Traditional Method Sparkling Wine

Champagne's method travelled to the Wairau Valley in the 1980s, found cool limestone free air and patient winemakers, and stayed. Traditional method sparkling wine, the kind whose second fermentation happens in the very bottle it is sold from, is now one of Marlborough's most serious categories: crisp, leesy, cleanly fruited wines that cost a fraction of their French models and lose little in the comparison. This page follows the method from winter pruning to the final cork, and explains what to look for on the label.

The method, step by step

The process begins unglamorously, in winter, because sparkling wine is a vineyard decision before it is a cellar one. The three champagne grapes grow here comfortably: chardonnay for spine and citrus, pinot noir for structure and red fruit, occasionally pinot meunier for early ripening softness. Fruit for bubbles is picked earlier than fruit for table wine, at lower sugar and higher acid, because the second fermentation will add alcohol and the wine needs its freshness to survive years of ageing.

The first fermentation runs as it would for any white wine, usually in tank or old wood, producing a dry, high acid base wine that would taste severe on its own. Blending follows: the winemaker mixes base wines from different sites, varieties and reserve parcels to build a consistent house style, the skill champagne calls assemblage. Then the transformation: the wine is bottled with a measured dose of sugar and yeast, sealed with a crown cap, and left to referment. Inside each bottle the yeast consumes the sugar, produces the alcohol lift and, crucially, the carbon dioxide that dissolves into the wine under pressure: the bubbles are made here, in the bottle, not injected later.

Lees, riddling and dosage

The spent yeast cells, the lees, then do the slow work that defines the category. As the bottles rest on their sides, often for two to five years and sometimes longer, the lees break down and release compounds that give the wine its bready, brioche, toasted complexity and its creamy texture. The length of this rest is the main quality ladder on the label: a non vintage style carries the legal minimum of around a year in bottle on lees, while the vintage and reserve cuvées age three, five or more years before release.

Clearing the lees out without losing the wine is a solved problem with an elegant history. Traditionally the bottles were riddled: turned a fraction each day and tilted progressively downwards in wooden racks, the pupitres of old champagne cellars, until the lees collected in the neck. Hand riddling survives as a craft; most production now uses gyropalettes, machines that rotate crates of hundreds of bottles through the same programme. The neck is then frozen, the crown cap removed, and the plug of ice and lees pushed out by the pressure inside, disgorgement. A small dose of sugar wine, the liqueur d'expédition, tops the bottle and sets its final sweetness, from the bone dry brut nature, through brut, the standard category, to the rarely seen sweeter grades. Cork, cage, label: the wine is finished.

What Marlborough brings to it

The valley's gift to the method is base wine with natural drive. The long cool ripening described in the climate guide delivers grapes that hold their acid at full flavour ripeness, exactly the raw material the method needs, since every stage after the first fermentation softens the wine and structure at the start is structure at the end. The regional style that results is brighter and more openly fruity than champagne: citrus, green apple and shortbread rather than the heavier brioche of warmer base wines, with a fine, persistent bead. Producers here have worked the method since the mid 1980s, when the first serious méthode traditionnelle came out of Marlborough fruit, and the category now includes estate grown cuvées, blanc de blancs built on chardonnay alone, and rosé versions coloured with a splash of pinot noir. The blanc de blancs style, all chardonnay, has a particular following; one Wairau estate has kept the tradition continuously since the 1990s, and its aged releases show how long these wines can go.

Reading the label

Four phrases carry the information. Traditional method or méthode traditionnelle confirms the second fermentation happened in this bottle, the distinction that matters; tank method fizz, fermented in bulk, is a different and cheaper drink. Vintage or a year on the label means the wine comes from one harvest, usually a good one, and has aged longer. Blanc de blancs means chardonnay only, tension and citrus; blanc de noirs means the black grapes only, weight and red fruit. Brut is the sweetness grade, dry to the taste with a few grams of sugar carried. Anything aged longer will say so, because aging is expensive and no one hides it.

Serving and keeping

Serve it properly cold, 6 to 8 degrees, in a tulip glass rather than a flute: the flute keeps the mousse but strangles the nose, which is half the wine's interest. Open bottles hold a day under a proper sparkling stopper, no longer. Unopened, the wines are sold ready and change slowly; three to five years of quiet, cool storage improves the reserve tiers, and the logic is laid out in the cellaring guide. At the table the brut styles take oysters, fried food and salted dishes the way acid and bubbles always do, while the rosé versions lean towards salmon and duck. For the grapes behind the category, the pinot noir profile covers one parent, and the region's other still wines begin at the grape guides.