Natural Sparkling Disgorgement

Laurent, Noëlla, Pascal : the disgorging team Domaine Noëlla Morantin (Touraine, Loire)
This is the first time Noëlla makes natural sparkling in her own estate (she has made some repeatedly when she worked for Junko Arai), but she'll now make some every year, as she has a one-hectare plot of Chardonnay which suits perfectly for this type of wine. Yer yields for this Chardonnay was 29 or 30 hectoliters/hectare this year, and in 2009, she put aside a large cask of Chardonnay to make this bubbly.
The natural-sparkling winemaking process requires like for Champagne wines to get rid of the sedimented lees that accumulated in the bottleneck right under the crown cap (the bottle having stayed a long time upside down on the riddling tables). While large and medium wineries do that with sophisticated machines (like the one on this video), sometimes with a freezing system to solidify the lees and expel them out of the bottle, many artisan wineries still do that manually like it was done in the past centuries, and this is an operation that requires a very particular expertise. Noëlla Morantin asked Pascal Potaire to help her for this very special task for her own sparklings, as Pascal is an expert in the natural-sparkling making (depending of the vintage, 50% to 75% of his wines are sparklings), and he masters the art of manual disgorgement as if he learnt do do it from the age of 7...

Action ! The arduous side of doing a manual disgorgement is that you'll do that without freezing the bottle neck (which may be actually better for the wine) and you must perform a swift and precise movement on the bottle while you take the crown cap off so that only a little amount of wine goes away under the pressure with the lees. That's the point : the wine is already under intense pressure, like a Champagne would be, and if you don't tilt the bottle the right way before opening it, you'll loose much of the wine. You can see on this picture the very momernt when the lees are expelled. Diverging trajectories of wine and lees... Now, let's have a closer look at this same picture and make a close-up : you can see distinctly the creamy, chewing-gum-like aspect of the lees (I'll not dare another comparison...) which mostly sticked to the crown cap and are the first to be expelled. Because of their consistency and weight, the lees take a different course than the wine which is here mostly droplets under pressure. Let's remind that you take the bottle from the riddling table, where it's positionned upside down, and you bring it in that position in the "shower", and there, you tilt it back up and open it when the air inside reached a particular point. Too early, you'll loose too much wine, and too late, the lees will disseminate in the bottle and make the wine turbid again... Pascal Potaire checking the lees before disgorgment Let's recapitulate how a natural sparkling is vinified : this is natural winemaking here, so you won't have anything added in the process, be it sugar, lab yeasts or dosage, and in that regard, it is a very interesting type of sparkling compared to most bublies found on the market, including Champagne. This Chardonnay (it's 100 % Chardonnay) is a 2009. Noëlla had it ferment and raised in tonnes, that is 400-liter casks. In june 2010 she had it bottled (tiré) with 20 or 25 grams residual sugar and put sur lattes for a "prise de mousse", meaning literally put horizontally on wooden laths for the bubble production. As this wine had residual sugar and active yeasts, the continuing fermentation in the tightly-sealed bottles yielded high pressure because the CO2 produced by this fermentation couldn't go away and got stuck in the wine under the form of tiny bubbles. Once laying "sur lattes", Noëlla wrapped the 500-bottle pallet with a black-plastic film so that no light could darken the color of the wine or give an unpleasant goùt de lumière, or light strike. Details like that count, too. Riddling table and shower installation The bottles with the mounting pressure inside were left laying horizontally from june to last november, which is quite long but here time plays a role to get fine bubbles. The sparkling was actually ready in the middle of the summer and she could have put it on the market then but keeping it a longer time sur lattes help get finer bubbles. And as this Chardonnay was very limpid, there wasn't much lees and she put the bottles on the riddling tables just a week before this disgorgement operation. As you probably know, the riddling tables are meant to put gradually the bottles in the vertical position (the bottles being moved a bit every day or few hours) so that the sedimented lees get right near the crown cap and can be easily expelled.
On this picture above, you can see Pascal Potaire's shower-like installation behind the riddling table to avoid having wine splashed everywhere around. He also wears protective clothing similar to fishermen apparel... Noella adding the missing wine As a bit of wine splashed away with the lees, you need to top up each bottle, and here it's done manually and not with an automated machine like in most modern sparkling bottling lines. At the difference with many other sparklings or Champagnes on the market, there's also no dosage or liqueur d'expédition added at this stage for natural sparklings, this is the same wine which is poured into the bottle to get the right level again. Many wineries use at this stage a dosage which changes intentionally the taste of the sparkling, as this topping up is often made with a sugary wine prepared separately in the winery (the exact composition is always kept secret by the winemaker). Once topped up, the bottle gets a new crown cap immediately thereafter (see Laurent on the right putting the closure manually). This was a very synchronized artisanal job : Pascal Potaire disgorged the bottles, putting them on the table where Noëlla would top them up, after which Laurent would seal them with a crown cap closure. Pascal Potaire explaining to Noella The crown cap may look less sexy than the Champagne-type cork with its metal stopper, foil and muselet cage, but these things don't mean a big difference for the wine and people buying natural sparklings are well aware that the content and the winemaking here is more important than a flashy packaging. And if you're eco-minded and into the global-warming narrative, the good side of the metal cap is that it saves trees Although one could argue (the save-the-planet narrative works both ways...) that the more you need cork, the more you'll plant trees, as implied by the ads finaced by the cork lobby (see this post on Vinography)...
Anyway, if Noella had wanted to put a Champagne-type cork here, she should have been obliged to make a specific declaration and ask an administrative authorization. See on page 15 (3 bis) of this law & regulation document (in French) intended for the vignerons of the region (if you're not depressed yet, you'll definitely be after reading through the obtuse regulations of the whole document...). And another thing is that anyway there is no possibility to get the Touraine Appellation when making a sparkling from 100 % Chardonnay. Filling the pallet The bottles pile up fast in the pallet. Note that the pallet is walled with wood boards, which I think help protect the wine from light strike. This natural sparkling is now on the market, but it'll make only between 400 and 500 bottles this year. Noella plans to vinify a bigger share of her Chardonnay in sparkling for the vintage 2010. Noella Morantin on a disgorging try At one point, Noella decided to try her skills, she says that must learn to do it too. She disgorged only a few bottles, the first ones were....hummm, a big splash, with quite lots of wine going away all over the place (the shower installation is very useful), but she soon improved her handling of the bottles. Laurent also tried a couple of bottles and he showed good skills at it.
Noella Morantin sells her natural sparkling for about 11 € at the estate, this is a great alternative to many Champagne wines, believe me. Enjoying the fruit of the work...

Here are different moments of the disgorgement caught on picture. Each time, the lees have clearly a different texture as well as a darker color that make them easily distinguishable from the wine, even when the two seem intricately intertwined... Cap taking off (with a thin layer of lees) Sticky lees - wine following The Big Bang

Comments

[Peter Vars]

Always fascinating, but really good pictures on this one Bertrand! Would love to try this wine.

[Mark Ryan]

Very fascinating post. The video you linked to doesn't show the mechanized disgorgement process in much detail. We did a video a few years ago which highlights each step of the process (starting at 3:50):

http://www.graperadio.com/archives/2008/01/28/schramsberg-vineyards/

[Erix]

Excellent!

[Yann Mazabraud]

As usual excellent, and magnificent pix !
Thank you.

[Justin]

Wonderful documentation. Thank you so much!

A question: When the bottles are topped up after disgorgement, are they topped with still wine?

[Bertrand]

Sorry for the late answer, it's the same wine wine which is used, meaning they take a disgorged bottle and top the others with it.