Stuff You Should Know - How Champagne Works

Episode Date: May 16, 2017

Sure we can all agree that champagne is probably the greatest thing humans have or ever will invent, but how much do we understand how it's made? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Pierre Clark. There's Charles Jock Bryant.

Okay. Jerry. Hi, Jerry. Oh, nice. Rollin'. Are we allowed to tell everyone your last name, Jerry? We've done it before. Okay.

What if they go try to find her on Facebook and find out she doesn't actually exist? That it's all just a plant, fake Facebook page that we've created. Oh no, that she is an actual plant. Right. That grows in the corner. Yep, feed me.

I am worried about this one. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. Oh, why? You were worried about the wine one for the same reasons? You didn't do the wine one. I know, that's why. That's exactly why. Is it the same reason?

Exactly for those reasons. Totally fine, man. No one knows anything about champagne. People spend lifetimes learning this stuff. Yes, but we have a show and everyone knows that we don't spend a lifetime learning about what we talk about, that we just do our research

and we try to find the most interesting stuff to explain how something works. I know, but these, anytime it's something where someone is such a huge, where it's such a big thing for so many people, I just know we're gonna mess up pronunciations in French. So champagne.

Right, champagne. Yeah. I think it's how Bugs Bunny always pronounced it. Oh yeah? Yeah. So you're following a grand tradition. I didn't know he was a drinker. Well, we are gonna talk about champagne.

It's a little late now. Do you like champagne? I love champagne. Oh, okay. Love it. I don't. I mainly drink sparkling wine, then I don't really drink champagne itself,

but buddy, this article made me wanna drink some champagne. Well, you do a little Prosecco, little Cava? Sure, I don't really discriminate. Okay. I do, I don't drink any of it. You don't like champagne, huh? No, I don't like sparkling wine. It's not for Chuck, as they say.

I got you. I love it. As they say. Love it, man. I particularly love chandelon out in California. I will say one time at a party, though, many years ago, like in the 90s, I drank a lot of just champagne, only champagne.

This might be why you don't like champagne. For the only time in my life. No, I actually, I felt like a 12 year old girl. That was wonderful. Oh, that's your problem. No, champagne is... No, no, no. I mean, silly and...

Oh, I see. Bubbly and fun. Like I played hopscotch and stuff like that. Yeah, I know. That's terrible. Why would you ever want to do that again? I don't mean I felt like a girl because I was drinking champagne.

That's what I thought you meant. No, no, no. I was like, well, there's your problem. Champagne's not a girly drink. No, no, no. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who do think that. Buddy, I will drink pink champagne with your finger up.

At a bullfight. Oh, gross. Yeah. You got to do something to wash the pain away. Yeah, it's just not for me. And that gave me such a bad headache. The next day, I didn't go back to the well. I'll have, you know, if someone wants to toast me,

I won't go. No, I'm not drinking that. Well, you were probably drinking pretty sweet champagne, weren't you? I don't remember. Usually the higher the sugar content and anything that the more of a hangover you're gonna have. Yeah, well, I don't know.

Well, I love it. Good. You mean I've been to Shandong twice? Okay. Went on Shandong cruise once? Wow. Big fans of Shandong. Where is that?

Hint, hint. It's out in Napa, Napa Valley. It's famously attached to Moet and Shandong. And then Shandong went and said, hey, we're gonna open up something in California too. Gotcha. He said, cool. Because their terroir is can't be beat.

It's got good terroir. And that's another thing too. This is what I'm nervous about. I'm not nervous about getting it wrong. I'm nervous about coming across like it's just a complete jackass sophisticate. You know, I'm not at all. I just like Champagne.

I know more now about Champagne doing this research for the last couple of days than I ever had before. So I definitely don't put myself out there as like an expert in any way, shape, or form. All right, so that's called- So everybody put your emails away. 10 minutes of caveats by Josh and Chuck.

See, that was French and you pronounced it great. Cavite? Is that Latin? All right, well, I guess if you don't know anything about Champagne, you might have noticed that we already said both the word Champagne and sparkling wine. And I think most people probably know this,

but some people may not. Champagne is a region in France. And technically, you were only supposed to say Champagne for sparkling wine if it comes from that region. Right, so all Champagne that's sparkling wine is sparkling wine. But all sparkling wine is not Champagne. That's right.

I think that simplifies it. In Champagne itself, the region is about an hour and a half, 90 minutes or so, northeast of Paris. Or east. And this article points out that it's one of the least visited regions of France, but I bet they have their fair amount of enthusiasts that go to the region.

I would guess so, sure. But maybe just not as many. I don't know, it's the south of France or other Burgundy maybe. Right, well, Burgundy comes to mind for sure. Apparently, Chablis, I didn't realize that that was a wine-growing region, did you? I don't think I did.

In the very famous Mad Dog region. Right. The Notre Dame. So silly. So Champagne is a region. It's also a sparkling wine. But yeah, like you said, you can't make sparkling wine outside

of this Champagne region. And you can even make sparkling wine inside of the Champagne region. And unless you're following a very strictly controlled process within this particular region of France, you are not allowed anywhere in the world to call your sparkling wine Champagne. It's what's called an Appalachian, Appalachian.

No, that's a mountain range. It's what's called a... Appalachian Trail. Appalachian de origine control. Or AOC is what we're gonna call it. But it's basically the same thing with Bourbon here in the United States, right? Yeah.

Where you have to follow specific rules and you have to make it within a specific region. And the whole point is it's, you don't want just any schmo making something that's similar to your product, but not nearly as good. That's not going through anywhere near the painstaking amount of process

and labor that you're doing. And still call it the same thing you're calling it. You don't wanna do that. Yeah. So you have to restrict it. Especially in the French, you know, that they're not gonna be all willy nilly about that. That's their region.

Yeah, apparently there's something like 84,000 acres, which I don't think is a lot. And what are those cities? The two main city are Rem and Epernais. But we even have a thing in here that says, if you say Rem, then you're an American city slicker. If you say Reims. Oh, okay.

Rem, I've seen plenty. Reims is what they say in the Help Me Out article that we got. I think you just earned some fans in France with that one. Well, by any other name, it is still Champagne and those are the cities. And there are, but three grapes that you can use to make Champagne.

You can't just say, oh, that muscadine looks nice. Like they do here in Georgia. Throw it in a bottle and firm in it. Yeah, you're a peaty. Put this in your mouth too and spit it up in the bottle. There are three grapes and they are the Pinot Noir grape, the Chardonnay grape. And how do you pronounce that last one?

Pinot Monnier. Okay. Which is another dark grape or red grape or black grape, I think is what they call it. Yeah, if you ever talk to a real wine person and you don't know the lingo, you're gonna be confused quick when they say things like black grapes.

Right. You'll be like, what the heck is a black grape? But if you dig into it, you start to find that there's a lot of overlap in words. There's a lot of multiple terms that describe the same thing. Yeah. Black grape, red grape, same thing.

Yeah. You know? Purple grape. Why not? If you say that, you're gonna get laughed out of Napa. Right, I like the purple grapes. Concord, I think is what they're called. But Chardonnay is of those three

is the only all white grape. So, and you know, a lot of people might not know this. It's the same with still wine, but you know, inside that black skin is white pulp. Yeah, depending on when you pick the grape. Yeah. So if you pick it early before it has a chance to turn reddish,

you can conceivably squeeze clear or white grape juice from red or black grapes. That's right. And that's what's happening in the case of champagne. Yeah, because if you look at it, you're like, well, I mean, this is clear. How is this made from red grapes? Well, as we'll see later on,

you have Dom Perignon, I think. Well, we should go ahead and talk about that, I guess. Well, let's talk about champagne a little bit first and then we'll get to Dom Perignon. So the region itself is pretty ancient. The first vineyards in champagne were planted by the Romans who also mined chalk in the area. And there's extensive chalk quarries

that are underground that have served as champagne sellers for generations. So the place has been making wine. The region has been making wine for millennia. But it wasn't until about the 1600s, 1700s when they really kind of took what was a naturally occurring problem, which was carbonation happening in their wine

and went to town with it. They said, if you can't beat them, join them. So they took this thing that was viewed as a flaw in their wine, carbonation, sparkling wine, and they figured out how to make it even more so and made it its own thing. Yeah, and in that region, that chalk is very key to what you end up getting because it's very reflective

because it's white. It is, so it reflects the sunlight from the ground back up to the leaves, right? Yeah, it's a very unique region. Like, and apparently it's, like if you stumbled upon that region today in our advanced wine making techniques and sparkling wine techniques,

you probably wouldn't say, hey, this is a great place to have a vineyard. Right, you go, soccer, blue, the soil is terrible. Well, you might, because it's, I think it's a little tougher to grow. Like, it's a very fine line between getting a successful harvest in that region, which it makes it, I think, very special.

Yeah, it does, like apparently they have cold, short, wet growing seasons. And apparently that's where the original sparkling wine and champagne came from. It was a freak of natural, natural climate and natural conditions, growing conditions, right? Because as we'll see, a second fermentation is what creates the carbonation.

And that would happen naturally because they would harvest the wine, make wine, store it, and then it would get cold all of a sudden, like early, before the fermentation process was done. So fermentation would basically stop, but then there'd be a lot of sugar and yeast left in their wine that hadn't fermented when they started it. So when spring came around again

and things started to warm up, a second fermentation process started, and that's really what kicked off the bubbles. But for a long time, the people in champagne in the champagne region were tearing their hair out because they didn't want this. It was a sign that their wine was terrible. They're poorly made.

And like I said, it wasn't until Dom Perignon came along who didn't like it himself, but was one of the people who created a lot of the techniques that helped establish champagne as the sparkling wine capital of the world. So he didn't care for it? No, he didn't, he called it mad wine, I think is what he called it.

He was a monk though, right? Yeah, he was a Benedictine monk in the area. He was the cellar master, which is if you are a cellar master, you are in charge as far as champagne goes with basically making the master blend of the champagne. Are you talking about the couvet? Yes, the couvet.

And when you put it together, that's the assemblage, right? That's right. So Dom Perignon was the guy in charge of that for this Abbey, he was a monk. His name was Pierre Perignon. Dom is like, he denotes you're a monk, a Benedictine monk. And he was one of the ones who established a lot of the groundwork for creating sparkling wine,

creating champagne. Very interesting. Like up to that point, you would have sparkling wines in your cellar, but they were using wood and hemp to stop these bottles. Well, that didn't work all that well. Bottles were very frequently explode

and cellars were very dangerous places to be because one of these stoppers came out, it shoot across the room, hit another bottle, and that bottle stopper would come out, and all of a sudden you'd have a chain reaction of these wooden stoppers like flying at your head. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yeah, or Three Stooges or something, right?

So Dom Perignon came up with the idea of using cork stoppers in thicker English type bottles which could withstand the pressure. Yeah. Holding them down with little rope muzzles. Now we use foil and wire. Yeah, what's that called? A muzzle.

Yeah, a muzzle. There's a French word for it, but I can't find it in my notes. Mose. That's something like that. So he came up with a bunch of stuff. He also was the first one to start blending wines from the region.

And as we'll talk about in a few, that's the basis of champagne. It's a blend. Champagne is a blend of wine. That's right. Should we take a break and collect ourselves? Yeah, I'm getting excited. Don't you want some champagne?

Nope. Cream here? Yes. Come on! Ooh, that looks better. Mm-hmm. That looks on Popeye. Justfuner than this one.

Yeah. The room is a mess. We're going to seek in on where's that popcorn track and pour them down on. Nah, the kids won't like this one. They won't refuse to wind around us. Oh, that's a shame. as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Really? No, I mean, if you opened a bottle of champagne in here, I would drink a flute. Yeah.

Because, uh, A, it's rude when you're offered something to turn your nose up at it. Right. Unless you're under 21. And B, it might help me to relax a little bit. Yeah. It really would. About this thing. You'd feel great.

Should we talk a little bit about, uh, the champagne method? Yes. What the French call? Le method champagne was. Okay. Le method champagne was. You have to say it, you have to close your septum. This is one reason why champagne is, uh, a bit more expensive,

or can be a bit more expensive, um, is because there's, there's a lot of processes involved. And not like there's not with still wine, but champagne kind of takes it a step further. It's time consuming and it, there are people's hands and feet involved. Yeah. A lot of times. Yeah. And like you said, it's, it is, it starts with making wine. Actually, it starts even further back than that.

It starts with growing the grape. That's right. Uh, but fermentation, you know, all wines are fermented, of course. And that's the, um, that's when sugar breaks down from the grape juice, turns it into alcohol, delicious, delicious alcohol. And that is called wine. Um, and just like regular wine, still wine, like you said, I guess we shouldn't call it regular wine, just still wine.

Still wine. Um, they start with basic wine. They start with those grapes. And in the case of champagne, they are pressed with human feet, which, uh, still happens. Right. And I can't help but think of that video still after all these years. That poor lady.

Of that poor lady. Yeah. Who, uh, at, uh, Chateau Elan, right? Oh, is that in Georgia? Yeah. I don't think I knew that. It was a Georgia like morning show Atlanta morning show. I think it was like Fox live or something like that.

I just, I can still hear it. I haven't seen it in years, but if you don't know what we're talking about, there was a, one of the early viral videos of this, uh, of this, uh, woman on location doing a story about wine in Georgia. And she was stomping on the wine and, uh, fell on a platform for some reason. Yeah. And she fell out of the barrel and, and hurt herself. And, but it sounded like she was in very much, uh, heavy distress.

Like new dimensions of pain is, or the sounds that the woman made. I've never heard anything like it before or since. Me neither. Um, yeah. I'm pretty sure she's okay. Yeah. That's why I don't mind talking about it now. It's not like she was, you know, maimed for life or anything like that.

I was thinking, I love Lucy too. Oh yeah. That very famous grape stomping scene. Yeah. You know, where she gets in like a grape throwing fight with the lady. Man, Lucy, she was always getting into trouble, wasn't she? Yeah. I was shot in the studio where they filmed that show one time in California.

Oh yeah. Right there in Hollywood. Yeah, it was kind of neat. Yeah. One of the grips just came over. He was like, you know, this is the Isle of Lucy studio. And you went, I smelled the grapes. Uh, all right.

So where were we? Um, feet. Feet. Yeah, which is this wonderful old world technique that I didn't know this. I didn't know that you have to do that for champagne. Is it just because it's so delicate? Yeah, I think that's part of it. But also they kind of shy away from machinery and the method champagne was really.

Yes. All right. It's a, it's a traditional method. Even though if you look back at the history of wine making champagne is very relatively new. Oh yeah. Like we're talking 1600, 1700s, right? Sure. They've been making wine for many thousands of years.

Right. So this is a fairly new invention, but it was still invented at a time where you mainly used human labor for, for things like this. So yeah, they've, they've tended to preserve that as much as possible. All right. Well, you've got your juice, your, uh, white juice and, um, well, they put it in stainless steel vats unless you're super old world, I guess. Uh, some people do use wood still, but yeah, you're allowed to use for the, for the initial

fermentation where you're like, you're just making the basic wine. Yeah. You can use stainless steel. Yeah, so there it sits for a long time, uh, ferments, becomes still wine and, uh, like we said, this is just the first, uh, fermentation and then you move on to the blending, which is where that all important seller master comes in. Right. So if you're a seller master for a champagne house, you are, unless you're a very specific

type of champagne house where you actually make champagne from growing the grapes to the finished product, right? Um, you were probably going around the champagne region, trying different champagnes or trying different wines, still wines and you're coming up within your head a blend of all these different wines and that blend, as we said before, is called the Kuve and the Kuve is, it's just that it's a blend of wine and it has mainly three different factors involved that you have to take into consideration if you're the seller master, right? Yes.

If it's a vintage Kuve, a vintage blend of wines, then that means it's using grapes that were all grown in the same year, same growing season. Yeah. And I imagine these seller masters, I mean, you said they're tasting things, I'm sure they are, but I imagine these seller masters in champagne also kind of know exactly where they're going to go for most of these. Sure. And they also would know like, well, if you guys have 2007 vintage wine, like that was a great

year, that was a great year or, um, that year was kind of rough. It might take it, add a neat edge to it, some other 2009 grapes I'm using too, right? Yes. These are what these people are walking around with in their heads. That kind of, that level of information. So they're putting it all together. They come up with these clever little blends and each blends a Kuve. Again, one of the things they can take into account is the vintage, the years.

Yeah. Like you said, if it's a vintage wine, it's just from the one year growing season. If it's non-vintage, that means you can, you're combining various years. Right. And typically vintage wines, I think tend to be more expensive. I have, I get the impression that they tend to be a little more revered. They definitely take longer to mature. Yeah. The fermentation process is longer than the non-vintage. And you'll see this on the label.

It'll say vintage or else it'll say envy a lot of times. Right. The two other things for a seller master to take into account are the varietals. Yeah. Yeah. And the crew, right? Yeah. CRU. So a crew is...

Not the C-R-E-W. Or the C-R-U-E with an umla over the U. Rock on. Yes. The crew is, it's a vineyard basically. So you can have grapes all from one vineyard from different years and different varietals. And that'd still be what's called a single crew. Or you could mix different crews, different vineyards, grapes,

um, to create a couvet. Yeah. And the grand crew, you might have seen that before on a bottle. That's a, if you get the grand crew status, then you're really cooking with gas, as my dad used to say. In the mid-1980s, well, initially there were only 12 villages that had that grand crew status. And then in 1985, they expanded that to 17 because five more villages, and I'm not going to try and pronounce all those, were added to the list. And it says here that less than 9%, it's incredibly low. Of all the vineyard land in Champaign has a 100% grand crew rating.

Right. So again, 84,000 acres. Only 9% of that is the top rated. Basically it's saying this land is the primo land for growing Champaign grapes. Yeah. So if you get grapes that are grown there by these people who really know what they're doing, it's, you're going to pay through the nose for it. Sure. So a grand crew Champaign is going to be pretty expensive, but there's a reason behind it.

Yeah. It's not just marketing. No. And varietals too. Like you said, there's three grapes, right? Just those three. And depending on how you put them together, you can come up with a type of couvet as well, right? So blanc de blanc means white of whites that's made just with Chardonnay grapes. Yeah. Blanc de noir is made with just one of the other black grapes, either the Pinot Mounier or the Pinot noir. That's right.

But all those three things are factored together to create a specific couvet. Well, and then you've got your rosé that you mentioned earlier. Oh, yeah. Your pink wine or as my friend Stacy calls it, pink crack. It's good stuff. She gets ahold of that stuff. Watch out. Yeah. And that is, well, there are a couple of ways you can do this.

Sometimes you leave some of the skin for a little bit of time, but these days more or less, you're going to be adding a little bit of the red wine, Pinot noir red wine to the couvet. So I think those are different. Like the still wine. That's different. If you leave the grapes on a little bit, you're going to have pink champagne. If you actually add red wine afterward, you're going to have rosé champagne. Well, what's the difference?

It says here rosé is also known as pink champagne. I know. This is what I'm saying. It gets confusing because you definitely get different things from different sources. But I have seen in multiple places that when you add red wine, that's rosé and that keeping the grapes in is pink champagne. Interesting. But apparently there's something like three million bottles of red wine are set aside every year just to make rosé champagne.

What a waste. Man, I'm really changing your mind about champagne. No, you're not. I'm going to. Emily likes rosé. Rosé champagne? I mean, she'll have that, but just still rosé. There's also rosé with gas that's not champagne.

It's just a little gassy. It's kind of different. Yeah, I'm just not a fan of all that stuff. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And it's not like I discriminate against wines either, but I definitely prefer champagnes or sparkling wines over still wine, like any day of the week. Yeah, yeah, we're the opposite in more ways than one.

Are we at the Riddler yet? Because this is my favorite part. So, oh, we've got the blend. And once you blend it, you have to put it in bottles. And one of the things Chuck about the AOC, this method champagne noise, is once you put it in that bottle, it stays in there until the person who buys it and drinks it takes it out. You have to keep it in the same bottle.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. Why would you switch bottles? That'd be weird anyway. Well, you used to want to decan it to get sediment out. You might just put it in one bottle to reuse the bottles. Who knows?

But once you put it in the bottle, it's got to stay in the bottle. And after that initial QV is blended, they put it in the bottle and they let it sit. And depending on what kind, what kind it is, if it's non-vintage, it's going to sit there for 12 more months for a total of a minimum of 15. Yeah, at least. If it's vintage, it's going to sit there for another three years and just age in the bottle. That's right. And so at this point, you're going to start, you want the bubbles.

So you're going to start that second fermentation process by adding sugar and yeast. Then you drop the temperature on your cooler to about 50 to 60, which is cooler than the initial fermentation process. And well, you can also do this in the tank, like they're different methods. But right. That's the, that's called the charmet method. The tanks? Yeah.

But I think the old world method is, well, geez. You can't use tanks. You got to use bottles. And I don't even think old world is the right term. That's oldish. I'll just say old. But I think old world means something very specific with wine. Oh yeah, I can see that.

I think it means non-Californian. See, this is where we get in trouble. So this is a very slow fermentation process, the second one. And the yeast is, is living and dying and those cells are breaking apart. And it's, this really interesting process is going on inside that bottle. Yeah. It's eating up all that sugar that you added and what's called the liquor to to Raj, right?

And when you add that in and you add the yeast in the yeast, you're like, this is great. We're going to live here for generations, eons by our time table. Yeah. Like look at all this delicious sugar that we can eat. And they eat it and eat it. And they eat all of the sugar in this second fermentation process. And what we're doing here now is recreating those, that natural fluke of a condition where

it would get cold and then warm up again. And that second fermentation process would start to make the CO2. Same things happening here, but this is a very controlled version of that. Sure. So the yeast is eating it. And like you said, they're dying and breaking open. And so when you're drinking champagne, part of what you're drinking are the, the internal remnants of yeast cells that have spilled their contents into the champagne.

That's why I don't drink it. But they also leave behind some stuff you don't want to drink, which are the cell structures. And that creates what's called sediment. It's basically leftover cellular structure of yeast cells. And you want to get that out. Yeah. And that's through a process called riddling.

And I mentioned the riddler is my favorite person in this process. It's a pretty thankless job to be the riddler. Is it? I think so. I'll bet you get a lot of free champagne. Well, sure. That's thanks. Yeah, but it's very solitary and redundant.

Oh, yeah. Repetitive. Yeah. So this riddler, they, the wine at this point is stored upside down at a 75 degree angle. And that is allowing all this, all these dead yeast cells to collect down near the, the neck. They, by hand, go in every day and turn these bottles one-eighth of a turn, 20,000, 30,000 bottles. I saw up to 40,000.

A day. Yep. They do this by hand. Yep. And they're just rotating these. It's, I can't imagine doing this. I mean, it's your life's work. You've got to really be dedicated to your craft to be a riddler.

And it takes about four to six weeks of this, this dedicated attention. It's a very fast process, though, if you've ever seen a riddler at work. Oh, yeah. You know? But they have to remember that they turn the bottle so they make a little chalk mark on each one 40,000 times in a day. Sure. Man.

It's amazing. So they, they're turning the bottle and like you said, it's turned up at an angle. And the whole point of this is that you're slowly, because you don't want to disturb the champagne. It's still in, it's still maturing, right? Mm-hmm. But this is toward the end of that maturation phase, either that 12 month or that 36 month minimum.

And as you're turning it, what you're doing is kind of shaking the bottle a little bit too. And you're just trying to get the yeast cells, what's left of them, to move toward the neck. Yeah. Right. And the whole point is this is called maturing on the leaves. And the leaves, I think, are what the, the sediment is called possibly or else what the, yeah, I think that's what it is.

Okay. I think. And as it goes down and accumulates at the, toward the front of the neck, you now have one of the last steps called the decor, gorgement or disgorgement. Yes. And what you have is just a, a thing of sediment is that it's accumulated at the neck and you put it in a nice bath. It's really amazing how they do this.

Yeah. And then what they used to have to do is they would pop open a bottle, decant it, fill it and they would pour it back. So it's filtered because one of the things you'll note about champagne is it's very clear and it undergoes several different clarification steps, but that would have been one of them. This is the same thing, but this one is way cooler. They put the neck in an ice bath, a salt ice bath. So you know, it's really cold because you know, salt lowers the freezing point of ice

water. Yeah. And at this point that's going to create a little yeast plug. Which is so gross out of it, up there toward the neck. And what they have to do then is get that plug out of there while maintaining the integrity of the rest of the wine that's inside. Yeah. Like you're going to lose some champagne.

It's going to perfect procedure. Well, yeah. I mean, that's part of the process is to lose some because then they add stuff back in, right, which we'll get to. Yeah. But so they remove, well, it says it in here, the cork, but these are the corks, but they remove, well, it says it in here, the cork, but these days, I think that initial one is a cap, like a bottle cap.

Right, bottle cap. You can use that, old world bottle cap. And you know, go on YouTube and look at a Riddler at work and just check this out. It's pretty neat. Like it's a fast process as well. Did you see the how it's made on that? No. They pop it out and a surprisingly small amount comes out.

Like I thought it just, they'd be like, oh God, oh geez. Like it'd be the most stressful job in the world, but it, you know, enough comes out. It's foaming over, but it's not like just a tremendous amount. And then they smell it to make sure it's not. The dude I saw would put a thumb over it real quick. So like it wasn't foaming over at all. Maybe that's what I saw. Or maybe that's what he was doing.

I didn't catch it. Yeah. Pretty interesting though. So the Riddlers is doing this by hand because there's, you know, carbon dioxide gas in there at this point and it forces that plug out. And like you said, you lose just a little bit and then you add maybe a little brandy, a little sugar, a little white wine back in to get the, you know, the proper amount of liquid inside the bottle.

Right. That's called the dosage or the liquor did dosage. Don't call it dosage. Because I did in my head. Yeah. Or like half of this research. Yeah. And then you're, oh, oh, this dosage.

Well, that's when it helps to watch videos. Yeah, for sure. And then they put that final cork in place. This is one that's going to stay in there until you uncork it and they tighten it down with that wire as our not so great article points out. You can make into a little chair afterward. Yeah. That's what people do, right?

Sure. And, you know, you have to have that thing on there because it, like, there's a lot of pressure still building up in that thing. Right. And they've actually, thanks to a 18th century French pharmacist named Antoine Beaumé, he came up with a device to measure the sugar content and wine. So now they know exactly how much sugar to put into the champagne to raise the pressure back up.

Right. Because you want about five or six atmospheres of pressure or about, I think, 60 to 70 square or pounds per square inch of pressure in a bottle of wine. How much? 50 to 70, I think, or 50 to 90. But it's definitely five or six atmospheres of pressure. Yeah, I got 90. 90, okay.

It's like kind of average. Okay. So they know how much of that liqueur dosage to put in. Yeah. How much sugar to put back in to raise the atmosphere back up. And the other reason you want to do that too, Chuck, is when you're adding that sugar back in, that yeast, all the sugar that was in there and turned it into carbon dioxide that you put in for the second fermentation.

And when they did, they made the champagne as dry as a bone. An extra brute? So the amount of sugar, it's actually more than that. It's called brute naturel. Well, I call it a double ex-brute. It's crazy dry. I've never had it, but I can only imagine how. Can you have that?

Yeah. Oh, really? There's one where they don't put in any dosage. They don't add any sugar afterward. So it's bone dry. And that's just for people who really prefer that, because that's not... I guess. Apparently the extra brute is the least popular.

Yeah, I can imagine. And I think the best-selling is sort of that brute, which is sort of in the middle of dry and sweet or sec or demi-sec. And then I think the last one is due. D-O-U-X is the sweetest of all. Non-brute. Yeah. But brute is drier than extra dry, which is kind of surprising.

But if you ever... It's pretty easy to pick up if you just read it once or twice. You're like, oh, okay, that's how it's denoted. But all of that is based on how much dosage you put in after you disgorge the yeast plug. Engorge. Yeah. One of my least favorite words, by the way. That's a bad one.

Is this true about Madame Clicquot? From what I saw, yeah. She was an entrepreneur famously, in fact, she's called Widow Clicquot at times. She's widowed at a very young age, sadly at 27, and took over her husband's wine business and supposedly invented that disgorging process herself, which is... I mean, it's kind of simple when you look at it, but I wouldn't have thought to do it. No, but again, I mean, they were decanning them back then and filtering it out. And this was, I think, 1813 when the Widow Clicquot came up with it.

And about then is when champagne, the drink, took off at least in France and started to spread very quickly around the world. Yeah, Napoleon had a lot to do with that, right? I think Napoleon did. By World War I, Winston Churchill reminded everyone, we're not fighting to save just France, boys, we're fighting to save champagne. Should we take another break? I think so.

All right, we're going to talk a little bit about what the fuss is with this stuff after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Josh, the master wine maker. The seller master. Has, uh, walked us through the process. What a great job that would be. Yeah, I have a, you know, my friend Robbie is a kind of a rock star wine maker in Napa. Is that right?

Yeah, it's pretty great. He's, he's like, he's living a good life. I'm sure. In fact, he got in touch at one point because he wanted to start a wine podcast. Uh-huh. And we just sort of emailed back and forth and it just never, like he just wanted advice and stuff. Not like he wanted to start one with me because that would be,

um, one of those podcasts call when like someone's a super expert and then you got a big dummy. I can't think of anything. That's what that would have been. Man, there was like, that was just ripe for jokes. I would have been the Thomas Satan church to his, uh, Paul Giamatti. Oh, you're talking about sideways. I thought you were talking about wings for a second. I would have been like, when are we going to drink it?

Tastes good to me. Hey, yeah. And Robbie be spitting it out. Yeah. Um, I don't think you should do that. He's very talented and, you know, does quite well, like making wine for other people. And he also has his own label, uh, Langevin and Pearson Meyer wines. Nice plug plug.

Yeah. Right. Uh, and when you go to his house and stay with him and his awesome guest house, at the top of Howell mountain, you get drunk on like amazing expensive wines that he opens like you're drinking that Perrier. I'm sorry. Here we go. No, this is Pellegrino.

Oh, excuse me. That's the Italian version of Perrier. It is. It's like the, like Spumonti. Perseco. What's Spumonti? Spumonti is Italian. Is it?

It's sparkling, right? Yeah. I guess Perseco is Italian as well. I just remember that from when I was a kid. Martini and Rossi, Rossi, Spumonti. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing how that's drilled in my brain.

Martini and Rossi, Rossi, Spumonti. Which probably is like crap, uh, sparkling wine. I know. Isn't it? I don't know that it's good. I don't know. I mean, I think it's, I think that's probably what gave you your headache. That and all the low and brow.

Is that still around? I don't know. Isn't that what Bob and Doug drank from the strength group? No. No, they drank some sort of. Was it made up? No, they drank Molson. Well, was it Labats?

I mean, it was probably some Canadian beer. We're going to get killed over this one. Yeah, we are. Sorry, everybody. All right. So, uh, let's move on then to what makes champagne so, uh, so expensive and so fancy. Like it has this, um, there's this notion, you know, that you drink it for celebrations or that you're like sort of the upper crust of society if you're drinking champagne.

Well, supposedly there is an actual reason why champagne is associated with toasting the big events in life because for a thousand years from about the ninth century to the 19th century, they had no champagne. The, the kings of France were coordinated in champagne. So it was like a celebration town for the whole country. So toasting with, even before the, they were sparkling wines. Yeah. Um, toasting with champagne wine was traditional.

So have, have you ever been in a restaurant and like gotten good news and said, waiter, champagne goes on? Has anyone ever done that? Uh, besides in movies? Oh, maybe. Yeah. It's funny. Like I was watching a, I was watching McConaughey act and I, it was, I was watching a movie on

somebody else's seat back on a flight. So I wasn't hearing it. So I was really just watching the movie, right? And, um, I was like, imagine if you were in real life around Matthew McConaughey, like in a room with one of his characters and just how off-putting and bizarre that experience would be, you know, because he's just, he just choose the scenery and everything he does is just so big that in real life, if you were interacting with that character, you'd be like, calm down, man.

You're freaking me out. Well, Wooderson was pretty chill. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll give it to you. But everybody since Wooderson. Pretty much.

All right. Boy, that's an interesting thing to think on a plane. Just hit me. It hit me on the plane. I think if I was in a restaurant and something great happened, I would say, waiter, another gin and tonic. And they would go, huh? They'd probably say, you got it.

Actually, I started calling those lime salads at my house. Nice. You're on the gin and tonic now? Yeah. That usually happens around, around April. Oh, yeah. April to, you know, September. I got one for you.

Um, gin and bitter lemon is a nice combo. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought bitter lemon was just like a fever tree drink. Yeah. They make them and they make a good one, but everybody from like Canada dry to whoever else makes bitter lemon as well. So just give yourself a good bitter lemon and some gin.

You're going to love it. You're going to love it. We should do a, we're definitely do a podcast on gin at some point. Okay. Very interesting. Liquor. Yeah. Complex.

Can be. Sure. I got another one for you. With that bitter lemon. If you want to get really fancy, get some St. George terror terroir. Yeah, I'm not a fan. You had the dry rye. No, you did.

You, you tried the terroir one. Yeah. So when it tastes like feet. No, that's the dry rye. I've tried all three of those St. George's and I don't like any of them. Oh, okay. I'm a London dry guy. Well, anyway, you'll still like it with bitter lemon.

All right. Everyone else would like the terroir St. George with bitter lemon. Everyone else on the planet because all right. And I figured out what was up with the dry rye. You're absolutely right. You can't make a martini out of that stuff. It kill you. It's not made for it.

It's made for things like the groanies. It makes a killer negroni. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. I'm a, I stick to my lime salad, you know. Okay. You know me and my basic needs.

But try the bitter lemon sometime with gin. Okay. You're dry London. It's fine. All right. Okay. But with, with the bitter lemon instead of tonic. Okay. I'll give it a try.

And if I don't like it, then I'm just weird because everyone else in the world loves it. No, I'm not saying that. You said that. All right. We're in the world worry. So we were talking about what makes champagne so fancy. Yeah.

Well, like we said earlier, it's, you know, it's a very small region comparatively speaking. Right. So that will lend to the price and all these hand processes that they still might use or foot processes. It's a big one. It's going to make it more expensive. And anytime the price is being driven up,

it's going to have that sort of air of sophistication. And then of course, when the hip hop scene started kind of using that in lyrics and popping champagne on the yacht and the videos. I'm on a boat. What was that? That was the serent life short. Oh, okay. With, oh, I think I remember that.

I don't remember who it was. I want to say two chains, but I don't think it was. Gotcha. Was it one of those Andy Sandberg shorts? Not Lil Wayne. Who's the other Lil? Lil Bow Wow? No, he's just Bow Wow now.

Really? Yeah. He's all grows up. The guy who was like, yeah, yeah, that guy. I have no idea. You do. Lil John? Yes.

Jerry's over there going. John. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not. But yes, it was at Andy Sandberg short. Yeah. I do. I think I do remember that.

But that definitely kind of solidified the sort of, you know. Status? Yeah. Sure. That's exactly the word. I would, I would suggest. I mean, it was already solidified. But it definitely didn't hurt.

No. Especially in the States here and with a whole new generation of people. Right. Right. Like the younger generation, it's like champagne. Whole new generation of humans. Right. But then all of a sudden Lil John's like, got some champagne.

No, for real. I'm sure the champagne industry was like, seriously, keep doing it. Sure. So the thing though is there's actual reason behind champagne being more expensive than your typical wine. But that doesn't mean that all champagne or all sparkling wines are like out of your price range. No, I mean, you can get some cheap sparkling wine that'll give you a massive headache. No, no.

That's not true. Like you can get chandon wines for 20 bucks and it's not going to give you a headache. I was talking about the $6 bottle. Good stuff. Yeah. But 20 bucks, I mean, if you're going to spring for a decent bottle of wine. Sure. If it's New Year's Eve.

Sure. Why not? That's when I'll toast it. All right, so 20 bucks will get you a good bottle of decent champagne is what you're saying. Yes. Not bad. Or you can spend hundreds of dollars, thousands, tens of thousands at auction, just like wine if you want some super rare collectible wine or champagne.

Apparently a quarter of a million dollars for a bottle at the Moscow Ritz Carlton. And that's not even something you drink, right? If you're a jackass, sure. But I mean, if you're here, you have to be a jackass to spend a quarter of a million dollars on a bottle of champagne anyway. You better drink it, frankly. But champagne, you don't keep, right? You can, you can.

And so there's a lot of misunderstanding about it, right? So a lot of people think that you keep champagne standing up. And you do for about the first month. But if you're keeping it in a cellar, you want to keep it on its side like any bottle of wine. You want the wine touching the cork. But the reason that champagne actually ages in the bottle, it's just like wine. That cork, it's in there pretty good, but it's not airtight. There's a minimal amount of gas exchange going on.

So the wine, the champagne continues to mature over the course of 10, 20, 30 years. If you keep it, if you keep it, the key to champagne apparently storing it is you want to avoid temperature fluctuations. You want to keep it at about the same temperature for the whole time you have it stored. So bury it in your backyard. Sure. On its side. Deep. And leave it there.

Yeah. And it will, you will find that all the worms drank it. You'll be like, worms. Burry it under the frost line. And you want to keep it out of the sunlight too. Well, underground. But apparently as it ages, I've never had old champagne, but as it ages, its taste starts to mellow. And it takes on dried fruit, nutty, toasty, honey notes,

or like the main notes that it hits. Yeah. We had a bottle of Dom Perignon that was awful when we opened it, but we didn't. It was every improper thing you could do. We did. Including moving it in a hot truck from LA to Atlanta. A hot moving truck. I don't know.

I mean, we just don't drink it much. So we just had it and we got it as a gift. If that happens, you just put some fresh squeezed orange juice in there. It's fine. Boom. Then you got a mimosa. Yeah. I'll have a mimosa occasionally.

That's champagne. I know. And orange juice. Yeah. That's the key. But the orange juice? Well, I mean, I enjoy mimosa more than just regular champagne. It's like a whole...

It's definitely one of those things that's greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah. You know? I don't think I ever said, Chuck, that those two... Quarter of a million dollar bottles of champagne were from a shipwreck that was headed to Russia to bring champagne to the Tsar's family. And the shipwrecked. And they discovered it in the 90s and now they're selling it at the Ritz Carlton.

To what did you say? Jackasses. And I think that's the one that's like a collector's piece, right? I don't know. You like to put it on your wall? That's nothing. I don't know. I don't know what you do with that.

Besides just drink it and hope for the best. Well, should we talk about drinking it in the proper way to open it and to pour it? Yes, please. And consume it? Yeah. Because if you don't know what you're doing and you've seen too many movies, you might try and pop that cork out across the room. It's very dangerous.

It is very dangerous. And people get injured, right? Are there deaths, I think? I didn't see any. Or is that like an urban legend? I would guess an urban legend. I could be wrong. I'm thinking if you died from getting hit with a cork, you had a pre-existing condition.

Is that covered? I don't know. No, under Obamacare, sure. I guess we'll see. So you'll get about six flutes if you're pouring properly out of a bottle of champagne. You want to serve it between 40 and 45 degrees? Celsius or Fahrenheit? That's Fahrenheit, right?

I don't know. If you are caught with your pants down at a party. Just go champagne and it'll get you out of anything. And you want to chill it very quickly. You can put it in an ice bath and not to get out that yeast plug. But just to make it cold fast. Just like you would beer or something. All right.

The neck, you mean? No, no, no. The whole bottle. If you want to serve it. Oh, sure. You got a hot bottle of champagne in your moving truck. Throw it in an ice bath for about 20 minutes and you should be good to go. Yeah.

If there's a party trick you can do too, where if you put just the neck in the ice bath, you can use what's called a saber. You can actually use anything, I've seen somebody do it on video with a shoe. Yeah, you don't even have to freeze it if you're a good saberer. Yeah, but you kind of want to. You want the neck very, very cold because you want the glass to just crack off cleanly. Yeah. And what the deal is, if you've ever seen someone, it's called saberage.

We mentioned earlier that the champagne bottle is very thick because it's in there at about 90 PSI. Where the seam meets the lip, it's about 50% less glass. And so that's a vulnerable area and that's what makes sabering possible. And so you use, well, like you said, you could use a shoe, I guess, if you're, you know, if you're that guy. Right. But there's traditional sabers.

They look like a little sword. They are a little sword. They just aren't ground to a point or an edge. They're very blunt. Well. Because the point is using blunt force on a weak point of the neck of the bottle. Yeah. But you can use your, like a saber can be sharp.

You just use the other side of it. Okay. All right. Sure. And I mean, it's pretty neat to do because you're not, like I think for a while, I thought you were just knocking the cork out. That's what I thought as well. But you're knocking the glass off.

Yeah. The top lip of the bottle is coming clean off if you're doing it correctly. And that is also dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. Because that thing will fly, you know, 15, 20 feet or more. Yeah. And that's actual glass. What you want to do is have a sharp shooter handy to shoot it out of the sky before it hurts anybody. That's right.

And have everyone stand behind you. Yeah. That's the traditional way. How you really open it is, and this is a, even if you're not just popping the cork, you might like twist the cork off. You want to twist the bottle. That's sort of the number one rule to open it cleanly and non-dangerously and without champagne, you know, getting all over the place.

Like when you open a tonic bottle. Or soda, anything fizzy. That's one of our traditions backstage at Stuff You Should Know Shows is Josh opens a tonic ball. Let's get it all over myself. He's used everywhere and you go, what's the deal? Yeah. Every single time. I think because I have so many lime salads, I just, I know you got to go easy with those

tonic bottles. I do, and it still will spray me. It's, it's almost comical. Almost. No, it's pretty funny. So you're twisting the bottle. If you have a towel, you can hold it over the cork. Yeah.

But you really don't need it as long as you're kind of holding it with your hand. Right. And twist that bottle, put your thumb in the punt, as they call it, which is that the area, the bottom of the bottle. The divot. Yeah, the punt. The concave part. Yeah, the punt.

Sure. Let's put your thumb in the punt, and then you've got it open and you tilt the glass, portents a little bit, pour a little bit more. You want about three quarters of a flute and put your pinky up and go to town. Yeah. And I did a brain stuff on what the best kind of glass for champagne is. And apparently the tulip is, it's a combination between the coop and the flute. You've probably seen it before.

No, I didn't see that one. It's a, I thought you meant the, the tulip glass. Yeah, I've seen tulips. But apparently they allow for the most sparkle. And if you, if you have the, so the bubbles coming up, the French call effervescence. And if you look at a glass of champagne that you're just holding there in front of you, when they bubble up to the top, they accumulate into a foam. And that is called mousse, like chocolate mousse.

Remember top secret? Oh yeah. Yeah. But it's not that. It's just mousse is what they call, or foam is another way to put it. That's what they call it. And so actually when you're creating the second fermentation process of the champagne making, what the, the method champagne was, it's called the prized mousse or the foam creation.

Wow. What? There's a lot. And that's why you pour it slow too. Cause if you get too fast, it's going to get everywhere. Yep. Like your tonic. And then you pour it three quarters full and you toast and say,

Huzzah, Huzzah, Huzzah, I think is the traditional thing you're supposed to say. So you like champagne yet? No, it's just not for me. That's fine. Don't feel bad for me. I won't then. If you want to know more about champagne, go get some. And in the meantime, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this one, well, getting the nomenclature correct, something we always strive to do and don't always do. Hey guys, let me start by saying you've been listening to your show for two years. You've added so much joy, laughter and knowledge to my life. Know you're always intentional and sensitive about the language you use on your show. And while listening to the MS episode, I noticed something I've heard you two say in the past. I work in suicide prevention and hope to change the culture and reduce the stigma around suicide.

As you know, one of the first steps of doing that is examining the language we use. The phrase commit suicide is very common, of course, and has been used for a very long time. However, the word commit makes it sound criminal. This perpetuates a stigma that there's something bad or wrong with someone who's experiencing thoughts of suicide, making it less likely that they will reach out and ask for help. I want to encourage you guys to use the word died by suicide or completed suicide as an alternative and more factual term. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is a great resource for more information.

And of course, I need to plug my own nonprofit I work for, notmykid.org. I appreciate everything you guys do. Please come to Phoenix to guarantee you will sell out a show there. Sincerely, that is Sarah Tisdon, aka Hope Dealer. Oh, wow, it's dealing hope. That's a heck of a aka. Yeah, and you know what? I never thought about that, but uh... That is not true. That is not true.

You have, because we've been called out on this before. Really? Yes, but I think we've even done a listener mail in it before, but it's so ingrained to say commit and then completed just sounds like they finished their homework or something like that. Right. But died by suicide, I could, I can get behind that. Now, I will try, but it's just so hard to not say committed. What though, if you're saying, if it hasn't happened, you're saying someone was going to...

Attempted. ... was thinking attempting suicide? Okay. Yeah, I think that one's kosher. All right, man, I didn't know we've covered this, so I feel bad that I still haven't gotten over that then. Yeah, same here. All right, I'm gonna work on it. Yeah, same here. Thanks for calling us out, Hope Dealer. Yeah, thanks Sarah.

Keep dealing that hope. Open up your trench coat and be like, this is what I got. Right, I'll take a lot out of it. I got hope right here. If you want to get in touch with us to correct us, prod us, whatever, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can hang out with me on Twitter at JoshumClark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at CharlesWChuck Bryant or slash stuff you should

know. You can send us both an email and Jerry to StuffPodcast.com. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. And back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my friends do? My favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never

ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.