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Pictures : the Crémant d'Alsace bottling !

At the domain Paul Buecher, the crémant d'Alsace is usually the first wine to be bottled. 2007 makes no exception to the rule.
Early April, the cheery trees are in bloom and show that the spring has arrived. So the time has come for these crémant bottles ! They represent the third of our total production, so this bottling is one of the key operations of the year.

In a few pictures, let us see this bottling from start to finish :

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Four days before the bottling, we begin a delicate operation : the preparation of the yeasts starter. These few hundred litres of wine will start the second alcoholic fermentation in the whole volume of crémant. These small tanks will start to ferment again thanks to the addition of sugar and yeasts.

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The wines have rested during the winter in tanks outside the cellar. This period in the coldness helps them to be more stable toward tartaric precipitations.
Now the different lots of crémant are blended and filtered. In 2007, some wines (mainly Riesling and Chardonnay varieties) have undergone malolactic fermentation. This filtration permits to take out most of the bacteria of the wine and avoids this fermentation to start again in bottles !

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We have to arrange the base wines in order that the bottle fermentation occurs in favourable conditions : The wines are first warmed up, then aerated (we try to bring a maximum of oxygen for the good development of the yeasts). At last we adjust the quantity of sugar in the wine. This proportioning has to be precise, the pressure in the bottle depends on it : 22 g/l corresponds to 5,5 bars of pressure. If there is too much sugar, the bottles could burst and if there is too little, we would not have enough foam.

Thursday morning, everything is ready ! The cellar is empty and the last control of the yeasts starter shows the activity is good. So we can add it gently to the base wine. From now, the whole tank has to be stirred continually in order that the wine keeps homogeneous.

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That was the résumé of our week. A few days of stress, of tiredness, but the mood is festive : it is one of the rare period of the year when the whole team works together at the same place !

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As soon as the machine arrives, the whole team is in a turmoil. The filler works very fast. More than 5000 bottles an hour have to be stacked, so everybody is required.

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The next day, 70 000 bottles have refilled the space in the cellar. From now, our crémant will go on alone, cooped up in its bottle. It will take its time to ferment out and evolve slowly in contact with its lies. The next time we will take the bottles in hands, it will be for riddling and taking out the deposits. This operation will not happen before one to three years !

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Surprise : At the end of the bottling, some green bottles were lacking to finish the tank. We have been obliged to put white crémant in white bottles ! So for the 2007 vintage, there will be a few hundred collector bottles !

April 2008

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