You may have heard that Champagne can only be called Champagne if it comes from Champagne. This is true, and too often people incorrectly use “Champagne” as a blanket term to refer to any kind of sparkling wine. Champagne is specifically from Champagne, but there are several different styles of sparkling wine made throughout France and around the world. Here’s a very quick rundown on the main differences between the 3 main styles of sparkling wine.

CHAMPAGNE METHOD

Sparkling wine sparkles by trapping the C02 that is produced by fermentation and absorbing or dissolving itself back into the juice to make it naturally carbonated. Before it becomes wine it’s just sugary grape juice right? So whether you add cultured yeast, or let nature do its thing and let wild native yeasts attack the sugar in the wine, it will start to ferment. 2 byproducts of fermentation are heat and CO2. So when it ferments it becomes warm and it releases Carbon Dioxide. The idea with sparkling is to trap that inside the juice. What was done with the Champagne Method was to create an initial wine (now called a base wine) that is quite acidic and entirely dry with no residual sugar and put that to bottle. THEN add some more sugar and more yeast with the purpose of creating a second fermentation. As that is started the bottle is capped off so that the C02 cannot escape and it’s aged for a minimum of 15 months. This time is needed to ensure the bubbles have enough time to become refined and for the dead yeast cells (the lees) to start to break down and let the wine absorb their flavours, through a process called autolysis. The dead yeast cells settle at the bottom of the bottles and it looks a little like when fresh apple cider has all the light fluffy sediment that settles at the bottom and gets cloudy when shook up. And once it’s done aging, it is separated from the juice by a process called disgorgement and you retain all the complex flavours but with clear wine.

This is what Champagne Method is all about when you compare to different styles. You can do it in other places outside Champagne, but you can’t call it Champagne unless it’s from the region. The other thing that makes Champagne so uniquely special is it’s chalk soils. The vine’s roots work their way down through meters and layers of thick chalk, absorbing that minerality and texture that creates the unique flavours that really only Champagne has been able create. So when talking about great Champagne, it shouldn’t just be about nice bubbles, because frankly you can get that in any region that makes good sparkling. It needs to speak of the terroir of Champagne with the chalky minerality and the toasty yeasty characteristics of lees aging that intermingle with all the floral, citrus, and fruit aromas and flavours.

ANCESTRAL METHOD (and PET NAT)

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t Dom Perignon in Champagne that invented the first sparkling wine, it had been around for centuries prior, most famously in the Savoie region of France in areas like Bugey-Cerdon. But they used a single fermentation method. It’s not making a base wine and then starting a second fermentation on top of that. It is essentially bottling the fermenting grape juice from the first fermentation before it is entirely done. That last bit of fermentation C02 gets dissolved into the bottle and you have a lightly sparkling wine. These wines have often been a bit off-dry or lightly sparkling like frizzante style. But as modern science was better able to accurately measure sugar levels you can plan at what point you need to put it to bottle for results of x amount of bubbles or residual sugar. There is no aging requirements or appellation tied to this name, so you can find many different styles from all over. Nowadays there are so many beautiful, dry, and really well balanced Method Ancestral wines.

And in the last few years, alongside the natural wine movement ‘Pet Nats’ have become very popular. Pet Nat is short for Pétillant Naturel and it is essentially another name for Method Ancestral. For the longest time I could not find a definition of Pet Nat that would show how/why it is different from Method Ancestral. Some winemakers I’ve asked have suggested that Pet Nats are not filtered or disgorged…but then I’ve found some examples where they are. So as far as I know Pet Nat is more or less the same thing, but with an implied style of rustic, raw character indicative of or associated with the natural wine movement. These can often be earthy, cloudy, raw and unfiltered. Think a hazy IPA or a traditional earthy unfiltered cider from Brittany compared to a clear clean crisp version of one.

CHARMAT METHOD (or TANK METHOD)

In the late 1890’s an Italian winemaker named Federico Martinotti developed this method which was later refined by a French winemaker Eugene Charmat, whose name it still carries today. What they both essentially did was take the Champagne method and scale it up. Instead of doing that process of creating a base wine and then starting a second fermentation on top and trap all the C02 in the bottle, they did it on a larger scale in a stainless steel, air tight, pressurized tank. Once the second fermentation is complete they can lightly filter the lees off and transfer the sparkling wine to a bottle and put a cork in it. This method is most famous with Prosecco wines. And because these wines are rarely aged in tank for the 15+ months like Champagne, they don’t develop the same secondary and tertiary characteristics from the lees like Champagne does. Most Charmat wines, like most Proseccos are primarily fruity and floral. They can be very good quality, but will always be geared to a lighter, prettier, sometimes slightly sweeter direction. And it’s also why they’re so much less expensive too. The economies of scale allow the tanks to be produced and bottled more or less the same way regular wines are, without all the extra hands-on individual bottle work that is required with the traditional method.