Burst Your Bubbly

February 02, 2010

For your new decade's toast, here's how to buy, open and imbibe sparkling wine By Marielle Gallagher mgallagher@bendbulletin.com / The Bulletin With 2010 fast approaching, bottles of bubbly will be flying off the shelves. But a couple of wine store owners in Bend give good reasons to enjoy sparkling wine throughout the year, not just for celebratory toasting.

If your method for buying a sparkler for New Year's Eve is to grab the cheapest bottle you can find, consider taking the time to look at the labels and spending a few more dollars on something that will go beyond just filling your flute. You don't have to spend a lot to get a good-quality sparkling wine, and you might find yourself coming back throughout the year for more.

Chris Oatman, owner of The Good Drop Wine Shoppe on Minnesota Avenue in downtown Bend, thinks sparkling wine ought to be consumed on a regular basis. “It has the mystique of being celebratory, which it is. It's a very fun elixir,” Oatman said. “But I think the general public should get off the fact that it's just to be consumed at New Year's or anniversaries or birthdays.” One of the reasons Oatman likes sparkling wine as an everyday drink is that it pairs well with an array of foods, from spicy dishes to seafood. “I probably consume more bubbles than other wines on a regular basis,” he said. “It goes with anything. ~ It just has a cleansing, cutting action, especially when you have any fat in your dish. The acidity with champagne really cuts through that. It really cleanses the palate and quenches the thirst and makes you want to go back for more.”

He says champagne is so easily paired with foods that you could buy it for a dinner party and drink it from appetizers to dessert. Melanie Betti, owner of The Wine Shop and Tasting Bar, also on Minnesota Avenue in downtown Bend, talks about bubbly in terms of weightiness. She likens a heavyweight sparkler to the mouth feel you get with whole milk. Two percent milk would be a medium-weight bubbly and a leaner weight would feel similar to nonfat milk. “Those heavier wines will have fresh bread or almond tones, and the leaner will have a more citrusy flavor,” said Betti.

Both Betti and Oatman use the size of the bubble and the mouth feel as defining points for the quality of a sparkler. If a bottle is labeled with methode champenoise (pronounced shahm-pen-wahz) or methode traditional, the wine was fermented in the bottle, which is the classic method for carbonating a sparkling wine and will produce smaller bubbles.

The alternative is a bulk method, called methode charmat, where a vat of wine is injected with carbon dioxide similar to the way soft drinks are carbonated. This makes a bulkier, clumsier bubble like soft drink bubbles, according to Oatman. “Generally the smaller the beads, the more expensive the champagne,” said Betti. Reading the label Like any other red or white wine, sparklers vary in their flavor profiles and qualities. Finding the one that suits you is a matter of tasting different styles, but knowing how to read the labels can help you get started in the right direction. (To try an array and not break the budget, look for sparklers available in smaller bottles called splits, which are 187 milliliters or about two flute-fulls.) Champagne can only be labeled as champagne if it was grown and bottled in the Champagne region of France.

Other names for sparkling wines include Cava from Spain, Prosecco and spumanti from Italy, Sekt from Germany, cremant from regions outside of Champagne, France, and even a sparkling shiraz from Australia, referred to as black bubbles, which Oatman says is a great alternative for people who only drink red wine. “When you see Cava and Prosecco and sparkling wine and Champagne, it's all in reference to sparkling something, but to be called champagne it has to be made in the region of Champagne in France,” said Oatman. Betti says consumers will pay a little more for champagne from Champagne because the vines are older and have more depth and structure. “They're the elite craftspeople of making sparkling wine,” said Betti.

The most common blend of grapes for sparkling wine is chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier (pronounced mean-yay). All grape pulp is white, so the color of the wine is determined by the amount of time the winemaker lets the wine soak on the skins. Blanc de blancs means “white of white,” and sparklers labeled as such are made entirely of chardonnay grapes. Brut rose is 100 percent pinot noir grapes. Blanc de noirs is either 100 percent pinot noir or a blend of pinot noir and pinot meunier. Styles of dryness The driest, or least sweet, sparkling wine is labeled as “extra brut” or “no dosage” (pronounced doe-saj) The dosage — which can be a mixture of brandy, still (nonsparkling) wines and sugar, according to Oatman — is added after the second fermentation and determines the dryness of the product.

A wine with no added sugar would be drier than the other styles that receive a dose of sugar. The spectrum of dryness is:

• Extra brut or no dosage (the driest style).
• Brut (the second driest and the most common).
• Extra dry (ironically, this is sweeter than brut).
• e_STnSSec (a little sweeter than extra dry).
• Demi sec (generally the sweetest that's commonly available).
• Doux (the sweetest style and not very common).

Vintage vs. nonvintage Most sparklers will be nonvintage, or NV, as commonly denoted on restaurant menus. Nonvintage wines are a blend of wines from two or three different years, typically back to back, according to Oatman. “(Winemakers) will blend vintages together and get you a great value. They might not have quite the same complexity as vintage wines,” said Oatman. “If you see a vintage on a bottle of champagne, then the consumer knows that they're getting a great bottle of wine because it was declared a vintage year.” Why a flute? The best glass for sparkling wine is the one you enjoy most, but there are benefits to drinking it from a glass designed for bubbly.

“The main reason for flutes or anything that has a stem is to get that bead of bubbles up through the glass,” said Oatman. The flute also confines the wine to a small surface area, which slows the loss of carbon dioxide, which is what makes the bubbly bubbly. But, as Oatman points out, even he deviates from the flute by using a Marie Antoinette-style glass with a much larger surface area than a flute. “Champagne loses some of the aromatics when you drink it out of real thin style flute,” said Oatman. “The aromatics of champagne are pretty special.” Marielle Gallagher can be reached at 541-383-0361 or mgallagher@bendbulletin.com.