Cava, the famous sparkling wine of Spain, is made in a similar way to many other sparkling wines, Franciacorta, Champagne, South African MCC etc. First you make a still white wine. Then you bottle it and put a little bit of sugar and yeast in the bottle. It ferments in the bottle and, voila, you have the bubbles. But the fermentation creates a little bit of lees. You can’t have lees in a bottle of sparkling wine. Looks not nice. What to do. Well, you disgorge it of course.
What? Disgorge? Simple. You put the bottle upside down in freezer liquid, you take of the temporary cork, you fill it up with a little bit of extra wine (if needed), bang in a new cork, put on the wire cage (don’t want any unintended popping do we?). And you have your finished bottle. To make it a little bit more elegant you can put a label and some other fancy cosmetics on it.
The only thing that remains is to drink it!
Come with us on a wine tour to Catalonia and you will learn more of how it is done, and perhaps even try it yourself.
Watch the video:
And some photos:
