Blue Mountain Vineyards in OK Falls, BC is one of the leading producers of sparkling wine in Canada, and in fact, if you’re a fan of a dryer, more traditional Brut style of bubbly, than this may very well be the best one coming out of the Okanagan.
I was invited to cover part of the winemaking process and was surprised to find how complex and time consuming it actually is to create a nice sparkling wine.
Blue Mountain employs the traditional method, or Methode Traditionelle as it’s called in the wine world, in which the bubbles come from fermenting yeast which is left in the wine for up to several years before being removed through a riddling and disgorging process. The end result is what we commonly refer to as Champagne, although in BC our wines cannot carry that French regional designation, so we are left to call it sparkling wine.
Essentially the process for making Champagne…or uhh, sparkling wine, goes a little like this:
- Grapes are harvested and pressed for their juice (traditionally this is Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier, but at Blue Mountain the Pinot Meunier is subbed out for Pinot Gris, making for a unique and subtly distinct blend)
- The grape juice ferments in a tank or oak barrel
- The wine is bottled with yeast
- The wine is left to age “sur lie” or “on the lees” — basically yeast is in the bottle unfiltered
- The wine is riddled meaning that the bottle is rotated and rested through a series of moves. In the old days this happened in a riddling rack, but there are now machines that take out some of the laborious hands on tasking
- The final move in the riddling process sees the wine end up upside down, or “sur pointe” and the yeast all falls to the bottom
- The yeast is frozen and then forced out of the bottle in a process known as disgorging
- The bottle is topped up with dosage (pronounce dosage in French) which is a house secret and can be anything from sugar water to brandy
- The cork is put in and the bottles are left to age further before they are ready for market
Of course my explanation is not that of a winemaker, so best just watch the video. What you can take from this though is how complex traditional sparkling wines are. The things that make a great bubbly can be quite subtle, but make all the difference. The whole process is quite intensive from growing to harvesting to aging to bottling, so a great sparkling wine is truly something to relish and savour.
Blue Mountain Brut Sparkling Wine is available directly from the winery, or at fine wine merchants in Vancouver and Calgary.
Also read the EatDrinkDrink Wine Scout take on the Blue Mountain Brut and Brut Rosé.
