Sparkling Wines and the East Coast

Well, this is a big week for me. I am flying to Virginia for a mini-vacation and hope to bring back some promising wines.

First on the list will be sparkling wines, of course, because for their quality they are quite cheap on the East Coast. For 60-125 dollars, one can really find some exceptional vintage and non-vintage sparkling wine. The top two I will be looking for are Oasis Winery’s Brut and 1988 Celebration Infinity.

1988 was a remarkable year for many Virginia wineries. It should be noted that by sparkling wine I am referring to what many would think of as champagne. Since it is not grown in Champagne, France, it cannot be labeled as such.

However, it is made in the traditional methode champanoise, rather than, the inferior Charmat process (this is a faster and easier way to make sparkling wine but the final product is definitely lacking).

For the rest of the column I will write “sparkling wine” and mean sparkling wine made in the methode champanoise (which may or may not be champagne).
Sparkling wine is made from a combination of three grapes which may or may not all appear in a particular wine. Two red grapes, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, and one white, Chardonnay, make up sparkling wine.

A combination of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay is the most common blend. Ultra premium sparkling wines sometimes, but not always, include all three.

Recently, pure Chardonnay (blanc de blancs) sparkling wines have become a bit more common but they are not terribly interesting, in my opinion.

There are various styles of sparkling wine and these are based on the amount of sugar added to the wine during its initial bottling. Anything sweeter than Brut is rarely seen.

Doux (8-15 % sugar) is very very sweet and hard to find.

Demi- Sec (3-5%) is still quite sweet and probably still offensive to those with a taste for dry wine.

Extra-Sec (1-5 %) is slightly more palatable.

But Brut (1%) is really the showcase sparkling wine. It is the standardized sparkling wine and what is on 99% of all shelves. If you’ve had sparkling wine or champagne, it was probably a Brut.

Lastly Extra-Brut has no sugar added and is very rare and is an acquired taste in the extreme (like an acquired taste for haggis as opposed to an acquired taste for beer or coffee).

So, I’m off to the East Coast…