Champagne Corks

The cork is very important for all the wines , but for Champagne , several important details differ . First , the cork in Champagne comes at the end of the ageing process , when other wines can still age with their final cork .


Champagne wine stays years in the 11 °C cellars with a temporary cap (a metal crown cap) . Then comes the riddling phase at the end of wich the dead yeasts and sediments are frozen and taken out of the bottle ...

Then , after injection of the "expedition liqueur" , also called dosage , a precious and very secret 1 cl , comes the real Champagne cork . This Champagne cork , before being forcefully inserted in the bottle , looks much like a regular wine cork , only that it is much bigger . In the past , it was inserted manually with rudimentary lever tools . This operation needs to be powerful and precise : The new cork has a diameter of 31 mm and the inside diameter of the bottle neck is 17 mm ...

A new, unused cork has a very different shape than the well known used champagne cork [ see on the picture : the new cork on the top , and the used one, around which you see the imprint of the bottle neck ] .

This compressed cork , plus the capsule and muselet (wire) to keep it tight , are why high pressure can't expel both the wine and the cork ...

Comments

[ROBERT NELSON]

Well, I have learnt something today but - go a little further. Trad champagne cork [am now looking at one from Deutz]seems to have two thinner sections, at the bottom where there is contact with the wine, which are laminated to the main body. WHY and HOW IS IT DONE. Have just found this web-site and can forecast many hours of interested viewing. March 2008

[Bill Crowe]

To what do the letters on top of champaign corks refer?

[Eric Schori]

To answer Robert's question,

The modern cork is of composite construction for economic reasons. The top is agglomeration, that is to say low quality cork fragments bonded together with polymer. This is a cheap and stable bulk material. However, for long term storage agglomerated cork is too porus and will allow carbonation to escape and oxygen to enter the bottle degrading the quality of any wine stored more than a year or two. To deal with this problem disks of high quality natural cork are affixed to the agglomerated portion of the cork. The natural cork provides a satifactory seal to prevent gas exchange, allowing the wine to be stored for years.

Only a tiny fraction of the cork grown is of suitable quality for making pure natural corks. Thus if a traditional style solid cork were used the cost would be excessive, and the cork growers would not be able to supply the number of corks needed by the modern wine industry. These factors are also the cause for the increasing use of synthetic corks in the wine industry.