The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (P.S.)

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Next, the must is placed in unsealed wooden casks. Here, within the right temperature range, the yeasts naturally lurking on the grape skins begin to consume the fruit sugars. There are two important by-products of this “hot” organic reaction: carbon dioxide, which escapes into the air; and alcohol, which thankfully stays put. When the fermentation runs its course—when the yeast has consumed all the sugar—the wine is then racked and clarified to remove the residue, including the yeast cells, which begin to die and decompose. At this point, we could drink the wine, although it would taste quite sharp. So instead, eighteenth-century wines were usually put into sealed wooden casks sometime during the winter and stored until the next autumn, letting them mellow. During the freezing cold winters of the seventeenth century, winemakers in the Champagne discovered that they had live yeast showing up again in the spring, pumping out more carbon dioxide and more alcohol after the wines had been placed in those sealed casks. Since now the carbon dioxide had nowhere to go, the result was fizzy wine.