At the same time the bottle is tilted, so that by the end of riddling a few weeks later, it is positioned head down and almost vertical ( sur pointe). The objective is to detach the sediment, now made even heavier by the riddling agents, from the sides of the bottle and encourage it to slide into the bottle neck and collect on the underside of the cork (or bidule), taking care not to send the lees back into suspension. Holding the bottles by the base, the cellarworker gives each one a short, sharp rotation, 1/8 th, 1/6 th, or 1/4 of a circle at a time, to the right or to the left, with a chalk mark on the bottom of the bottle for reference. By the end of riddling, the wine is left clear and perfectly limpid and remains in the cellar to rest for a further two to three weeks. The cellar worker in charge of pointage, also known as the remueur (riddler), gives each bottle a flick of his wrist to detach the sediment from the sides of the bottle and send it sliding into the neck. Each surface is pierced with six bevelled holes across 10 rows, creating space for 120 bottles (special pupitres are available for larger bottle formats). The bottles are tilted about 35 degrees in an oak pupitre consisting of two flat surfaces that are hinged at the top (an A-frame-shaped riddling rack). This creates the unique flavors and structure we desire for each vintage.Pointage is the shaking of the bottles to dislodge any sediment. Our traditional method sparklers will then age en tirage for many months.
AGING EN TIRAGE:Īfter the bottles are filled, we stack them in our cave where they will finish fermentation. Secondary fermentation will now begin within the bottle. After we fill each bottle, we insert a bidule (which will capture yeast during riddling…but that’s a different blog) and seal the bottle with a crown cap. We pump the mixture over to our semi automatic filler where we will fill the bottles (pictured at the top of this page). This final mixture is called the liqueur de tirage and is now ready to bottle. Right before we are ready to bottle, winemaker Mark or Sarah adds a small amount of sugar and the yeast culture to the base wine. After a couple of carefully monitored days, we have a thriving culture filled with trillions of yeast cells hungry and eager to build some bubbly. The yeast begins their lush life of eating and reproducing. To do this, he mixes a precise amount of wine, sugar and yeast.
In the days leading up to tirage bottling, our winemakers build a yeast culture (pictured, in full yeasty glory, above). (Check out our “Whole Berry Press” blog to learn more how we press our grapes for our base wines.) Any off-aroma or flavor in a base wine will be magnified tenfold in a sparkling wine those CO2 bubbles that we love so much become our worst enemy if there’s a problem in the base wine.
The base wine selected must be extremely clean and the highest of quality. In other words, this is how the bubbles get into your favorite sparkling wine. Once inside the bottle, secondary fermentation begins. What is tirage bottling, you ask? Well, tirage bottling is when the base wine is combined with yeast and sugar, and then bottled. And if something goes wrong during tirage bottling, months – even years – can be wasted. Literally, months of hard work go into this day.
The French term tirage means to “draw off’ the blended wines into bottles ready for a second fermentation. Possibly the single most important day in sparkling wine production is tirage bottling day. Tirage Bottling: Putting the Bub in the Bot