanish term for their sparkling wine. Germany makes Sekt and South Africa makes Cap Classique.

Grape Ape: In Champagne, all bubbly is made from only three grapes (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir & Pinot Meunier), but in other regions, there are lots of grapes used to make sparkly wine. Cava is made from a blend of Macabeo, Parellada, Xarel·lo, Chardonnay, and Subirat. Sekt is usually made from Riesling, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris grapes.

A sparkling wine that calls itself Blanc de Blancs is 100% Chardonnay. 100% Pinot Noir is used to make Blanc de Noirs. A Rose is usually a blend of red and white wines, which is then bottled for its second fermentation.

Size matters. Smaller bubbles are better, and winespeak terms for talking about how small the bubbles in your wine include: perlage(as in, check out the minute perlage) and bead (as in, note the fine bead). The foam on top of the wine when it’s poured is called mousse, and we like those bubbles to be small, too. You’re going to want to drink your sparkler from a flute glass rather than those wide, flattish cups, because flutes allow less surface area for the wine to release its CO2, and allow the bubbles to last longer. A white wine glass will allow you to taste even more on a sparkling wine, as there will be more room to swirl and sniff in the larger glass.

Sugar, Sugar… Sweetness levels in Champagne go like this:

• Brut Natural or Brut Zéro (less than 3 grams of sugar per liter)
• Extra Brut (less than 6 grams of sugar per liter)
• Brut (less than 15 grams of sugar per liter)
• Extra Sec or Extra Dry (12 to 20 grams of sugar per liter)
• Sec (17 to 35 grams of sugar per liter)
• Demi-Sec (33 to 50 grams of sugar per liter)
• Doux (more than 50 grams of sugar per liter)

In my experience, Brut is plenty dry enough. If you are truly terrified of having a “champagne headache,” go with Extra Brut. Feel free to try Brut Zero if you can find it, but Brut suits nearly everyone’s palate just fine. Sec and Demi-Sec will be appropriate for desserts or super-spicy foods.

A few last notes: Drink your champagne ice-cold. If you don’t finish it all that day, and wish to drink some tomorrow, try buying this clever little bubble-saver: Champagne Bottle Saver Stopper It’s my favorite wine accessory.

Finally, our inspirational message of the day:

“I only drink Champagne when I’m happy, and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I am not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it—unless I’m thirsty.” – Lily Bollinger

Cheers, y’all!

And so it is that I begin a new Wine Scamp Series: I Don’t Know Wine, posts for those who read this site for pleasure, maybe a little knowledge, but really not to find out how the ’05 Cortons are drinking.

The concept here is to impart to you just enough wine knowledge to defend yourself in a wine shop or at a normal, public tasting. These skills won’t protect you against an all-out onslaught of wine geek-o-rama, but they should, given proper maintenance and some remaining short-term memory, allow you acquit yourself worthily if your group asks you to pick a wine for dinner.

I want to start with the grape varietal Pinot Noir because of its enshrinement by the movie Sideways and because it’s a flexible, reliable (if not inexpensive) wine choice.

Things to remember about Pinot Noir: supple, food-friendly, and complex. It will not make a big tear-your-face-off wine; it makes a sensual, sophisticated wine that is a pleasure to drink whether you detect all the complexity in it or not.

Smells you might find in a Pinot Noir glass include: fruits like plum, cherries or strawberries, flowers like violets or roses, spices like nutmeg or caraway, and herbs like oregano or tea.

Flavors you might taste in a mouthful of Pinot Noir include: berries again, earthiness like mushrooms, herbs like tea and rosemary again, and some oakiness like vanilla or smoke or toast. Sometimes older Pinot Noirs will have a cedar-like woodsy flavor from bottle aging.

To break it down even more simply, Pinot Noir should bring you red fruit, spice and earth. There’s also a silky texture that’s quite prized in good PN: perceptable viscosity that will feel literally silky on the tongue. Very sexy, and not common in other wines. Ordering a Pinot Noir on a date will give you the legitimate chance to say, “I like how it feels in my mouth.” What other wine gives you that?

On the subject of dating and Pinot Noir: this is not cheap stuff. You can find inexpensive PN out there, but it’s rarely very good. Why, you ask? Whence the twisting of the proverbial arm?

The thing is that Pinot Noir is a real bitch to grow and vinify. It’s whinier than a sleepy 3-year-old, and just as unpredictable. It might not like the soil. It might not like the weather. It has a crappy immune system, and suffers from every stupid little fungus, vine disease, or pest that you can think of. It’s genetically unstable, so it might just produce grapes that aren’t actually Pinot Noir. If you don’t pick it right on time, the grapes are likely to turn into raisins within days. Sometimes its fermentation speeds crazily out of control, causing the wine to “boil” over and out of its barrel. Wine producers the world over call Pinot Noir “the heartbreak grape.”

Anyhow, so it’s hard to make Pinot Noir wine, and thus it is expensive, because of all the extra work needed to produce relatively less saleable product. To my mind, this makes PN a great wine for dates, anniversaries, birthdays, any day when you can accept the excuse to treat yourself (and your loved one) to something fabulous.

Places they grow good Pinot Noir include: Burgundy, France, California (especially cooler areas like Carneros, Russian River, and Monterey County), Oregon (especially the Willamette Valley), and New Zealand. If you’re worried about region, think cold and rainy. Some of the few times that’s actually a desirable climate: Pinot Noir and mushrooms. So therefore cold regions of Germany, Italy, Australia, South America, etc., also have the potential to make drinkable PN.

An aside: that obnoxious wine freak in Sideways always dropped the “Noir” whenever he talked about Pinot Noir, which annoys me. I recognize that it’s done, frequently among very respectable wine people and vintners, for that matter. But if you’ll do me a favor, please call the grape by its full name. There are other Pinots: Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc, to be precise, and I think it’s needlessly confusing (and somewhat pretentious) to just say “Pinot” when referring to Pinot Noir. Besides, there’s a cadre of Pinot Grigio drinkers out there who will think you mean their quaff instead.

Eat poultry, lamb, pork and oily fish like salmon (my favorite pairing) or tuna with Pinot Noir.  It’s a really flexible food wine, with just enough tannin to play well with the fat and just enough acidity to get along with the spice.  Drinking Pinot Noir with a spicy meal may enhance the spiciness of the food, fair warning.

If you love the living hell out of Pinot Noir and wish to learn more about it by reading blogs, you are totally in luck. Wine Library TV has a great PN tasting episode here; he covers four different regions, and from some reasonably priced bottles. Watch the whole thing to see how sod, pig crap, and saurkraut can all be good things.

If you’ve reached the bottom of this post and suddenly, horrified, realized you remember nothing of what you just read, you can check out this other basic Pinot Noir information page at Appellation America. I love the little pictures they do of the grapes, I swear to gawd.

Pinotphile is an entire blog dedicated to finding the sweet spot: “where the quality and price of a wine intersect.” If you are into researching wines before you buy them, this is the site for you. Another encyclopedic blog, this one exclusively about Burgundy, is Burgundy Report.

For advanced reading, there’s a great blog written by winemaker Josh Hermsmeyer called Pinotblogger which can teach you loads about winemaking, Pinot Noir and the industry at large.

I could throw some brands at you, but I think I’d rather see if anyone made it to the end of this primer, and ask our studio audience to suggest a delicious Pinot Noir that they always enjoy. Anyone? Bueller?