How Champagne Works

Sure we can all agree that champagne is probably the greatest thing humans have or ever will invent, but how much do we understand how it's made?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Pierre Clark. There's Charles Jacques Bryant. Jerry. Oh nice, rolling.

(00:25):
Are we allowed to tell everyone your last name, Jerry?
We've done it before. Okay, what if they go try
to find her on Facebook and find out she doesn't
actually exist? It's all just a plant, fake Facebook page
that we've created. I know that she she is an
actual plant, right that crows in the corner feed me.
I am worried about this one. I'm just gonna go

(00:46):
ahead and say it. Oh, why you were worried about
the wine one, for the same reasons we didn't do
the wine I know, that's why. That's exactly why reason
exactly for those reasons. No one knows anything about champagne.
People spend life times learning this stuff. Yes, but we
have a show, and everyone knows that we don't spend
a lifetime learning about what we talk about that We

(01:08):
just do our research and we try to find the
most interesting stuff to explain how something works. I know,
but these with anytime it's something where someone is like
such a huge like where it's such a big thing
for so many people. Uh, I just know we're gonna
mess up pronunciations. Since French, so champagne, right, champagny. I

(01:34):
think that's how bugs Bunny always pronounced it. So you're
you're following a grand tradition. I didn't know he was
a drinker. Well, we are going to talk about Champagne's
a little light. Now do you like champagne? I love champagne,
love it. I don't. I mainly drink sparkling wine and
I don't really drink champagne itself. But buddy, this article

(01:57):
made me want to drink some champagne. Well you do
a little prosecco? WELLKVA, sure, I don't really discriminate, Okay,
I do. I don't drink any of it. You don't
like champagne, huh Nah, I don't like sparkling wine. It's
not just not it's not for chuck as they say,
love it, man um. I particularly love Shandon out in California.

(02:20):
I will say, one time at a party, though many
years ago, like in the nineties, I drank a lot
of just champagne, only champagne. This might be why you
don't like champagne. The only time in my life. No,
I actually, uh, I felt like a twelve year old girl.
That was wonderful. That's your problem. Champagne is no, no,
I mean silly and oh bubbly. It's fun like I

(02:43):
played hop scotch and stuff like that. Yeah, I know
that's terrible. Why would you ever want to do that again.
I don't mean I felt like a girl because I
was drinking champagne. That's what I thought. You meant. Well,
there's your problem. Champagne is not a girly drink. No,
I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who do
think that. Buddy, I will drink pink champagne. You don't
with your finger up at a bull fight. Oh gross. Yeah,

(03:05):
you gotta do something to wash the pain away. Uh. Yeah,
it's just not for me. Uh. And that gave me
a such a bad headache the next day. I didn't
go back to the well. I'll have you know, I
have someone. If someone wants to toast me, yeah, I
won't go. No, I'm not drinking that. Well, you were
probably drinking pretty sweet champagne, weren't you. Usually the higher

(03:28):
the sugar content and anything, that, the more um of
a hangover. You're gonna have Yeah, I don't know. Huh, well,
I love it good. You mean I've been to Shandon twice. Okay,
went on Shandon cruise once. Wow, big fans of Shandon.
Where is that? Hint? Hint? It's out in um Napa.
Napa Valley's famously attached to Mowett and Shandon. And then

(03:51):
Shandon went and said, Hey, we're gonna open up something
in California too. Got you just like cool? Because their
Tara war is it's heavy beat, it's good, good ter war.
And that's another thing too. This is what I'm nervous about.
I'm not nervous about getting it wrong. I'm nervous about
coming across like it's just a complete jackass sophisticate. You know,
I'm not at all. I just like Champagne. I'm I

(04:14):
know more now about Champagne doing this research for the
last couple of days than I ever had before. So
I definitely don't put myself out there. It's like a
um an expert in any way, shape or form. All right,
So that's called everybody put your emails away. Ten minutes
of caveats by Josh and Chuck. See that was French
and you pronounced it great, said Latin. All right, Well,

(04:39):
I guess if you don't know anything about Champagne, you
might have noticed that we already said both the word
champagne and sparkling wine. And um, I think most people
probably know this, but some people may not. Um, Champagne
is a region in France, and uh, technically you were
only supposed to say Champagne for sparkling wine if it
comes from that region. So all Champagne that's sparkling wine

(05:04):
is sparkling wine, but all sparkling wine is not Champagne.
That's right. That that I think that's simplified. Uh. In
Champagne itself, the region is about hour and a half
ninety minutes or so northeast of Paris or east. And
this UM article points out that it's one of the
least visited regions of France. But I bet I bet

(05:25):
they have their fair amount of enthusiasts that go, but
maybe just not as many. I don't know. It's the
south of France or other Burgundy maybe right, Well, Burgundy
comes to mind for sure. Apparently Sablie I didn't realize
that that was a wine growing region, did you, I
don't think I did, and the very famous mad dog,
the Nutrian so silly, so um so. Champagne is a region.

(05:51):
It's also a sparkling wine. But yeah, like you said,
you can't make sparkling wine outside of this this Champagne region,
and you can even make spar kling wine inside of
the Champagne region. And unless you're following a very strictly
controlled process within this particular region of France, you are
not allowed anywhere in the world to call your sparkling

(06:14):
wine Champagne. It's what's what's called an Appalachian applechian. Now
that's a mountain range. It's what's called a umpan trail
Appellatian de origine control or ao C is what we're
gonna call it. But it's basically the same thing with

(06:36):
um bourbon here in the United States, right where you
have to follow specific rules and you have to make
it within a specific region. And the whole point is
it's you don't want just any schmo making something that's
similar to your product but not nearly as good, that's
not going through anywhere near the painstaking amount of process

(06:57):
um and labor that you're doing, and still call it
this same thing you're calling it. You don't want to
do that. Yeah, so you have to sure restrict it,
especially the French. You know that they're not gonna be
all willy nilly about that. That's their region. Yeah, apparently
there's something like acres, which I don't think is a lot.
And what are those cities. The two main cities are

(07:19):
Rim and Epernay. But uh, we even have a thing
in here that says if you say Rim, then you're
an American city slicker. If you say m, I've seen
plenty of wrongs, is what they say in the in
that help me out article that we got. I think
you just earned some fans in France with that one. Well,

(07:42):
by any other name, it is still Champagne. And those
are the cities. And there are but three grapes that
you can use to make champagne. You can't just say,
oh that that muscadine looks nice. They do here in Georgia.
Just throw it in a bottle in fer minute, Pete,
put this in your mouth to spit it up. In
the bottom. There are three grapes and they are the

(08:05):
peanut and noir grape, the Chardonnay grape, and um, how
do you pronounce that last one peanut, Okay, which is
another dark grape or red grape or black grape I
think is what they call it. Yeah, if you ever
talked to a real wine person, you don't know the lingo,
You're gonna be confused quick when they say things like
black grapes, right, I mean, like, what the heck is

(08:25):
a black grape? But if you dig into it, you
start to find that there's a lot of overlapping words.
There's a lot of multiple terms that describe the same thing. Yeah,
black grape, red grape, same thing. Yeah, you know, purple grape.
Why not if you say that, you're gonna get laughed
out of nava, right, I like the purple grapes. Concorde
I think is what they're calling But chardon ay is

(08:46):
um of those three is the only all white grape.
So um. And you know a lot of people might
not know this. It's the same with uh still wine.
But you know inside that black skin is white pulp. Yeah,
depending on when you pick the grape, So if you
pick it early, before it has a chance to turn reddish,

(09:08):
you can conceivably squeeze clear or white grape juice from
red or black grapes. That's right, and that's what's happening
in the case of Champagne. Yeah, because if you look
at it, you're like, well, I mean, this is this
is clear? How is this made from red grapes? Well,
as we'll see later on, you have domperiren You wanted
to think we shoul well, we should go ahead and

(09:29):
talk about that. I guess well, let's talk about Champagne
a little bit for first, and then we'll get to
dom Perignon. So the region itself is pretty ancient UM.
The first vineyards in Champagne were planted by the Romans,
who also mine chalk in the area, and there's extensive
chalk quarries that are underground that have served as Champagne

(09:49):
sellers for generations. So the place has been making wine.
The region has been making wine for millennia UM. But
it wasn't until about the sixteen seventeen hundreds when they
really kind of took what was a naturally occurring problem,
which was carbonation happening in their wine, and went to

(10:12):
town with it. They said, if you can't beat them,
join them. So they took this thing that was viewed
as a flaw in their wine carbonation sparkling wine, and
they figured out how to make it even more so
and made it its own thing. Yeah, and that um
in that region, that chalk is very key to uh
what you end up getting because it's very reflective because

(10:35):
it's white. It is so it reflects the sunlight from
the ground back up to the leaves. Right. Yeah, it's
a very unique region, like and apparently it's uh like,
if you stumbled upon that region today in our advanced
wine making techniques and sparkling wine techniques, you probably wouldn't say, hey,
this is a great place to have a vineyard, right
you go, sacral soil is terrible. Uh, well you might,

(10:59):
um because it's I think it's a little tougher to
grow like it. It's a very fine line between getting
a successful uh harvest in that region, which it makes
it I think very special. Yeah, it does. Like um
apparently they have cold, short, wet growing seasons and apparently

(11:19):
that's where the original um sparkling wine and champagne came from.
It was a freak of natural um, natural climate and
natural conditions growing conditions, right because as we'll see a
second um, fermentation is what creates the carbonation and that
would happen naturally because they would harvest the wine, make wine,

(11:44):
store it, and then it would get um cold all
of a sudden, like early before the fermentation process was done,
so fermentation would basically stop. But then there'll be a
lot of sugar and yeasts left in their wine that
hadn't fermented when they started it. So when um spring
came around again and the things started to warm up,
a second fermentation process started, and that's really what kicked

(12:06):
off the bubbles. But for a long time, the people
in in Um Champagne and the Champagne region, we're tearing
their hair out because they didn't want this. It was
a sign that their wine was terrible, poorly made. And
like I said, it wasn't until Don Perignon came along
Um who didn't like it himself. Uh, but was one
of the people who created a lot of the techniques

(12:27):
that helped established Champagne as the sparkling wine capital of
the world. So he didn't care for it, No, he didn't,
he didn't, Um he could. He called it mad wine,
I think is what he called. Yeah. He was a
Benedictine monk in the area, and and and he was
the seller master, which is um. If you are a

(12:47):
seller master, you are in charge as far as champagne
goes with basically making the master blend of the champagne, yes,
the covey and when you put it together the assemblange.
So Don Perignon was the guy in charge of that
for this abbey. He was a monk. His name was
Pierre Parignon. Dom is like it denotes your a monk,

(13:10):
Benedictine monk and um. He was one of the ones
who established a lot of the groundwork for creating sparkling
want creating champagne very interesting like um up to that
point you would have um sparkling wines in your cellar.
But they were using like wood and hemp to like

(13:32):
stop these bottles. Well, that didn't work all that Well,
bottles were very frequently explode, and sellers were very dangerous
places to be because one one of these stoppers came out,
it shoot across the room, hit another bottle, and that
bottle stop would come out and all of a sudden
you have a chain reaction of these wooden stoppers like
flying at your head. Yeah, three stooges or something. Right,

(13:53):
So um, Don Perignon came up with the idea of
using cork stoppers in thicker English type bottles which could
withstand the pressure. Um holding him down with little rope muzzles,
now we use foil and wire. What's that called a muzzle? Yeah, muzzle?
There's a French word for it, but I can't find

(14:13):
it my not what's something like that? So he came
up with a bunch of stuff. He also was the
first one to start blending wines from the region, and
as we'll talk about in a few Um, that's the
basis of champagne. It's a blend champagne. Champagne is a
blend of wine. That's right. Should we take a break
like ourselves? Yeah, I'm getting excited. Don't you want some champagne? Really? No?

(15:06):
I mean if you opened a bottle of champagne in here,
I would. I would drink a flute because, uh, hey,
it's rude when you're offered something to turn your nose
about it unless you're under twenty one and b it
might help me to relax a little bit about it,
really would about this thing? You'd feel great? Um, should
we talk a little bit about uh the champagne method? Yes,

(15:30):
what the French call method champagne was okay, method champagne.
So let's see if the closer stuff them. Um. This
is one reason why champagne is a bit more expensive,
or can be a bit more expensive. Um. It's because

(15:51):
there's there's a lot of processes involved, and not like
there's not with still wine, but champagne kind of takes
it a step further. It's time consuming, and it there
are people's hands and feet involved a lot of times. Yeah.
And like you said, it's it is. It starts with
making wine. Actually it starts even further back then. It

(16:12):
starts with growing, that's right. Uh. But fermentation, you know,
all wines are for a minute, of course, and that's
the Um. That's when sugar breaks down from the grape
juice turns it into alcohol, delicious delicious alcohol, and that
is called wine. Um. And just like regular wine, still wine,
like you said, I guess we should call it regular wine,

(16:34):
just still wine. Still. Um. They start, they start with
those grapes. Uh. And in the case of champagne, they
are pressed with human feet, which still happens. And I
can't help but think of that video still after all
these years, that poor lady uh and uh Chateau Lan,

(16:58):
right was that? And George? Yeah, I don't think I
knew that it was Georgia, like Morning show Atlanta Morning,
So I think it was like Fox Live or something
like that. I just I can still hear it. I
haven't seen it in years. But if you don't know
what we're talking about, there was a one of the
early viral videos of this uh of this woman on
location doing a story about wine in Georgia, and she

(17:20):
was stomping on the wine and UH on a platform
for some reason, and she fell out of the barrel
and and hurt herself. But it sounded like she was
in very much heavy distress, like new dimensions of pain. Yea.
Or the sounds that the woman made. I've never heard
anything like it before or since. Um, yeah, I'm very

(17:43):
sure sure she was Okay. Yeah, that's why I don't
mind talking about it now. It's not like she was,
you know, maimed for life or anything like that. I
was thinking, I love Lucy too. Oh yeah, very famous
grape stompings. Yeah, you know, or she gets in like
a grape throwing fight with the lady Lucy. She was
always getting into trouble. One I was shot in the
studio where they film that show one time in California,

(18:05):
right there in Hollywood. Yeah, it's kind of neat. Yeah.
One of the groups just came over. He was like,
you know, this is the I love Lucy studio. I
smelled the grapes. Uh, all right, so where were we? Um?
Feet feet? Yeah? Which is this wonderful old world technique
that I didn't know this. I didn't know that you
have to do that for champagne. Is it just because

(18:25):
it's so delicate? Yeah, I think that's part of it.
But also they kind of shy away from machinery and
the method champagne was really yes, a right, it's a
it's a traditional method. Even though if you look back
at the history of whine making, champagne is very relatively new,
Like we're talking sixteen sev hundreds, right, They've been making

(18:46):
wine for many thousands of years, so this is a
fairly new invention, but it was still invented at a
time where you mainly used human labor for for things
like this. So yeah, they've I've tended to preserve that
as much as possible. All Right, Well, you've got your juice,
your white juice, and um, well, they put it in

(19:10):
stainless steel vats unless you're super old world. I guess,
uh some people do use wood still, but yeah, that
you're allowed to use for the for the initial fermentation
where you're like you're just making the basic wine. You
can use thing. Yeah, So there it sits for a
long time, ferments becomes still wine and uh, like we said,
this is just the first fermentation, and then you move

(19:32):
on to the blending, which is where that all important
seller master comes in. Right, So if you're a seller
master for a champagne house, you are unless you're very
specific type of champagne house where you actually make champagne
from growing the grapes to the finished product. Um, you
were probably going around the Champagne region trying different champagne's,

(19:53):
are trying different wines still wines, and you're coming up
within your head a blend of all these different wines.
And that blend, as we said before, is called the
couve a. And the couve a is it's just that
it's a blend of wine and it has mainly three
different factors involved that you have to take any consideration
if you're the seller master. Right, if it's a vintage

(20:17):
couve a vintage blend of wines. Then that means it's
using grapes that we're all grown in the same year,
the same growing season. Yeah, and I imagine these seller masters,
I mean he said they're tasting things. I'm sure they are,
but I imagine these seller masters in Champagne also kind
of know exactly where they're gonna go for most of
these sure, and they also would know like, well, if

(20:37):
you guys have two thousand seven vintage wine that was
a great year, or um that year was kind of rough,
it might take a at a neat edge to it
some other two thousand nine grapes I'm using too, Right,
these are what these people are walking around within their heads,
that kind of that level of information. So they're putting
it all together. They come up with these clever little blends,

(20:59):
and each blend to cue a. Again, one of the
things they can take into account is the vintage the years. Yeah,
like you said that, if it's a vintage wine, it's
just from the one year growing season. If it's non vintage,
that means you can you're combining various years, right, And
typically vintage wines I think tend to be more expensive
I have. I get the impression that they tend to

(21:20):
be a little more revered. They definitely take longer to mature. Yeah,
the fermentation process is longer than the non vintage. And
you'll see this on the label. It'll say vintage, else
it will say envy a lot of times. Um. The
two other things for a seller master to take into
account are um, the varietals and the crew. Right yeah,

(21:45):
c R you So crew is c R E W
or the c R U E with an umla over
the rock. Yes. Um, the crew is it's a vineyard basically,
So you can have grapes all from vineyard from different
years and different ritals um, and that'd still be what's
called a single crew. Or you could mix different crews,

(22:07):
different vineyards grapes um to to create a couve. Yeah.
And the grand crew you might have seen that before
on a bottle. Um. That's a If you get the
grand crew status, then you're really cooking with gases. My
dad used to say, uh. In the mid nineteen eighties, Um, well,
initially there were only twelve villages that had that grand

(22:27):
crew status, and then in h they expanded at the
seventeen UM because five more villages and I'm not going
to try and pronounce all those were added to the list.
And um it says here that less than nine percent,
it's incredibly low. Of all the vineyard land in Champagne
has grand crew rating, right, So again thou acres only

(22:50):
nine percent of that is the top rated. Basically, it's
saying this land is the primo land for growing Champagne grapes.
So if you get apes that are grown there by
these people who really know what they're doing, it's you're
gonna pay through the nose for it. So a grand
crew um Champagne is going to be pretty expensive, but

(23:11):
there's a there's a reason behind it. It's not just
marketing now, and varietals too. Like you said, there's three grapes, right,
just those three, and depending on how you put them together,
you can come up with a type of cuve as well. Right,
So blanc to blanc means white of whites. That's made
just with Chardonnay grapes. Blanc noir is made with um

(23:34):
just one of the other black grapes, either the Peanot
monier or the Pinot noir. That's right, um. But all
those three things are factored together to create a specific
cuve A well, and then you've got your rose that
you mentioned earlier, your pink wine or is My friend
Stacy calls it pink crack. It's good stuff. She gets
ahold of that stuff. Watch out, yeah, um, and that

(23:57):
is uh well, they there's a couple of ways you
can do the Um. Sometimes you leave some of the
skin for a little bit of time, but these days,
more or less you're gonna be adding a little bit
of the red wine, um peanut noir red wine to
the gouvey. So I think there's still wine that's different.
If you leave the grapes on a little bit, you're

(24:18):
gonna have pink champagne. If you actually add red wine afterwards,
you're gonna have rose champagne. What's the difference? Says here,
Rose is also known as pink champagne. I've seen I know,
this is what I'm saying. So it gets confusing because
you definitely get different things from different sources. But I
have seen in multiple places that when you add red wine,
that's rose, and that keeping the grapes in his pink

(24:40):
champagne interesting. But um, apparently there's something like three million
bottles of red wine or set aside every year just
to make rose champagne. What a waste, man, I'm really
I'm changing your mind about champagne. Uh No, you're not
going to Emily likes rose rose champagne. No, I mean

(25:02):
she'll have that, but just still rose. There's also rose
with gas that's not champagne. It's just a little gassie.
It's it's kind of different stuff. Yeah, I love it. Yeah,
And it's not like I discriminate against wines either, but um,
I'm I'm definitely prefer champagne. Are sparkling wines over still wine,

(25:23):
like any day of the week. Yeah, yeah, where the
opposite in more ways than one. Uh are we at
the Riddler yet? Because this is my favorite part. Uh.
So we've got the blend and once you once you
blend it, you have to put it in bottles. And
one of the things chuck about the AO C this
uh method champagne wise, is once you put in that bottle,

(25:47):
it stays in there until the person who buys it
and drinks it takes it out. You have to keep
it in the same bottle, all right, Yeah, why would
you switch bottle? That'd be weird. Anyway. Um, well, you
you used to want to to cannon to get sentiment out. Um,
you might just put it in one bottle to reuse
the bottles. Who knows, but you you. Once you put

(26:08):
in the bottle, it's got to stay in the bottle.
And after that initial que is blended, they put it
in the bottle and they let it sit and depending
on what kind um, what kind of is. If it's
non vintage, it's gonna sit there for twelve more months
for a total of a minimum of fifteen. If it's vintage,
it's gonna sit there for another three years and just

(26:30):
age in the bottle. That's right. And so at this
point you're gonna start you want the bubbles, So you're
gonna start that second fermentation process by adding sugar and yeast.
Then you drop the temperature on your cooler, uh to
about fifty to sixty, which is cooler than the initial
fermentation process. And um, well you can also do this

(26:54):
in the tank. Like they're different methods, but right, that's
the that's called the shar Met method. The tanks. Yeah,
but I think the old world method is well Jesus,
you can't use tanks. You gotta use bottles. And don't
you think old world is the right term. That's old ish.
I'll just stay old. But I think old world means
something very specific with wine. Oh yeah, I can see that.

(27:16):
I think it means non Californian. See, this is where
we get in trouble. Uh. So this is a very
slow fermentation process, the second one, and um, the yeast
is is living and dying and those cells are breaking apart,
and it's this really interesting processes going on inside that bottle. Yeah,

(27:37):
it's eating up all that sugar that you added and
what's called the liquor to tarage, right, and when you
add that in and you add the yeast in the yeaster,
Like this is great. We're gonna live here for generations
eons by our time table. Yeah, like, look at all
this delicious sugar that we can eat. And they eat
it and eat it and they eat all of the
sugar and this second fermentation process and what we're doing

(28:00):
or now is recreating those that natural fluke of a
condition where it would get cold and then warm up
again and that second fermentation process would start to make
the CEO. Two same things happening here, but this is
a very controlled version of that. So the use is
eating it, and like you said, they're dying and breaking open.
And so when you're drinking champagne, part of what you're

(28:22):
drinking are the the internal remnants of yeast cells that
have spilled their contents into the champagne. That's why I
don't drink it. But they also leave behind some stuff
you don't want to drink, which are the cell structures,
and that creates what's called sentiment. It's basically leftover cellular
structure of yeast cells, and you want to get that out. Yeah,

(28:44):
and that's through a process called riddling. And I mentioned
the riddler is my favorite person in this process. It's
a pretty thankless job to be the riddler, is it,
I think? So I'll bet you get a lot of
free champagne. Well, sure, that's thanks, Yeah, but it's it's
very solitary and redundant, repetitive. Uh So this riddler. They

(29:09):
the wine at this point is stored upside down at
a seventy five degree angle, and that is allowing all
this all these dead yeat cells to collect down near
the neck um. They by hand go in every day
and turn these bottles one eighth the baturn twenty thousand,

(29:30):
thirty thoddles day. They do this by hand and they're
just rotating these Uh, it's I can't imagine doing this.
I mean, that's your life's work. You've got to really
be dedicated to your craft to be a riddler. And
it takes about four to six weeks of this this

(29:51):
um dedicated attention. Very fast process though, if you've ever
seen a riddler at work, you know, but they have
to remember that they turn the bottle, so they a
little chalk mark on each one times in a day. Man,
it's so they they they're turning the bottle and like
you said, it's turned up in an angle. And the
whole point of this is that you're slowly because you

(30:12):
don't want to disturb the champagne. It's still it's still maturing, right, um.
But this is towards the end of that maturation phase,
either that twelve month or that thirty six month minimum.
And as you're turning it, what you're doing is kind
of shaking the bottle a little bit too, and you're
just trying to get the yeast cells what's left of them,
to move towards the neck, right, And the whole point

(30:34):
is this is called maturing on the leaves, and the
leaves I think are what the sediment is called, possibly
or else what the Yeah, I think that's what it is.
I think. And as it goes down and accumulates at
the towards the front of the neck, you now have
one of the last steps called gourge mont or disgorgement. Yes,

(30:55):
and what you have is it's just a thing of sediment.
Is it's accumulated at the neck and you put it
in an ice bath. It's really amazing how they do this. Yeah.
And then what they used to have to do is
they would pop open a bottle, decant it, filter it,
and um they would uh pour it back, so it's filtered.

(31:15):
Because one of the things you'll note about champagne is
it's very clear and it undergoes several different clarification steps.
But that would have been one of them. This is
the same thing, but this one's way cooler. They put
the neck in an ice bath, a salt ice bath,
so you know it's really cold because you know, salt
lowers the freezing point of ice water. Yeah, and at
this point that's going to create a little yeast plug.

(31:39):
So up there toward the neck and what they have
to do then is get that plug out of there
while maintaining the integrity of the rest of the wine
that's inside. Yeah, like you're gonna lose some champagne. It's
been a perfect procedure. Well yeah, I mean that's part
of the process, is to lose some because then they
add stuff back in, right, which we'll get to. But um,

(32:01):
so they remove while it says in here the cork.
But these days, I think that initial one is a
cap like a bottle cap, bottle cap, that old world
bottle cap. And you know, go on YouTube and look
at a riddler at work and and just check this out.
It's it's pretty neat, Like it's a fast process as well. Um,

(32:21):
did you see the how it's made on that They
pop it out and a surprisingly small amount comes out,
like I thought it would just they'd be like, oh god,
oh jeez, like it could be the most stressful job
in the world. But you know, enough comes out. It's
foaming over but um, it's not like a just a
tremendous amount, and then they smell it to make sure
it's not The dude I saw put his thumb over

(32:43):
it real quick, so like it wasn't foaming over at all.
Maybe that's what I saw, or maybe that's what he
was doing. I didn't catch it. Yeah, pretty interesting though.
So the riddlers is doing this by hand, uh, because
there's you know, carbon dioxide gas in there at this
point and it forces that plug out and like you said,
lose just a little bit. Then you add, uh, maybe

(33:04):
a little brandy, little sugar, a little white wine back
in to get the you know, the proper amount of
liquid inside the bottle. Right, that's called the dosage or
the liquor dosage. Don't call it dosage, no, because I
did in my head for like half of this research. Yeah,
and then you know, oh that's dosage. Well that's when
it helps to watch videos. Um. And then they put

(33:27):
that final cork in place, is one that's going to
stay in there until you un cork it, and they
tighten it down with that wire. As are not so
great article points out, you can make into a little
chair afterwards. That's what people do, right. Uh. And you
know you have to have that thing on there because
it's like there's a lot of pressure still building up

(33:49):
in that thing, right. Um. And they've actually, thanks to
a eighteenth century French pharmacist named Antoine Baumy. He came
up with a device to measure the sugar content and wine.
So now they know exactly how much sugar to put
into the champagne to raise the pressure back up. If

(34:09):
you want about five or six atmospheres of pressure or
about I think sixty to seventy square or pounds per
square inch of pressure in a bottle of wine. How
much fifties seventy I think, or fifty to ninety, but
it's definitely five or six atmospheres of pressure average, Okay,

(34:31):
so um, they know how much of that liqueur de
dosage to put in, how much sugar to put back
in to raise the the atmosphere back up. And the
other reason you want to do that to chuck is
when you're adding that that sugar back in that yeast state,
all the sugar that was in there, and turn it
into carbon dioxide that you put in for the second fermentation.

(34:53):
And when they did, they made this champagne as dry
as a bone. An extra brute the amount of shure,
it's actually more than that. It's brute natural well, I
call it a double X brute. It's crazy dry. I've
never had it, but I can only imagine how Yeah,
there's there's one where they don't put in any dossage.

(35:15):
They don't add any sugar afterwards, so it's bone dry
and that's just for people who really prefer that, because
that's Yes, apparently the extra brute is the least popular. Yeah,
I can imagine, And I think I think the best
selling is sort of that brute, which is sort of
in the middle of dry and sweet or sec or

(35:35):
demi sec, and then I think the last one is
due d o u x is the sweetest of all
non brute. Yeah, but brute is drier than extra dry,
which is kind of surprising. But if you ever, it's
pretty easy to pick up. If you just read it
once or twice, you're like, okay, that's that's how it's denoted.
But all that is based on how much dosage you

(35:58):
put in after you just just uh and gore disgorge
the yeast plug gorge. Uh one of my least favorite words.
By the way, that's a bad one. Um. Is this
true about Madame Clique from what I saw? Yeah, Um,
she was an entrepreneur famously. In fact, she's called Widow
cliquoh at times she's widowed at a very young age, sadly,

(36:22):
and took over her husband's wine business and supposedly invented
that disgorging process herself, which is uh. I mean, it's
kind of simple when you look at it, but I
wouldn't have thought to do it. No again, I mean
they were decanning them back then, filtering it out. So
and this was I think eighteen thirteen when the widow
clicko came up with it. And about then is when

(36:46):
Champagne the drink took off, at least in France and
started to spread very quickly around the world. Yeah, Napoleon
had a lot to do with that, right, I think
Napoleon did. By World War One, Winston Churchill reminded everyone,
we're not five need to save just France, boys, We're
fighting to save Champagne. Um, should we take another break?

(37:08):
I think, all right, we're gonna talk a little bit
about what the fuss is with this stuff after this?

(37:43):
All right, So Josh the master winemaker, the seller master
has uh walked through the process. What a great job
that would be. Yeah, I have a you know, my
friend Robbie is a kind of a rock star winemaker
and nappa. Yeah, it's pretty be great. He's he's like
he's living a good life. In fact, he got in

(38:04):
touch at one point because he wanted to start a
wine podcast. Uh. And we just sort of email back
and forth, and it just never like he just wanted
advice and stuff, not like he wanted to start one
with me, because that would be, Um, what are those
podcasts called when like someone's super expert and then you
got a big dummy. Uh uh I can't think of

(38:28):
any That's what that would have been. Man, there was
like that was just ripe for jokes. I would have
been the Thomas Satan Church to his Uh, Paul, oh
you're talking about sideways. I thought you were talking about
wings for a second. I would have been like, when
are we gonna drink? It? Tastes good to me, yeah,
and Robbie'd be spitting it out. Um. I don't think

(38:49):
you should that. He's very talented and you know does
quite well like making wine for other people. And he
also has his own label uh Lingevan and Pierce and
Meyer Wines plug plug uh. And when he got to
his house and stay with him in his awesome guest house,
the top of how Mountain. Huh, you get drunk on

(39:12):
like amazing expensive wine. So it's awesome that he opens
like you're drinking that Peria. I'm sorry, this is Pellegrina.
Oh excuse me, that's the Italian version of Peria. It is.
It's like the like spumrsecco. What's spumanti? Spumante is Italian?
Is its sparkling? Right? Yeah? I guess Prosecco's Italian as well.

(39:35):
I just remember that from when I was a kid,
Martini and ROSSIASI it's amazing, and that's drilled in my
brain Martini and Rossie, which probably is like crap sparkling wine,
isn't it. I don't know that it's good. I don't know.
I mean I think it's I think that's probably what

(39:56):
gave you your headache, that and all the low and rawl. Yeah,
is that still around? I don't know. And though Bob
and Doug drank from now, they drank some sort of
was it made up? No? They drank Molson? Well is
it with bats? I mean it was probably some Canadian beer.

(40:18):
We're gonna get killed over this, are sorry? Everybody? All right?
So let's move on then to what makes champagne so
so expensive and so fancy, like it has this um,
there's this notion you know that you drink it for
celebrations or that you're like sort of the upper crust
of society if you're drinking champagne. Well, supposedly there is

(40:40):
an actual reason why champagne is associated with toasting the
big events in life. Because for a thousand years, from
about the ninth century to the nineteenth century, they had
no champagne. The kings of France were coronated in champagne,
so it was like a celebration town for the whole country.
So toasting with even before they were sparkling wines, um,

(41:04):
toasting with champagne wine was traditional. So have you ever
been in a restaurant and like gotten good news and said, waiter,
champagne song. Has anyone ever done that? Uh? Besides in movies,
I don't know. Maybe it's funny like I was watching, Uh,

(41:26):
I was watching McConaughey act and it was I was
watching a movie on somebody else's seat back on a flight,
so I wasn't hearing it, so I was really just
watching the movie, right, And um, I was like, I
imagine if you were in real life around Matthew McConaughey,
like in a room with one of his characters, and

(41:49):
just how off putting in bizarre that experience would be,
you know, because he's just said he just choose the
scenery and everything he does. It's just so big. He's
that in real life, if you were interacting with that character,
you'd be like, calm down, man, you're freaking me out. Well,
Watterson was pretty chill. Yeah, yeah, okay, but everybody since

(42:10):
Waterson pretty much all right, boy, that's an interesting thing
to think on a plane. Just hit me, hit me
on the plane. I think if I was in a
restaurant and something great happened, I would say, waiter another
Gin and tonic and they would go huh. They probably
say you got it. Actually, I started calling those lime
salads at my house. Nice. You're on the gin and

(42:32):
tonic now, yeah. That usually happens around around April. Oh yeah,
April two, you know, September. I going for you. Um
gin and bitter lemon is a nice combo. Yeah yeah.
And I thought bitter lemon was just like a fever
tree drink that they make them. They make a good one,
but everybody from like Canada dry to whoever else makes

(42:55):
better lemon as well. So just give yourself a good
bitter lemon and some ginn of it. Um, we should
do it. We'll definitely do a podcast on gin at
some point. Very interesting. Uh, Liquor Complex, can be sure.

(43:17):
I got another one for you with that better lemon.
If you want to get really fancy, get some St.
George terror ter War. Yeah, I'm not a fan. You
had the dry Rye? No you did? You? You tried
the tar war one? Yeah, some one that tastes like feet, No,
that's the dry rye. I've tried all three of those St.
George's and I don't like any of them. I'm a

(43:40):
London dry guy. Well, anyway, you'll still like it with
bitter lemon, all right, everyone else you would like the
Tara War St. George with bitter lemon, everyone else on
the planet. Because all right, and I figured out what
was up with the dry rye. You're absolutely right. You
can't make a martini out of that stuff and kill you.

(44:00):
It's not made for it. It's made for things like
the Gronies. It makes a killer NEGRONI. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah,
I'm a I stick to my lime salad. You know. Okay,
you know me and my basic names. But try the
bitter lemon sometime with gin. Okay, your your dry line,
it's fine, all right, Okay, but with with the bitter
limbon instead of tonic. Okay, I'll give it a dry

(44:20):
And if I don't like it, then I'm just weird
because everyone else in the world loves it. I'm not
saying that. You said that. Uh, all right, we're in
the world worry. So we were talking about, um, what
makes champagne so fancy? Yeah? Uh, well, like we said earlier,
it's um. You know, it's a very small region comparatively speaking. Uh,

(44:42):
so that will lend to the price. And all these
hand processes that they still might use or foot processes
it's a big one is gonna make it more expensive.
And anytime the price is being driven up, uh, it's
gonna have that sort of air of sophistication. Uh. And then,
of course when the hip hop scene started kind of

(45:03):
uh using that in lyrics and popping Champagne on the
yacht and the videos I'm on a boat. What was that?
Was the stur life short? Okay with oh I think
I remember that, I don't remember who it was, but
I don't think it was got. It was one of
those Andy Sandberg shorts. Not Little Wayne. Who's the other

(45:24):
little little bow Wow? No, he's just bow Wow now
really yeah, grows up man, the guy who was like, yeah, yeah,
that guy. I have no idea you do, Little John?
Yes John? Yeah, uh yeah, I'm not. But yes, it

(45:45):
was an Andy Sandberg short. Yeah I do. I think
I do remember that. But that definitely, um kind of
solidified the sort of you know status. Yeah, sure, that's
exactly the word I would I would suggested, but it
definitely didn't hurt. No, especially in the States here and

(46:06):
with a whole new generation of people, right, like the
younger generation. It's like champagne, right, but then all of
a sudden, Little John's like, I got some champagne for real.
I'm sure the champagne industry was like, seriously, keep doing it. Sure.
So the thing though, is there's um actual reason behind

(46:30):
champagne being more expensive than your typical wine. But that
doesn't mean that all champagne or all all sparkling wines
are like out of your price range. No, I mean
you can get some cheap sparkling wine that'll goodche No, No,
that's not true. Like you can get Chandon wines fors

(46:51):
and it's not going to give you a headache. I'm
talking about the six dollar good stuff. Yeah, but twenty bucks.
I mean, if you're gonna spring for a decent bottle
of wine if it's New Year's Eve, why not, That's
what I'll toast it. Uh. Alright, So twenty bucks will
get you a good bottle of decent champagne, is what

(47:13):
you're saying, Yes, not bad. Or you can spend hundreds
of dollars, thousands, tens of thousands at auction, just like wine,
if you want some super rare collectible wine apparently a
quarter of a million dollars for a bottle at the
Moscow Ritz Carlton, And that's not even something you drink,

(47:33):
right if you're a jackass. Sure, but I mean, if
your you have to be a jackass to spend a
quarter of a million dollars on a bottle of champagne anyway,
you better drink it, frankly. But champagne you don't keep right,
you can, you can, and so there's a lot of
misunderstanding about it. Right, So a lot of people think
that you keep champagne standing up, you do for about

(47:54):
the first month. But if you're keeping in a seller,
you want to keep it on its side. Like any
bottle of wine, you want the the wine touching the cork.
But the reason that champagne actually ages in the bottle.
It's just like wine that that cork. It's in there
pretty good, but it's not air tight. There's a minimal
amount of gas exchange going on, so that the wine,
the champagne, continues to mature over the course of ten

(48:17):
twenty thirty years if you keep it. If you keep it,
the key to champagne, apparently storing it is you want
to avoid temperature fluctuations. You want to keep it at
about the same temperature for the whole time you have
its story. To bury it in your backyards, its side
deep and leave it there. Yeah uh, and it will.
You will find that all the worms drank it. You'll

(48:38):
be like worms. Bury it under the frost line, and
you want to keep it out of the sunlight too
well underground. But apparently as the ages, I've never had
old champagne, but as the ages, its taste starts to
mellow um and it takes on dried fruit nutty, toasty
honey notes are like the main notes that it hits. Yeah,
we had a bottle of dom peregnon that awful when

(49:00):
we opened it, but we didn't. It was every improper
thing you could do, we did, including moving it in
a hot truck f l A to Atlanta, a hot
moving truck. I don't know. I mean, we just don't
drink it much, so we just had it and we
got it as a gift. If that happens, you just
just put some fresh squeeze orange juice in there. It's fine, boom,

(49:20):
then you've got a mimosa. I'll have a mimosa occasionally.
That's champagne, I know, in orange juice. Yeah, that's the
key with the orange juice. Well, I mean I enjoy
mimosa more than just regular champagne. It's like a whole.
It's definitely one of those things that's greater than the
sum of its parts. Yeah, you know, I don't think
I ever said chuck the um the Those two quarter

(49:43):
of a million dollar bottles of champagne were from a
shipwreck that was headed to Russia to bring champagne to
the Tsar's family, and it's all the shipwrecked and they
discovered it in the nineties and now they're selling it
at the Ritz Carlton two. What did you say? And

(50:04):
I think that's the one that's like a collector's piece, right,
I don't know you like to put it on your wall.
That's not from what I don't know. I don't know
what you do with that besides just drink it and
hope for the best. Well, should we talk about drinking
it in the proper way, to open it and to
pour it, please consume it, because uh, if you if

(50:26):
you don't know what you're doing and you've seen too
many movies, you might try and pop that cork out
across the room. It's very dangerous. It is very dangerous,
and people get injured, right are their deaths? I think
I didn't see it, or is that like an urban legend?
I would guess an open legend. I could be wrong.
I'm thinking if you died from me getting hit with
a cork, you had a pre existing condition. Is that

(50:50):
covered I don't know under Obamacare ster I guess we'll see.
So you'll get about six flutes if you're pouring properly
out of a all of champagne. I want to serve
it between forty and forty five degrees celsias your fahrenheit.
That's fahrenheit right, I don't know. Uh. If you are
caught with your pants down at a party, just go

(51:13):
champagne and it'll get you out of it. Um. And
you want to chill it very quickly, you can put
it in an ice bath and not to get out
that yeast plug, but just to make it cold fast,
just like it would beer or something. All right, the
neck you mean, no, no, no, the whole bottle. If
you want to serve it. You got a hot bottle
of champagne and your moving truck, throw it in an

(51:36):
ice bath for about twenty minutes and you should be
good to go. Yeah, if you there's a party trick
you can do too, where if you put just the
neck in the ice bath, you can use what's called
a saber. You can actually use anything. I've seen somebody
do it on on video with a shoe. Yeah. You
don't even have to freeze it if you're a good
saber or yeah, but you you kind of want to.

(51:56):
You want the neck very very cold because you want
the glass to just crack off cleanly. Yeah, and what
the deal is if you've ever seen someone, it's called sabridge. Um.
We mentioned earlier that the champagne bottle is very thick
because it's uh in there at about nine p s.
I where the scene meets the lip, it's about less

(52:17):
glass and so that's a vulnerable area and that's what
makes sabering possible. And so you use well, like you said,
you could use a shoe. I guess if you're you know,
if you're that guy. But there's traditional sabers there there.
They look like a little sword. They are a little sword.
They just aren't ground to a point or an edge.

(52:39):
They're very blunt. Well because the point is using blunt
force on a weak point of the of the neck
of the bottle. Yeah, but you can use your like
a saber can be sharp. You just use the other
side of it. And um, I mean it's it's pretty
neat to do because you're not like I think for
a while I thought you were just knocking the cork out,

(53:00):
so I thought, as well, but you're you're you're knocking
the glass off. Yeah, the top the top lip of
the of the bottle is coming clean off. If you're
doing it correctly, and it's it's that is also dangerous
if you don't know what you're doing, because that thing
will fly or more. Yeah, and that's actual glass. What
you want to do is have a sharpshooter handy to

(53:20):
shoot it out of the sky before it hurts anybody,
that's right, and have everyone standing behind you. That's the
traditional way. Um, how you really open it is and
this is a uh even if you're not just popping
the cork, you might like twist the cork off. You
want to twist the bottle. That's sort of the number
one rule to open it cleanly and non dangerously and

(53:44):
without why champagne, you know, getting all over the place,
like when you open an a tonic bottle, her soda,
anything fizzy. That's one of our traditions backstage. A stuff
you should know shows is Josh opens a tonic ball,
get it all excuse everywhere, and you go, what's the deal?
Every single time? Um, I think because I have so

(54:05):
many lime salads and just I know you gotta go
easy with those tonic bottles. I do, and it's still
spray me. It's it's almost comical as um No, it's
pretty funny um. So you're twisting the bottle. Uh if
if you have a towel, you can hold it over
the cork, but you really don't need it as long
as you're kind of holding it with your hand and

(54:27):
twist that bottle. Put your thumb in the punt as
they call it, which is that the area at the
bottom of the bottle to div it. Yeah, the punt
the concave part. Yeah, the punt. Let's put your thumb
in the punt um and then you've got it open
and you tilt the glass importance a little bit for
a little bit more. You want about three quarters of

(54:49):
a flute and put your pinkie up and go to town. Yeah,
and I did a brain stuff on what the best
kind of glass for champagne is, and apparently the tulip
is it's a combination between the coupe and the flute um.
You've probably seen it before, No I didn't. It's a
you know, the tulip class um. But apparently they allow

(55:12):
for the most sparkle and if you if you have
the so the bubbles coming up the French call effervescence.
And if you look at a glass of champagne, that
you're just holding there in front of you. When they
bubble up to the top, they accumulate into a foam,
and uh, that is called moose like shock a lot moose,
remember top secret. Oh yeah, but it's not that. It's

(55:36):
just moose is what they call it. Or foam is
another way to put it. That's what they call it.
And so actually when you're creating them second fermentation process
of the champagne making, what the method champagne was, it's
called um the prize de mouse or the foam creation

(55:58):
wow a lot. And that's why you poured slow too,
because if you get too fast, it's gonna get everywhere
like your tonic. And then you pour it three quarters
full and you toast and say huzzah, huzzah, huzza. I
think is the traditional yeah thing you're supposed to say.
So you like champagne yet, No, it's just not for me.
That's fine, dope, feel bad for me. I want then, Uh,

(56:20):
if you want to know more about champagne, go get some.
And in the meantime, you can type that word in
the search part how stuff works dot com. And since
I said search par it's time for a listener mail,
all right, I'm gonna call this one. Uh. Well, getting
the nomenclature correct something we always strive to do and
don't always do. Hey, guys, let me start by saying,

(56:43):
you've been listening your show for two years. You've added
so much joy, laughter, and knowledge to my life. Now.
You're always intentional and sensitive about the language you used
on your show, And while listening to the MS episode,
I noticed something I've heard you two say in the past.
I work in suicide prevention and hope to change the
culture and reduce the stigma around suicide. As you know,

(57:04):
one of the first steps of doing that is examining
the language we use. The phrase commit suicide. It's very common,
of course, and has been used for a very long time. However,
the word commit makes it sound criminal. This perpetuates a
stigma that there's something bad or wrong with someone who's
experiencing thoughts of suicide, making it less likely that they
will reach out and ask for help. I want to

(57:26):
encourage you, guys to use the word died by suicide
or completed suicide as an alternative and more factual term. Uh.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention it's great resource for
more information and of course I need to plug my
own nonprofit I work for not my kid dot org.
I appreciate everything you guys do. Please come to Phoenix.
I guarantee you will sell out a show there. Sincerely,

(57:48):
that as Sarah tisden a k A Hope dealer. Oh wow,
dealing hope. That's the heck of a Yeah, and you
know what, I never thought about that, but that is
not true. That's not true. You have because we've been
called out on this before. Really, yes, but I think
we've e been done a listener mail on it before.

(58:09):
But it's so ingrained to say commit and then complete.
It just sounds like they finished their homework or something
like that, but died by suicide. I could. I can
get behind that, and I will try, but it's just
so hard not say committed. What though, if you're saying
if it hasn't happened, you're saying someone was going to

(58:29):
attempt to thinking attempting suicide. Okay, yeah, I think that
one's a kacher. All right, man, I didn't know we've
covered this, so I feel bad that I still haven't
gotten over that. Then yeah, same here, all right, I'm
gonna work on it. Yeah, same here. Thanks, for calling
us out. Hope Dealer appreciate that. Thanks Sarah, keep dealing that, Hope,
open up your trench, come and be like, this is

(58:50):
what I got right? Uh. If you want to get
in touch with us to correct us, prod us whatever,
you can tweet to us that that's a sk podcast.
You can hang out with me on Twitter at josh
um Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook
at Charles d W Chuck Bryant or slash Stuff you

(59:10):
Should Know. You can send us both an email and
Jerry to stuff podcasts at how stuff Works dot com
and has always hang out with us at our home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com For
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff Works dot com