We all associate sparkling wine and champagne with joyous celebrations. However, recently, many people have recognized that sparkling wine can provide a bargain accompaniment even for an everyday meal.

Making Sparkling Wine and Champagne

If you see the words ‘traditional method’ or ‘methode traditionelle’ on a bottle of champagne or sparkling wine, then it has been made using the methods originally developed in the Champagne region of France.

The first step in making sparkling wine is to create a base wine that is very acidic. Secondly, the base wine is put in a bottle with some extra yeast and sugar and sealed. A word of warning, if you are planning to make your own, the seal must be VERY strong as the build-up of carbon dioxide can be extremely powerful!

Finally, the bottle needs to be tipped forwards so that the sediment sinks into the neck of the bottle. In traditional champagne houses, the bottles are turned daily and tapped for a period of up to three months to remove the sediment. However, the more modern approach is to freeze the neck, release the sediment and then re-cork the bottle.

Champagne Uncovered

Only wines produced in the French region of Champagne are allowed to carry the label ‘champagne’. Therefore, we are seeing a lot of sparkling wine on our shelves that is of excellent quality. Not only must champagne be produced in the Champagne region, but it must also be made from the chardonnay, pinot noir or pinot meunier grape varieties. Even the bottling method is unique to the Champagne region.

A champagne label will tell you about the sweetness of the particular champagne. For example, rich or doux champagne is very sweet with over 50g of sugar per liter, demi sec has between 17 and 35g of sugar per liter, extra dry is a label used for champagne containing between 12 and 20g of sugar per liter, brut is dry champagne with less than 15g of sugar per liter and extra brut is very dry champagne with under 6g of sugar per liter.

If you want a very special bottle of champagne look for the words “tête de cuvée” on the bottle as this refers to a premium champagne which is normally made from a single harvest.

Choosing and Serving Sparkling Wine

Sparkling wine or champagne is a popular choice for those trying to choose wine for non-wine drinkers. Champagne is known as the quality bubbly; good champagne is expensive and deservedly so. You’d be wise to avoid the cheaper end of the market as it will be at best a disappointment and at worst undrinkable.

For a cheaper alternative, often of similar quality, look for sparkling wines from areas such as Australia, New Zealand and California. France also produces some excellent sparkling wines from regions other than Champagne, for example, Saumur in the Loire Valley. Other worthy alternatives include the sparkling offerings from Italy, including the light Prosecco and the sweet Asti varieties. If you are looking for a very good value sparkling wine then consider Spanish cava. Whilst nowhere near the same quality as champagne it is a well-priced, drinkable alternative.

Sparkling wine and champagne should be served at 6 Degrees Celsius (43 degrees Fahrenheit); therefore, an ice bucket is essential from the moment the bottle of sparkling wine leaves the refrigerator. A final word of caution, when you open a bottle of bubbly, there will be a large release of gas so make sure that the cork is controlled and not pointed at anyone!

The best and easiest thing to do is simply to order something you’ve heard of. If you already know of a wine that’s good, simply order a glass. Or if you know the wine is good, order a bottle and impress your date (plus if the date works out, you’ll have something to remember it by). The good thing about ordering what you know is that it’s safe. That could also be a bad thing because you could miss up the opportunity to try something new. Because even if you like a wine, it doesn’t mean your date will have the same taste.

Every restaurant carries different wine, so if there’s nothing you recognize and if you’re going to try something new (and it’s advised that you should), ask for the restaurant’s wine list. This way, you’ll be able to see how much each wine costs and the wine’s country of origin without having to ask. From there, you can simply order something at random or ask your date. You never know when you’ll come across a great new wine. And even if the wine you order isn’t any good, it could still end up being a fun experience: Remember back on our first date how terrible that wine was!?

The last option is simply to just ask. Ask for a wine list and then after looking through it for a while, don’t be afraid to ask the waiter which wines are good. He’ll usually offer a few selections based on different types of taste. From there, try a glass. Remember, it’s only a first date; so unless you’re made of money, don’t spend too much (you’re only trying to impress her a little bit). Only order a single glass per meal (some restaurants will think it rude when people ask for a second glass if you didn’t like the first) and don’t ever tell the restaurant that their wine wasn’t any good or that you didn’t care for it.

A few things to remember are that the waiter usually offers you the cork to the bottle you’re drinking from. If you’re only ordering a glass, and not a bottle, don’t hesitate to take up his offer. Remember to swirl your glass and to breathe in the aroma before and while you’re drinking. Swirling it in your mouth a little can also be a nice feeling and may exaggerate the taste. Many people are intimidated about ordering wine, but as long as you have a basic understanding of what to do, it will almost always be worth it and be a good experience.

I was reading about wines the other day without really knowing why? In the article it talked about counterfeit wines and called them Château Faux. For some reason I felt that this was kind of intriguing. We all know about the big problems with Chinese imports that we have been experiencing, but how many people know that counterfeiting wine is also a big industry in China? Some of the wine bottles from as recently as 20 years ago are no longer manufactured the same way. In order to counterfeit some of these wines from that time, most counterfeiters would have to refill an original bottle. Here is the thing however, the bottle has to be perfect and the labels also have to be in order. One might not know that this was a counterfeit product even if he was an expert, until the cork was pulled. Most of the time, I have been told, that you can tell by the cork, if you know what you’re looking for, if a bottle has been refilled. Here is something that I just learned, the corks in wine bottles may have a vintage burned into their side. I don’t know if this exists on the older brands, but I do know it does exists on some. One dead giveaway is when you pull the cork on an expensive bottle of wine and this area has been smoothed out, if this brand usually had it burned into the cork. So here is the way that works, this type of wine would have the name and the vintage on the cork. .The particular bottle of wine I am talking about was said to have been purchased for $2000.

Just like US currency, some of the makers of very expensive wine are using high-tech labels and engraving, hoping that this will make counterfeiting their product, much more difficult. This doesn’t hold true if somebody gets a hold of an empty bottle. There are some people out there that collect rare wines. Can you imagine how many of them think that they have the genuine articles stored in their wine cellar, when they really only have a counterfeit? About the only saving grace in wine counterfeiting is that the people that usually buy these expensive bottles of wine can afford the loss. This does not make the crime any less serious however. I have always said a crime is a crime is a crime. It doesn’t lessen the crime just because you’re taking advantage of the richer segment of our society. The counterfeiting of wine has become so widespread in the United States, that the FBI is now involved in it. Some feel that some of the biggest wine auction houses in the world are turning a blind eye to the question of whether bottles are authentic, or they are not. Perhaps this is because nobody wants to have to pull the cork to answer that question, they feel they would destroy the value of the wine. The truth is that even if you opened a bottle or two from a large consignment of wines to be auctioned, this certainly does not guarantee that the rest of the wine is authentic. This is truly a huge problem for wine connoisseurs and collectors. When wine collections are auctioned from completely honest people, that doesn’t mean that they unknowingly don’t have counterfeits in their collections.

So how much wine is sold at auction houses? Well, The Independent, states that last year Christie’s is said to have sold about $58 million worth of rare wine from London and Paris to New York and Los Angeles. That’s an awful lot of wine just from one auction house. It has been said that there is some kind of deal between the Italian Mafia and Chinese manufacturers of fraudulent wines. This problem is so bad that it is believed that some of the very old wines may have been forged many years ago and went undetected. I can see it all now, some multi-rich executive is hosting a dinner party and pops open a bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild, which he paid thousands of dollars for and all his guests drink it and praise the flavor, but in truth it is a forgery and nobody has even noticed. I really don’t know, but I do suspect that it just might be possible for a wine to be imitated in a lab. They may not get it exactly right, but it just might be close enough to fool many people. After all, if you gave a bottle of this stuff to somebody who had never tasted it, how would they know it was a forgery. So it seems to me that you would have had to have tasted the real thing at least once, before you could judge the next bottle.

When we talk about wine counterfeiting in China, we are not saying that the Chinese government condones this practice. As a matter of fact, they are actively cracking down on wine counterfeiters. The problem in China is that there are actually whole factories there dedicated to this. So these are not small operations, they are more like wholesale wine counterfeiting operations. As I said above, many of these factories have ties to organized crime and are working hand-in-hand with the Mafia in Italy, the Australian mob and many other gangster organizations. I guess one of the real big problems will happen when they have perfected counterfeit wines to the point where you wouldn’t be able to tell the counterfeit from the real without a lab analysis. In this technological world of ours this cannot be viewed as an impossibility. Looking at the art community for example, it is now possible for a computer-controlled machine to make an exact copy of an original painting so perfect that a law has been passed that states that it must say on the painting that is a reproduction. It may just turn out that the same thing will happen in the wine market in years to come. In a way, while this might be a bad thing for wine collectors and wine aficionados, it might turn out to be the beginning of a good thing for the rest of us. What I am talking about here is food that can be manufactured without using real animals and yet be so close in taste that we would not know the difference.

We know that much of the foreign wine that is being sold in Beijing is not genuine.This is mostly a problem for the Chinese however. Europe has also been accused of high-end wine counterfeiting. Many believe that this is actually where wine counterfeiting began and that it is only recently that an Asian market has developed for it. You want to impress your boss so you got him a bottle of wine that cost a few hundred dollars. Later you begin to think about your purchase. You start to worry that the bottle may not contain the genuine product and that maybe you boss, who’s coming to dinner at your house with his wife, has tasted the genuine article and will know the difference. What should you do? Should you take the chance and put this wine out on the table, or should you get something a little less exotic, that has less of a chance of not being genuine? This may be the choice that faces all wine drinkers in the future. It is nice to think that you have something rare, but it is not so nice when you have to worry about its authenticity. Well I have people coming over tomorrow. I guess I’ll go out and get myself a box of wine, nothing is too good for my guests and I know for a fact that it is genuine Gallo.

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Many would-be wine drinkers are put off by the idea that they have to come up with an elaborate and expensive wine storage method (along with many bottles of wine) before they can start enjoying the pastime of drinking and enjoying wine.

However, this is not the case at all.  Wine can be enjoyed even if you do not have a lot of space for wine storage.  Many people make do with a small corner of their kitchen, and still others simply buy a bottle or two at a time as they are needed.

Why Store Wine?

During the Roman Empire, the long-held belief that all wine should be consumed sooner rather than later was disproven.  Romans stored their wine in tightly closed bottles and noticed that some wines improved in taste and complexity the longer they were allowed to age.

Most white wines do not continue to improve when aged, making them poor candidates for long-term storage and some reds are better when they are consumed as soon as you buy them.  However, there are many reds that will age very nicely, making your wine storage efforts worthwhile.

Even if you do not plan to drink the wine after it is aged, buying a case of immature wine and holding on to it until it is at its optimum drinking age can be a wise investment.  Many savvy wine drinkers buy a case of young wine, store it until it is aged completely, and then sell off half of the case while keeping the other half to drink.  This can net a nice profit, even effectively meaning that you get half a case of wine for free.

How Do You Start A Wine Storage Effort?

You do not need to have a huge wine cellar with an entire wall of storage.  If you have a temperature-controlled, dark, and moderately humid cellar that can serve as wine storage, then great!  However, most people do not have this luxury.

For everyone else, there are many other wine storage options.  Most wines purchased by the casual drinker will be ready-to-drink and do not require any significant amount of wine storage for the purposes of improving the taste.  In fact, most ready-to-drink bottles should not be kept in wine storage for more than 8-12 months.

If you have just a few bottles, a small wine storage rack placed in your living room or in a dark closet will be sufficient.  You will want to avoid having the rack in your kitchen due to the temperature fluctuations that are unavoidable around the stove and oven.

If you plan to keep a few more bottles around for a long amount of time, a popular wine storage method is a portable wine cellar.  These appliances look like small “dorm” refrigerators and can be kept nearly anywhere in your home where you have room.  They are climate-controlled and will keep your wine at optimum wine storage conditions.

Whichever method of wine storage appeals to you, there are a few basic factors to remember: tilt the bottles to keep the corks wet, keep the temperature somewhere between 45 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit at all times, and above all, keep the bottles away from direct sunlight and heat.

1. You may start finding a storage place for your wine collections. You may create a place for cooling and storing at home for all the wines you collect.

2. You should determine what type and brands you would like to collect. You may have the option of buying only the red or white wines. You should have a plan on where you want to start buying wines with good refinery and quality.

3. You may participate in trade shows where there are wine exhibits. This is a chance for you to get to know the members of the wine clubs and get to know the local wine traders.

4. You should educate yourself on wines. You may purchase wine magazines and wine newsletters for more information about wines. They will also be able to provide you tips about buying, storing and cooling wines.

5. You may purchase magnums for wine storage. It will make the wine more processed because of the small cork that covers the entire hole of the bottle. It protects the content from air and sunlight as well.

6. You may consider purchasing “wine futures”. This can assure you of acquiring the best international wines.

7. You may try tasting varieties of wines to prepare them for storage. You can identify which wine needs more aging. You may learn more about wine when you master the art of tasting and distinguishing which wine is the best.

8. Learn how to identify flavor quality. There is a difference between the vintage wines and the instantly processed wines.

9. Before purchasing wine in bulk, make sure that you are sure about what kinds of wines you would like to collect.

10. You should also let the wine traders know that you are a wine enthusiast. They can let you know if the wines you collect are available in their stores. You could even ask for their contact numbers with advice on what wine you should get if you travel to a particular place.

Collecting wine doesn’t just provide leisure and fun. It may also be considered as a gateway to starting up your own business. You may attend local wine festivals and tasting events to discover new brands of wines and locally made ones that could have high potential in the market.