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Enjoy Aphrodise responsibly with friends and family on any occasion and experience The Season That Never Ends.
In this article, we’ll be looking at two of the main methods of making sparkling wine, which does in fact show the difference between how traditional sparkling wine is made, such as champagne, and how varieties such as our Greek sparkling rosé are perfected.
Once your grapes of choice have been harvested (in our case, we used the Xinomavro grape, which is indigenous to Greece) a still base wine is produced using the white wine process. This sees the pressing of the grapes, and removal of their skins, before they go through the wine’s first fermentation process within a tank. In the case of rose, time is allowed for skin contact – this means that the ‘juice’ takes on that perfectly pink quality that gives rosé its beautiful name.
What happens next depends on the sparkling wine making method that you use.
Sometimes also referred to as the tank method, which gives away a little of how this process unfolds, isn’t done on a bottle-by-bottle basis, but instead uses a tank to ferment the base wine on a larger scale. The base wine is kept within a large tank instead of bottles, tightly sealed in with yeast and sugar. These two ingredients produce CO2; being trapped within the tank, bubbles are formed within the wine to give it that invigorating fizz.
Of course, yeast can’t be left in the wine; this would be unpleasant, and so it needs to be removed. For Charmat-made wine, a pressurized tank extracts the dead yeast using filters, before the wine is poured into bottles and sealed using specialist filling equipment.
Compared to the traditional sparkling wine production method, which is somewhat laborious and time consuming, the Charmat method still produces high quality sparkling wine on a quicker turnaround.
Resting is a crucial part of the traditional method; the wine should age for at least 9 months in a horizontal position before it’s anywhere near to being ready for yeast removal. This is done through a process called riddling; the bottles are slowly, over a period of days and weeks, rotated so that the neck of the bottle points vertically downwards to encourage the yeast to gather close to the cap.
The necks of the bottles are then frozen, so that the gathered yeast forms a plug, which can then be expelled from the bottles under pressurized conditions.
If the wine is intended to be sweet, a small amount of sugar can be added prior to the bottles being sealed, labelled, and having their cages added. This sugar input is known as the dosage.
Choose Drink Aphrodise for outstanding sparkling rosé wine
The noble Greek grapes used to make Aphrodise makes for a delicious bottle of sparkling rosé. Best enjoyed in the sunshine, and preferably around a pool, you can while away a summer's day with something outstanding to sip.
