Our Know – How producing champagne

A Year in the Vineyards

The grape harvest is the fruit of one year’s work.

During the winter, the pruning helps us find a balance between the quantity of the harvest and the development and the longevity of the vines.

Then in the spring we have different interventions called the green pruning (disbudding, trellising, trimming…) which enables us to align the vines in rows, paying particular attention to permit a good maturity and airing of the vines.

To fight against the illnesses and parasites of the vines, we have put in place a lasting viticulture using moderated viticultural methods, which gives for a regular, good quality harvest, while respecting the environment and mankind.
To enable this we have to put in place cultural and controlled ethics , for the environment whenever necessary, for grass sowing and the soil on certain plots, for the sexual confusion, for the planting of bushes, for moderated manure….

Around mid-September comes the time for the grape picking.

From the Harvest to the Still Wine

The grape picking is done by hand. In order to ensure clear juices from black skinned grapes(Pinot Noir) the picking with a harvesting machine is forbidden.

To extract only the juices, we undertake a typical champagne pressing, slow and with little pressure, so that the juices do not colour from contact with the grapeskins

Once the grapes have been pressed, the yeast turns the sugar into alcohol: this is called the alcoholic fermentation.

Then comes the malolactic fermentation which is the transformation of the acid which enables the wine to balance.

The Champagnisation

Then comes the time for the cuvée blending, very specific to Champagne. You must know how to combine the blend of different wines from different grape varieties, different years, towns and plots to obtain, each year, a constant quality of our vintages. This entails a very important work of memory.

Around March – April it is bottling time (tirage). The wines will go through a second alcoholic fermentation in the bottles. This is called the sparkling fermentation. The added sugar changes to alcohol, due to the yeasts and naturally produce carbon dioxide which gives the bubbles and the froth of our champagnes. This lasts a month and then we leave the wines several years to age in the cellars. It is on the sediment, developing new aromas, that the wines will age and improve.

After ageing, the riddling helps the sediment to arrive at the bottle neck to then be ejected with the disgorgement and we add liqueur for the dosage of the champagne (brut, demi-sec..). The bottles will be capsuled and labeled after several months.