"True Facts" Wine Bottles, Busted

Wine bottles sure come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. Is this but one more plot to confuse you and me? Well, not intentionally!

In the old world of Europe advancements in glass-blowing technology melded together with tradition. It is this and a historical sense of regional branding and marketing identity that gives us the bottle shapes and colors we see on store shelves today. The new world of the Americas and the Southern hemisphere have for the most part simply adopted these old world bottle style conventions for similar wines. 

A.       Bordeaux: Straight sides and high shoulders, with dark green glass for the dry reds, lighter green for the dry whites, clear glass for the sweet whites.

B.       Burgundy: Gently sloping shoulders  with both red and white wines in similar sturdy green glass. In the new world this shape is widely used for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Wine bottles from the Rhone have very similar sloping shoulders like the Burgundy bottle, but a bit slimmer. In the Rhone, the bottles very often bear a coat of arms on the neck.

C.        Champagne: Thick glass, gently sloping shoulders and a deep punt (the indentation on the underside) are needed to sustain the intense pressure inside the bottle.

D.       Alsace and Mosel: Tall, slender and narrower than other styles, with a very gentle slope to the shoulders. Green glass suggests either the Mosel in Germany, or Alsace in France. Rhine wine is bottled in a bottle similar in shape to the Mosel/Alsace bottle, but the glass color is traditionally colored brown.

E.        Fortified wines: Port, Madeira and Sherry are traditionally packed in sturdy square-sided bottles which may have a bulge in the neck that functions to help capture the sediment when the aged wine is poured or decanted.

4th Down and Ten

Each of these bottle styles has a bottom surface that may be either flat or "punted" – except for Champagne/sparkling which demand the added surface area and strength that this indentation or punt provides. The true origins and rational for the punt seem lost to history. However, it isn’t difficult to deduce one reason  - and that is to have bottles stand upright. If you can imagine your self a glass bottle maker - it was much easier for a glass blower to form an even plane on a molten glass orb by pushing up on the center of the bottom, rather attempting to turn one that was perfectly flat. 

In today's eco-conscious era there are efforts under way to reduce the weight of wine bottle glass to minimize the carbon footprint. The glass gets thinner and the punt goes away. More and more wines are going into bladders for bag-in-a-box service. Some are even being shipped in tank to be served "on tap".

Can’t we just say S, M, L, XL?

We all are familiar with the 750mL wine bottle format found on grocer and wine shop shelves. Half bottles or splits, as they are called,  are relatively easy to find too. And most of us have spotted a magnum bottle through locked glass cabinets in finer establishments. It is a rare occasion to see the large, larger and largest bottle sizes except at black tie affairs or exclusive events. Few people know that there are standards for these mega-bottles and each of these standards has a really cool name – many named after biblical kings, for unknown reasons.

Wine bottle size conventions are based on Old World tradition, much like the bottle shapes.  Confusingly (of course), the same king’s name may be used to refer to different size bottles in different regions of France (Bordeaux, Champagne, Burgundy). Here are the large format bottles commonly referred to.

For the names of the larger bottlings, most French regions, and other regions of the world  tend to follow the Champagne and Burgundy terminology, and consequently some Jéroboams (four bottles) may be found. The Bordeaux term may be different for the same sized bottle. The big format bottles are popular with Bordeaux  and upper tier red wine collectors, particularly the eight-bottle sized Impériale. The small amount of air in the bottle (between the cork and the wine) and a the large amount of wine results in a small air to wine ratio. It is this smaller air/wine ratio that allows for a slower development of the wine as it ages when compared with smaller bottle formats.  

 

"True Facts" Sulfites in wine: Friend or Foe?

Sulfites refer to the family of sulfur-based compounds, some of which occur naturally, and others that are made commercially. Those most commonly used in winemaking are a gas, sulphur dioxide (SO2), and a powder, available as potassium metabisulphite. It seems hard to justify the use of something that sounds so very chemical and unnatural in my wine, yet sulfites are naturally produced by many organisms and found in such food items as grapes, oranges, cabbage, garlic and the onion family, and chicken eggs. They are even produced by our own bodies at close to a gram per day. Because of the antioxidant and antimicrobial properties of sulfites, they are used as preservatives for dried fruit, canned goods, shrimp, fruit juice, potato chips, and just a huge list of common food products.

Potassium metabisulfite is a common wine or must additive, in which it forms sulfur dioxide gas (SO2). This both prevents most wild microorganisms from growing, and it acts as a potent antioxident, protecting both the color and delicate flavors of wine. It is purchased as a white powder or salt containing approximately 57 percent sulfur dioxide. Potassium metabisulfite also comes in tablet form, known as Camden tablets.

• The use of sulfites in winemaking is a natural process that's been used by winemakers for a couple of thousand years, with the benign purpose of keeping your wine from spoiling before you can drink it. Ancient literature through the ages is loaded with techniques and handwringing over methods to preserve foods, grape juice and wine. Ancient wine preservation methods

• In modern winemaking sulfites in the form of SO2 may be used to clean winemaking equipment like barrels to insure that spoilage bacteria like brettanomyces do not become established in the winery. Sulfur compounds are added directly to the uncrushed grapes as they come in from the field, or immediately after crushing to tame wild yeast strains and other bacteria so that winemaking yeasts can take charge of fermentation.

• Then during fermentation, some winemakers will add sulphur to protect the must from contact with oxygen. Because it will kill the yeasts, it may be added later to actually halt fermentation if some residual sugar is desired in the finished wine, such as with German Rieslings or dessert wines.

• A final and perhaps most critical dose of SO2 is added to protect the wines while they are being shipped around the world. Even more importantly for wines that are to be cellared, the final sulfite additions are there to prevent oxidation, assuring that the finest wines will last and mature for decades or more. At each winemaking stage it is the stabilizing and antimicrobial effects of sulfur dioxide (SO2) that are desired, as well as its ability to bind with oxygen (which “oxidizes”, ages or hastens to spoilage) and certain aldehydes responsible off aromas and flavors.

You are probably NOT sulfite sensitive...

• The FDA estimates that 1% of the population is sensitive to sulfites. This works out to 4-5% of asthmatics in particular, who are so sulfite-sensitive that they must avoid sausages, pickles, canned tomatoes, dried fruits, condiments and many other good things - in addition to wine - in order to avoid an asthmatic reaction (tingling, redness, itching and a swollen tongue, and then depending on severity, progress to hives or an asthma attack). See Wine and Asthma (page 4), Wine Allergy?  and  Wine and Headaches

• If you get a headache or a stuffy nose after drinking wine, you may be allergic to something - possibly the histamines in some red wines, or in the case of hangovers, low tolerance to alcohol or simple over-indulgence! More (much) information on histamines in wine You might be experiencing something called Red Wine Headache Syndrome (RWHS), but it's not the sulfites.

• Actual sulfite levels in wine range from about 10 to 150 parts per million (ppm).  The legal maximum for wine in the United States is 350ppm. White dessert wines (sweet) have the most sulfur, followed by medium-sweet white wines and blush wines because these types of wine need the most protection due to the risk of re-fermentation of the residual sugars. Dry white wines generally have less, and dry reds have the least. Often not recognized is that red wines contain far less sulfur than white wines. This is partly because the tannins in red wines act as a preservative, making sulfur dioxide less necessary.

 

• Due to the real sensitivities of some (very few) the FDA begin requiring a prominent "Contains Sulfites" warning on every bottle of wine made or imported into the United States after 1986 with SO2 greater than 10ppm. Consider that about 10 - 20ppm occurs naturally in wine so the FDA rule covers just about every wine on my shelf and in your cellar. Despite the fact that virtually every winemaker in the world uses sulfites, the sudden appearance of the warning on United States wine labels has led to the mistaken belief that U.S. wines have "extra chemicals." Oddly, the fact that raisins, soy sauce, pickles, fruit juices and many other foods can contain as much as ten times more sulfites than wine doesn’t really seem to register.

Some wine producers, including many “organic” wine producers label and sell wines with no added sulfites. The key word is "added": Wine with zero sulfites is an unlikely thing, because they are a natural product of fermentation; the sulfites naturally created when the wine is made. Wines with less than 10ppm sulfites can be labeled as “sulfite free”, and these are very rare indeed, but are a blessing to those wine lovers who really are sulfite sensitive.

Champagne Part II

“TRUE FACTS” Here is part II, the end game of how Champagne becomes so wonderful. How DO they get all that yeast out of there? And what does BRUT actually mean?

When we left our nascent Champagne bottles they had been dosed with yeast, topped by a crown cap and were resting on their sides. Your “basic” non-vintage Champagnes will be aged like this for a minimum of 18 months. Your finer vintage Champagnes will develop like this for at least 3 years (often more) and your very best might lay down for up to 10 years. At this point all of the yeasty lees are coating the bottom inside of the bottle like a fine powder. The challenge now is to get all of this sediment into the neck of the bottle for removal. For the finest of Champagnes this process involves 100 or more hand steps. The bottles are taken from the stacks and each is placed neck first into angled holes bored into specially built wooden A-frames called “pupitres”. In the process known as “riddling” every 3 or 4 days, a trained workman (called a remuer in French) gives the bottles a shake and a slight turn, gradually increasing the angle of tilt and dropping the bottle back in the rack with a slight whack. After an entire  6 or 8 weeks, all the bottles end up positioned straight downward and all the sediment has collected in the neck.   To remove the yeast lees the neck of the bottle is placed in an icy brine or glycol solution, which causes the neck's contents (mainly the sediment) to freeze into a solid plug. What happens next is called “disgorging” the cork (or cap) is removed, and the pressure in the bottle causes the frozen plug of sediment to pop out. The French term for this process is dégorgement for disgorging. The disgorging procedure is followed by the remaining steps involved with this “méthode champenoise”, including adding the “dosage”, the topping off of the bottle with additional wine, putting in the actual cork it and cinching it down with a wire cage. The dosage is what will determine the degree of sweetness in the final wine. This shipping dosage (dosage d'expédition or liqueur d'expédition) is a syrupy mixture of sugar and wine (and sometimes brandy and/or citric acid) that is added to Champagne immediately prior to final corking to increase its level of sweetness. Depending on this level of sweetness, sparkling wines are described as Extra Brut, Brut, Extra Dry or Extra-Sec, Sec, Demi-Sec, or Doux. Serve your sparkling wines chilled - but not too cold (about 45-50° F). Serving Champagne too cold dumbs down much of the flavor and makes the wine seem too tart. Sparkling wines are perhaps the most versatile wines to pair with almost any food. Try with salty foods, cheeses, poultry, fish, even pork and veal. However, unless the sparkling wine is quite sweet (Demi-Sec or Doux) it may be overwhelmed by sweets or dessert. Champagne flutes are ok for good sparkling wines but to truly enjoy the really good stuff try drinking from a traditional wine glass like a Bordeaux or Pinot Noir glass. No need to swirl the glass since the bubbles will carry the aromas to your nose.