By: Read ‘Em And Drink: Posts of the Week « Ms. Drinkwell

Read ‘Em And Drink: Posts of the Week « Ms. Drinkwell — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:43:17 +0000

[...] Fun facts on Fizz — To find out why hangovers from bubbly are so wicked, how many bubbles are really in that bottle of Champers, and the proper way to store your sparklers, scroll about halfway down this post from My Wine Education. [...]

By: Burke Morton

Burke Morton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:04:32 +0000

Thanks for the great post! I have spent some time probing the machinery of the Champagne industry, and there are a couple of things that come to mind that I hope will be of value.
The bad bubbly hangover has two other potential causes, one of which is related to your first reason of drinking too much of it: the CO2 in sparkling wine magnifies a drinker’s experience of everything in the wine–so whatever histaminic reaction one might have from an aggressively made base wine (i.e., the wine before the bottle fermentation that makes it bubbly) is made much greater when with the addition of bubbles. A doctor explained the effect to me this way: When drinking sparkling wine, we are also consuming dissolved C02, which enters the bloodstream on the same pathway that oxygen would, reducing the oxygen concentration in the blood. This makes us feel the alcohol more quickly and makes us more susceptible to a hangover. He also asserted that drinking sparkling water can have a similar effect when combined with wine, but that it is much less pronounced.
The only antidote for this is to DRINK WATER. This is true any time we drink alcohol, but especially so when it’s Champagne, so drink MORE water.
The second reason for the hangover that pops a Champagne-bottle’s worth of brain-cells is related to your sage advice of drinking young (for non-vintage wines that is, not underage…). The major Champagne houses (and their offspring) have deep pockets that allow them storage space (which is generally the always romantic-looking tanker truck) for about ten to fifteen vintages of juice. They spread the blend across so many vintages in an effort to keep the non-vintage wine from changing character significantly through the years. To further insure this, the wine destined for non-vintage use is stripped of its general vintage character (it goes through a centrifuge and intense clarification). This is so that when the neutral-tasting base wine gets the yeast and dosage of liquid sugar (which is the crucial step that turns the still wine into sparkling wine), also included in the sugar is a cocktail of additives that contains the typical house flavors. From one Champagne house to another, one cannot be sure of the after-effects of making wine this way, but some non-vintage wines encourage hangovers more than others. I’ve noticed that this doesn’t come up at wine dinners, which is probably just as well.
Some see this as “doctored wine” and want to avoid it. If so, estate-bottled Champagne (also known as Grower Champagne or Farmer Fizz) is the way to go. The growers typically only have enough space to store two to three years worth of juice (as opposed to a decade or more) to blend together for their non-vintage wine, and when they add a dosage (IF they choose to, but that’s another story) with the yeast, they add not sugar but unfermented grape juice, so the process is generally purer.
Incidentally, the non-vintage Grower Champagnes do age quite well because they do not contain any old wine, but I can see no reason to sit on non-vintage Champagne–it’s not likely to get any better.
A by-product of the insurgency of Farmer Fizz (which was virtually unavailable 12 years ago) is that the non-vintage wines from the big houses have improved. I recently had the NVs from Bollinger and Roederer and loved them…and there wasn’t hangover in sight.

Comments on: Sparkling Wine with Dinner

By: Read ‘Em And Drink: Posts of the Week « Ms. Drinkwell

By: Burke Morton