The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo Page A

gelatin. Sometimes winemakers used milk, cream, or blood. Or they could substitute a commercial mixture, probably quite unsavory in its origins, known as “powder number three” and thought to be particularly suited to the production of champagne.
    Essentially, a colle acts as a positively charged chemical magnet, attracting the negative wayward particles and gathering them in a big mass that will settle to the bottom of the barrel when chilled. Anyone who has mastered the skill in French cooking of clarifying a consommé knows that a mixture of beef marrow and egg whites can be used to produce a perfectly clear broth with an exquisite flavor, because the coagulants trap the smallest impurities in an unappealing mass. The principle is exactly the same in winemaking.
    Now that François was planning to bottle his own champagnes, getting the wines to stay crystal clear would be one of his biggest frustrations. There was no easy solution to the problem. A second fermentation in the bottle—when the sugar and yeast added in the liqueur de tirage are slowly transformed into alcohol and trapped carbon dioxide—is necessary to create the ebullient sparkle of champagne. But the process also created more dead yeast cells, which no one found any more attractive in the nineteenth century than we would now.
    As with cask wines, the process of clearing champagne could range from the time-consuming to the downright tedious. After the bottles had rested on their sides for a year in the cellars, developing their sparkle, someone had to find a way to get rid of the debris trapped inside. The easiest way was to rely on gravity. The process was known as transvasage , but we can think of it as racking wines in the bottle. The cellar workers could just pour the wine from one bottle to another, leaving the debris behind. It worked in theory, but the sparkle of the wine wasn’t exactly improved by all this pouring.
    The other way to dispel the debris was called dégorgement . Nineteenth-century wine manuals make disgorging sound pretty arduous. The cellar worker had to invert the bottle and pop the cork off just long enough to let a bit of the wine and all of the debris come shooting out—but not a moment longer. The trick was in having a good eye to track the sediment and an excellent thumb, capable of stopping up the bottle fast, before all the wine poured onto the floor in an expensive puddle. Working bottle by bottle, disgorging champagne was a time-consuming and expensive process. Even with modern advances in winemaking, it is part of the reason champagne continues to command luxury prices.
    Still, it would be foolhardy to wish for too easy a solution to this sediment—or to wish for too much cheap champagne. Ironically, experts today recognize that this irritating debris is actually crucial to the birth of great sparkling wine. During the year or more that the bottles are resting in the cellars, the fermentation is creating more than just alcohol and bubbles. The yeast cells also break down in the chemical process called “autolysis.” Autolysis begins when wine is left in contact with the enzymes naturally produced during the decomposition process—in other words, when a wine is aged while containing the dead yeast cells. Winemakers elegantly call it “aging on the lees” or, in French, sur lies . The important thing to know is that the result is a happy one, giving fine champagne its characteristic rich, nutty flavors.
     
     
    Now that the Clicquots were bottling their own wines, there was also the chance to experiment with blending the wines, creating a “marriage” of flavors. Making great wine—and making great champagne in particular—depended on skillful blending. Dom Pérignon may not have invented champagne, but he was a pioneer in the art of blending. World-class champagne today is often a carefully selected mixture of as many as forty different growths, or crus, with grapes from different varieties and grown in