TASTING NOTES :
A pale pink colour with a delicate string of bubbles. The nose is rich and delicious, with notes of red and black fruit. The palate is smooth and highly aromatic, with red and black fruit and a hint of melon on the finish.
VINIFICATION / AGEING
The sparkling wine-making process begins with the selective hand-picking of grapes before they are fully ripe. Once harvested, the grapes are pressed twice and the juice is vinified in vats, creating basic still wines that are not sparkling.
To transform these basic wines into sparkling wines, a liqueur de tirage, made from cane sugar and yeast, is added to the cuvée before bottling. This second fermentation then takes place in the bottle. The yeasts in the liqueur de tirage convert the sugar into alcohol, producing carbon dioxide which dissolves in the wine, creating the characteristic bubbles of sparkling wine. This stage is known as "prise de mousse".
The bottles are then placed on laths for around 14 months to allow the wine to feed off the fermentation lees. The yeasts evolve, releasing aromas and leaving a deposit in the bottle.
A stirring process is carried out to move the deposit to the neck of the bottle, just below the cork. Then, during the disgorging operation, the yeast deposit is removed, and a liqueur d'expédition, often a mixture of old wine and cane sugar, is added to compensate for the volume removed during disgorging. This stage is called "dosage".
So, at the end of this complex process, the sparkling wines obtained have their sparkling characteristics and their specific flavour resulting from these different stages of vinification.
