How champagne is made
The bubbles are made inside the sealed bottle, and the dead yeast is removed by freezing a plug of ice in the neck.
- stations
- 8
- things upstream
- 55
- raw sources
- 22
- steps from the ground
- 7
The short version
Champagne is a sparkling wine from France's Champagne region, made mainly from Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay. A still base wine is bottled with yeast and sugar, which start a second fermentation inside the sealed bottle. The bottles age on their yeast, are turned until it settles in the neck, then frozen and opened to eject it.
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Press the grapes gently
Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay are pressed with very little skin contact. Even the dark grapes give a pale juice, because the pigment sits in the skins.
Goes in -
Ferment the base wine
The juice ferments into a still, tart base wine, usually in separate lots by grape and vineyard. These lots are later combined into one cuvée.
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Blend the cuvée
The cellar master tastes the lots and blends them, often including reserve wines from earlier years. This gives the house its consistent style.
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Seal in sugar and yeast
The blend is bottled with a measured dose of yeast and sugar and closed with a crown cap, similar to the one on a beer bottle. Each house guards its own recipe.
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Ferment again in the bottle
Yeast eats the added sugar inside the sealed bottle. The carbon dioxide has nowhere to go, so it dissolves into the wine and builds pressure. The dead yeast, called lees, settles along the bottle wall.
at least fifteen months of aging
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Turn the bottles
Bottles are tilted nose-down and slowly rotated and tapped by hand or by machine. This process, remuage, coaxes the lees into the neck.
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Freeze the neck
The bottle necks are dipped in a freezing bath, trapping the lees in a plug of ice. The cap is then removed, and the pressure in the bottle blows the plug out.
about six bar (90 psi) of pressure
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Top up and cork
A little wine and sugar, called the dosage, replaces what was lost and sets the sweetness. The bottle is quickly corked, and a wire cage holds the cork in place against the pressure.
Worth repeating
- Vintage champagne has to mature for at least three years before it is released.
- In the 18th century, cellars lost 20 to 90% of their bottles to bursting, and workers wore heavy iron masks.
- Adolphe Jaquesson invented the wire cage, called the muselet, in 1844 to stop corks blowing out.
- Dom Pérignon was originally charged by his superiors with getting rid of the bubbles.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and champagne starts as these 22 raw sources.
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Sources
Cite this page: "How champagne is made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/champagne