Champagne veuve godart & fils

Le champagne et sa région | Le vin | Du jus au vin

Pressing

Once picked, the grapes are taken to the wine press as soon as possible.
The basic principle of Champagne wine pressing is to allow the grains to break up without letting the skin change the colour of the grape juice. In this way, white wines can be obtained from black grapes.
Moreover, this principle has another advantage: it allows juice extraction to be limited to the best quality parts, so that neither the grape skins nor the grape seeds are allowed to impair the fine quality of the must obtained.

These musts are divided into four categories:

The first juice constitutes the “cuvée” (wine blend),
it is followed by the juice from the first and second pressings,
The “rebêche” (turning) is the last stage, but it is excluded from the Champagne appellation for quality reasons.

The “bellons”, which are vats placed under the wine presses, receive the musts category by categoryand allow them to clear by ensuring a resting time of twelve to twenty-four hours.

First fermentation

The first fermentation lasts about two to three weeks.
Its principle is simple: under the action of the yeasts, the sugar that is naturally contained in the juice is progressively transformed into alcohol.

Yeasts are therefore at the origin of this change, also called “bouillage” (bubbling), since the sugar produces alcohol as well as carbon dioxide during its transformation. All these biological reactions provoke an increase in temperature, thus making it necessary to check temperature variations with precision.
(above 23°C the temperature may be harmful to the future champagne)

The wines are then drawn off and prepared for malo-lactic fermentation.

Malo-lactique fermentation

This is a biological de-acidification of the wines by the lactic bacteria that are naturally present in the wine storehouses or wine cellars; however, these bacteria can also be artificially introduced.
Even though some wine producers have decided not to use it (because it has been controversial for a long time now on account of a lactic taste tending to disappear rather slowly) the malo-lactic fermentation is now used by most of them.

The two schools of thought thus co-exist, sharing the common quest for quality.

Wine clearing

While in progress, the subsequent fermentations produce a large number of particles. These organic particles are suspended in the wine making it turbid and opaque.

The clearing process takes place in two stages:
The first stage is the bonding, the aim of which is to bond the particles together in order to make them insoluble. Once agglutinated together, the organic residues will progressively become concentrated in the form of a deposit.

Solidification may be followed by filtration in which the wine is passed through a filter, which retains the larger particles due to its fineness.

Filtration thus achieves better wine clarity. The next stage is wine stabilization.

Wine stabilization

Stabilization allows the prevention of the appearance of crystals in the bottle at the time of the foam formation or when you keep the wine in your refrigerator.
In fact, wine naturally contains scale which gives rise to the following problem: wine which has not been subjected to substantial cooling before its bottling runs the risk, when in contact with the cold, of having a major concentration of crystals formed in it, as the scale reacts easily to low temperatures.

In order to avoid this, the wine must be stabilized: the wine is therefore kept in a vat at -4°C for at least 48 hours. A further filtration will allow the separation of the crystals from the wine, so that no further dissolution of these crystals may occur during the temperature rise. In this way it acquires a stability that will prevent any further appearance of scale crystals.
In the past, the wine stores were left open throughout the winter, and this stabilization thus took place naturally but imperfectly.

After all these operations, the musts are transformed into clear wines.