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IT How Champagne is made, simply explained
In short: Champagne is made almost exclusively from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier grown in the Champagne region. The grapes are picked by hand and gently pressed as whole bunches. The must ferments into a still, dry base wine which, after blending (assemblage), is bottled with yeast and sugar to undergo a second fermentation; this is what creates the carbon dioxide. The wine then rests on its lees for at least twelve months and may not be sold earlier than 15 months after bottling – or 36 months in the case of a vintage Champagne. Riddling, disgorgement and dosage complete the process.
- Whole bunches are gently pressed; only the finest must is used.
- The first, still fermentation turns it into a dry base wine.
- Assemblage: the cellar master composes the blend from different vineyard sites, grape varieties and vintages.
- Bottled with yeast and sugar, the wine ferments a second time – the carbon dioxide forms inside the bottle.
- The Champagne matures on its lees for at least twelve months, often several years; this lends depth and a fine mousse.
- During riddling (remuage), the yeast travels into the neck of the bottle.
- Disgorgement: the plug of yeast is removed.
- The dosage determines the style, from Brut Nature to Doux; the bottle is then finally corked.
Champagne is not manufactured. Champagne comes into being – through a process that stretches over years, whose core is a simple idea: the second fermentation takes place in the very bottle that will later stand on your table. No tank, no transfer, no shortcuts. What distinguishes the Méthode Champenoise from the Charmat method used for Prosecco and most other sparkling wines is not merely a technical gimmick. It is a fundamentally different understanding of what sparkling wine can be.
From pressing the whole bunches, through the still fermentation of the base wine and its composition from various vintages and vineyard sites, to the second fermentation in the bottle, ageing on the lees, riddling, disgorgement and the final dosage – eight steps whose sequence has remained essentially unchanged since the 18th century. Each one offers room for decision-making, and it is precisely here that craftsmanship parts ways with industrial production.
The winemakers we bring together on lebendigeweine.de are without exception Récoltants-Manipulants – producers who grow, press and market their own grapes. What goes into the bottle at Larmandier-Bernier, Georges Laval or Horiot is the expression of a specific vineyard site, a specific vintage, a specific signature.
Pressurage — the art of pressing
Everything begins at the press, and even here Champagne works differently from any other wine region. The grapes are pressed as whole bunches – neither destemmed nor crushed. According to the regulations, 4,000 kilograms of grapes yield exactly 2,550 litres of must after pressing. The first 2,050 litres are called the cuvée and are considered the finest in quality: delicate acidity, clear fruit, little phenolic extraction. The next 500 litres, the taille, contain more tannins and colour pigments. Many ambitious winemakers use only the cuvée.
There is a simple physical reason for pressing whole bunches: the stems act as drainage channels, allowing the juice to run off quickly and gently without remaining in contact with the skins and pips for too long. This is crucial above all for Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier – red grape varieties from which white wine is to be made.
Cuvée (first 2,050 L from 4,000 kg): finer acidity, clearer fruit, fewer phenols. Used for the finest Champagnes.
Taille (next 500 L): more tannins, more colour pigments, fuller body. Often vinified separately or sold off.
He deliberately opts for a half-size traditional press, which allows him to press his tiny harvest quantities in separate lots — individual parcels, individual picking passes — rather than homogenising everything in one large pressing.
Première Fermentation — The Base Wine
The freshly pressed must is fermented — initially completely still, without carbon dioxide. The result is a lean, acid-driven white wine, the Vin Clair, which no one would spontaneously enjoy. Alcoholic fermentation often takes place at comparatively low temperatures in order to preserve fruit aromas and create a clean base for everything that follows.
Malolactic fermentation — the bacterial conversion of sharp malic acid into milder lactic acid — divides Champagne into two camps. Some allow it because it makes the wine rounder, creamier and more stable. Others block it because they wish to preserve the freshness, tension and ageing potential of the base wine. A Champagne without malo retains a nervous, almost citrus-like acidity structure over the years, whereas one with malo opens up earlier and shows more unctuousness.
Precision and pure fruit. A reductive environment preserves primary aromas. Standard practice among the grandes maisons.
Structure and micro-oxygenation. Subtle spice, more texture. Used casks — no vanilla wood.
Pierre Larmandier ferments his base wines in Stockinger casks made from Austrian oak — not new barriques, but used casks that have become neutral, giving the wine texture without aromatically overpowering it. Tarlant experiments with terracotta amphorae. Lacourte-Godbillon in Écueil goes even further: their cask wood comes from the forest directly bordering the vineyards — terroir in the most literal sense, from the soil to the cask.
Assemblage — The Art of Composition
Assemblage is what sets Champagne apart from almost all other sparkling wine regions. The cellar master does not have just one wine before him, but dozens — from different grape varieties, different vineyard sites, different vintages. From these building blocks, the final cuvée is composed. At the grandes maisons, the aim is to reproduce the same house style year after year. For the winemakers on lebendigeweine.de, it is about expression.
The reserve wines are the most powerful tool in this process. Some winemakers maintain veritable solera systems modelled on sherry production: a cask is never emptied completely, but repeatedly topped up with the new vintage, so that over the years a multi-layered continuum develops. Huré Frères in Ludes have been running their solera since 1982 — more than forty vintages flow together. Bonnet-Ponson started in 2004, and Horiot has maintained a solera for his Sève since 2007.
At the same time, there is a counter-movement: winemakers who radically restrict assemblage. In Ambonnay, Marguet bottles four different single vineyards separately — each site a wine in its own right, expressing the terroir of a specific piece of ground. Georges Laval in Cumières does something similar: his lieux-dits Les Chênes, Les Hautes Chèvres and Cumières are named plots with their own geological identity. An approach closer to Burgundy than to classical Champagne.
More about the terroirs of Champagne
Tirage — The Second Fermentation in Bottle
Once the base wine has been composed, it is bottled — together with the Liqueur de Tirage, a mixture of wine, sugar and selected yeast. Exactly 24 grams of sugar per litre are required to generate around six atmospheres of pressure inside the sealed bottle. That is three times as much as in a car tyre. The yeast metabolises the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide — adding roughly 1.2 per cent by volume to the base wine — and because the CO₂ cannot escape, it dissolves into the wine.
The French call this phase Prise de Mousse, the “capturing of the foam”, and it lasts six to eight weeks. The bottle becomes the fermenter — each one undergoes its own individual fermentation. This is the exact opposite of tank fermentation, where thousands of litres ferment simultaneously. The Charmat method is efficient and reproducible. Bottle fermentation is labour-intensive and space-consuming — but it produces a finer, more persistent bead and a spectrum of aromas that tank fermentation simply cannot deliver.
Méthode Champenoise: Second fermentation in the bottle. Months to years on the lees. Finer bead, more complex aromas (brioche, nut). Champagne, Crémant, Cava.
Charmat method: Second fermentation in a pressurised tank. Weeks on the lees. Fresher fruit, larger bubbles. Prosecco, Sekt.
Where Crémant, grower Sekt and Pét-Nat fit into this comparison is explained on our page Champagne, Crémant, Sekt, Pét-Nat: How They Differ.
Ageing on the lees — autolysis
After the second fermentation, the wine rests on its deposit of lees. The yeast has done its work, the sugar is spent, and the cells begin to die. What follows is autolysis — a slow biochemical process that fundamentally transforms the Champagne. The cell walls break down, releasing amino acids, polysaccharides and mannoproteins. It is these compounds that lend a mature Champagne its characteristic aromas of brioche, roasted nuts, butter and biscuit. The mannoproteins make the wine creamier and stabilise the bead — the bubbles become finer the longer the wine remains on the lees.
The appellation rules stipulate minimum periods: non-vintage Champagne must spend at least twelve months on the lees and may not be sold earlier than 15 months after bottling, while vintage Champagne may not be released before 36 months. For ambitious winemakers, these are merely regulatory lower limits. Among the producers on lebendigeweine.de, three years is rather the minimum, five to seven the norm, and ten by no means unusual. Louise Brison in Celles-sur-Ource does not let a single Champagne leave the cellar before five years on the lees.
The cellars in which this ageing takes place are anything but interchangeable. Drappier in Urville uses vaults dating back to 1152, built by Cistercian monks — a constant ten to twelve degrees, almost one hundred per cent humidity, absolute silence. In the chalk tunnels beneath Reims and Épernay, the Crayères, much of Champagne matures under conditions that no modern climate-controlled cellar can replicate.
Remuage — riddling
After years of ageing, the yeast deposit must be removed from the bottle. It rests on the side of the horizontally stored bottle and has to travel into the neck. For this purpose, riddling was invented in the 19th century — supposedly by the Widow Clicquot, whose cellar master drilled holes in a kitchen table so that the bottles could be inserted upside down. From this developed the pupitres, the riddling racks.
During traditional remuage, the riddler turns the bottle by an eighth of a turn every day over six to eight weeks, gradually tilting it more steeply. By the end, it stands almost vertically upside down, with the yeast deposit neatly settled in the neck. A skilled riddler can handle up to 40,000 bottles a day. The gyropalette, a computer-controlled riddling cage, achieves the same in three to five days and has replaced manual labour in almost all wineries.
6–8 weeks, 1/8 turn per day. Up to 40,000 bottles/day per riddler. An almost extinct specialisation.
3–5 days, computer-controlled. Hundreds of bottles at once. Identical result, unrivalled efficiency.
Still riddles by hand — less because it yields better quality, but rather as a statement of a working philosophy that leaves no step to a machine. A commitment to artisanal control from the vineyard to the finished Champagne.
Disgorgement — The dramatic moment
Once the yeast deposit is neatly settled in the neck, it has to come out. Disgorgement is the most technically delicate moment of the entire production process: the bottle is under six atmospheres of pressure, and when opened, only the yeast should escape. The method commonly used today, dégorgement à la glace, solves this elegantly: the neck of the bottle is immersed in a brine bath at minus 25 degrees, the yeast deposit freezes into an ice plug, and when the crown cap is removed, this plug shoots cleanly out of the bottle.
The older method, dégorgement à la volée, does without freezing. The person disgorging opens the bottle while holding it upside down and lets the pressure expel the yeast — a technique that requires experience, speed and a certain degree of fearlessness.
Many Récoltants-Manipulants print the date of disgorgement on the bottle. This reveals two things: how long the wine spent on the lees, and how long it has been ageing since disgorgement. A freshly disgorged Champagne appears livelier and more nervous. Post-disgorgement ageing rounds it off, integrates the dosage and brings harmony.
Dosage — The final decision
After disgorgement, a small volume is missing from the bottle — the space left behind by the yeast. This volume is topped up with the liqueur d’expédition, a mixture of wine and sugar whose composition represents the final and perhaps most controversial decision in the entire production process. In most cases it also carries a small dose of sulphur that protects the freshly disgorged wine from oxygen; only a handful of growers forgo it and bottle Champagne without added sulphur.
Brut Nature is the most radical statement a Champagne grower can make. Without the cosmetic correction of sugar, the wine lies bare — every weakness in the base wine, every imbalance in the acidity becomes mercilessly audible. Sugar is to Champagne what Photoshop is to photography: it can conceal, smooth out and render more pleasing. Anyone who forgoes it must work with whatever the vineyard and the vintage yield.
Mélanie Tarlant put it this way: “Dosage disturbs the message of the terroir.” It is a sentence that perfectly suits the family’s approach — at Tarlant in Œuilly, single-vineyard sites, late disgorgement and minimal or zero dosage have been standard practice for years. Most of the producers on lebendigeweine.de work in the Extra Brut or Brut Nature range.
What grower Champagnes do differently
The abbreviations on the label reveal more than any marketing text. RM stands for Récoltant-Manipulant: a grower who cultivates their own grapes and vinifies them themselves. NM stands for Négociant-Manipulant: a house that purchases grapes. The big names — Moët, Veuve Clicquot, Krug — are NMs. They strive for consistency. The RMs on lebendigeweine.de strive for expression.
In the cellar, this shows in a series of decisions: ageing in wooden casks rather than stainless steel tanks, spontaneous fermentation with indigenous cellar yeasts instead of cultured yeasts, and no filtration or fining. The foundation is laid in the vineyard — De Sousa in Avize works biodynamically with horses, as does Marguet in Ambonnay. Jérôme Blin in Vincelles and Solemme on the Montagne de Reims farm organically.
The single-vineyard bottlings, the solera reserve wines, the maturation in wooden casks, the biodynamics, the refusal of dosage — none of these are isolated individual measures. Together they form a coherent picture: Champagne that reveals a place rather than a brand. The Méthode Champenoise is the same for all producers — the same eight steps, the same second fermentation in the bottle. But what the growers make of it differs radically. And that is precisely where the argument for grower Champagne lies: not in the method, but in the attitude.
In our range this becomes concrete: 237 available Champagnes from 27 houses, almost all of them grower Champagnes, whose back labels often state the disgorgement date and so document the final step before release.
Discover our grower Champagnes
Frequently asked questions
How do the bubbles get into Champagne?
Through the second fermentation in the bottle: the liqueur de tirage, made of yeast and sugar, produces carbon dioxide that cannot escape and dissolves into the wine – creating around six bar of pressure. The longer the wine then matures on the lees, the finer and more persistent the mousse becomes.
How much does it cost to produce Champagne?
More than any other sparkling wine: grapes from Champagne cost around seven euros per kilo, and a good kilo goes into each bottle – even before years of cellar ageing, manual labour and materials have been paid for. A serious grower Champagne well below twenty euros is therefore scarcely feasible.