Champagne showcase: let's get fizz-ical

Now, many of us will have the opportunity over the coming days to sit down with a nice glass of wine or two. And, arguably, one of the best ways to get dinner off to a flying start is to pop open a bottle of bubbly. But which one, and why does the fizz do the bizz, or is it all just in our heads? As well as being an internationally regarded immunologist, Cambridge University’s Clare Bryant is also a wine buff, and she took me to her local eatery in Saffron Walden, Chaters, which also doubles as a distillery!

Clare - It's that time of year, Chris. And one of the things that I think is particularly interesting about champagne is the whole history and science behind it. And what does a bubble do? So there's two elements to this - there's the methode traditionnelle, which is a way in which champagne is made, but it's also a way in which many sparkling wines across the world are made, including England, which produces particularly fine sparkling wine. So today we'll compare champagne with an English sparkling wine.

Chris - I'm looking forward to that bit. How far back in history does it go?

Clare - In the 1600s, the champenoise, the people in Champagne, decided to make wine to try and compete with people in Burgundy. They were making wine with one particular grape, pinot noir. And along the way, one of the things they found was, because they were farther North than Burgundy, it was colder during the fermentation process. They were getting a stopping point when the wine was too cold. And then, when the temperature warmed up again, they were getting fermentation occurring again. What they found is that sometimes their wines were fizzy. Now, initially, this caused total horror because this was a wine fault. And then after a while they tried marketing it, in particular to us Brits and the Brits decided they really liked fizzy wine. By around the mid 17, 1800s, sparkling wine was something they were working hard to produce. The challenge was, though, to get nice sparkling wine, you need to have the fermentation in the bottle, which means the bottles need to be very strong. So it wasn't really until about the early 1900s manufacturing processes started to produce bottles that were strong enough. After that production kicked off the champenoise were in business.

Chris - What's involved in actually making it, though?

Clare - So there's two phases of fermentation which is absolutely key. So you harvest the grapes, of which there are three usually, pinot noir, pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay, and they make what's called a base wine. Then they put this wine into bottles with some more yeast, a little bit of sugar, and then the wine undergoes a secondary fermentation in the bottle and that's what generates the gas. After a while, they take the old yeast out and then they dose it up with a little bit more sugar sometimes to alter the sweetness of the wine, and that's it.

Chris - How did the bubbles contribute to the wine, though? Is it just that it's fizzy and frothy and it looks exciting? Or do they actually affect the chemistry?

Clare - It actually contributes to the taste and the flavour because the bubbles act as a carrier. They carry volatile molecules all wrapped up in these little parcels of carbon dioxide and then, as the bubbles burst, they release the smell and the aromas and everything that's associated with the wine in a very concentrated way across the top of your glass. So whereby when you normally taste a glass of wine you might swirl the glass to try and get the aromas out, you don't need to do that with champagne. That's what the bubbles do and that's what makes the wine so exciting.

Chris - I think we should try some. What have you brought along for us to consider?

Clare - So I've bought two half bottles of wine, today.

Chris - Where's the other half? Have you already drunk it?

Clare - Chris, don't be so churlish. It's lunchtime. So what I've bought is a half bottle of rose champagne because rose champagne is very interesting. That's pink champagne. What they do to make rose champagne is they add a little bit of still red wine to the bottle to give it a pink colour. So that's a traditional champagne from France, and then I've also bought a half bottle of white sparkling wine from Nyetimber, which is one of the oldest English champagne makers in the UK.

Chris - I think we should pop some corks, but we've got to be careful how we do this, Clare, because there's a paper in the British Medical Journal for Christmas that cautions us how to safely open champagne bottles because apparently a very high proportion of eye injuries are caused by escaping champagne corks.

Clare - Yeah, I saw that. That's from our colleagues in ophthalmology. You can totally understand that because a cork comes out at quite a rate. But actually their advice on how to uncork a bottle of champagne is very relevant to maintaining the flavour as well because if you fire that cork out at a great rate of knots, you are firing out lots and lots of CO2 and you're reducing the flavour. So the best way to do it is to take the wire off, pop a tea towel over the top, gradually ease out the cork, and then gently pour your wine, preferably down the side of the glass because if you fire it into the middle of the grass you're losing your bubbles. There's about a million bubbles in a hundred mils of champagne, so you want to keep those as much as possible.

Chris - It sounds like the guy who counted the perforations in a Tetley tea bag, but which one are we going to start with?

Clare - Would you like to start with the rose? That's how you open a bottle of champagne, Chris.

Chris - I'm impressed. None wasted.

Clare - None wasted.

Chris - Right, so I've got a couple of glasses. That's one. Beautiful.

Clare - As you can see Chris, in your glass, there's little bubbles just coming up to the top and they'll be bringing all the aromas up to the surface. Take a deep sniff.

Chris - It's a very fruity number, there.

Clare - Should be fruits, cherries, cranberries, that kind of flavour actually in there. Tell me what you taste.

Chris - It's beautiful. Cherries. I can see why they're saying cranberries and cherries. Didn't get the smell so much, but the flavour: big hit. Beautiful.

Clare - And I can taste little toastiness on the back as well. And it's that combination of fruit toast and the bubbles and you can feel the bubbles on your tongue as well. That, coupled to the texture, that's what really helps carry the wine. So yeah, it is delicious, I have to say.

Chris - I probably wouldn't have considered something like that a rose, and I didn't realise that they made it by adding red wine to the mixture, and it's delightful.

Clare - Yeah, it'll work really well with smoked salmon. Any of the usual, traditional starters.

Chris - Let's try the English one. I'm really keen to get stuck into that and see how it compares. The people having lunch in here are going think we've got a lot to celebrate, Clare

Clare - We survived another year, Chris - there's a lot to celebrate! So you can see something else interesting here as well, Chris, which is you can see a sort of mousse-y stuff that comes out on the top. So that froth is due to the protein in the wine, actually. Have a sniff.

Chris - This doesn't have the same fruitiness. This is more of just what a white wine would smell like. To me, it doesn't have that same fruity sparkle.

Clare - Yeah, I agree. There's no cherries there, right?

Chris - It's nice, though. It's fruity, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what fruit. Apples maybe. It's certainly fruity, but it doesn't have the intrigue that the other one did. That tantalised my taste buds.

Clare - I would agree. This is more of a chardonnay flavour through it. It's a different beast, but it's a beautiful beast. They're two different things. That's one of the reasons why I bought them, because I knew the flavour profile would be different.

Chris - And lastly, what should I eat with this? Because there's a lot made of horses for courses, wines for different dishes. So what's a really good compliment for these sorts of beverages?

Clare - So one of the things that's very interesting about champagne is that actually it balances out with quite a lot of different foods, but in particular it works well with the umami food profiles. So things like smoked salmon, which has been an obvious pairing as you know, but it's the kind of complex flavour, the umami flavour, that you get with smoked salmon, but also with ham and various other savouries. And in fact, in front of us, we have a little bit of ham and we shall shortly try it with the sparkling wines and see what we think.

Chris - So there you go. We've sorted out at least the start to our Christmas dinner this year. Cheers Clare, thank you very much for doing this for us, and now I know a bit more about champagne. I'm really grateful.

Clare - Happy Christmas, Chris.