The stirring of champagne is this ancestral gesture which consists of turning the bottles and gradually raising them to bring the sediment into the neck of the bottle.
An essential step in the production of champagne wines that involves the human hand and a lot of patience. Today the process can be automated but the result is the same: the creation of a perfectly clear champagne.
After rest, gentle awakening
After the hand harvest, the grapes were bottled and then left to rest for many months, at least 15 for non-vintage wines, 3 years for vintage wines. The fermentation has indeed taken place. It consists of adding a liqueur de tirage composed of sugar, yeast and a riddling aid. It is essential for transforming still wines into sparkling wines.
But after this long period spent sheltered in temperate cellars, it is time to proceed with the stirring of each bottle of champagne. The reason is simple, it is necessary to slide these famous sediments to the neck where they will be extracted during the disgorging stage.
A professional “stirrer” can stir between 50,000 and 60,000 bottles per day.
This step takes a month and a half. During this time, a bottle of champagne will be shaken about 25 times. The bottle is turned 1/8th or ¼ turn to the left or right from a chalk line drawn on the base of the bottle. It is also gradually straightened from horizontal to vertical to end in a "sur pointe" position (head down).
These different movements, reproduced for centuries, make it possible to move the bulk of the deposit towards the neck of the bottle while carrying the finest particles with it.
Manual stirring versus automatic stirring
Which is more efficient, the human hand or the arm of the gyropalette? This know-how is a little less used except for large formats and bottles with particular shapes offered by the great champagne houses. It is the cellar master who will be in charge of the riddling schedule to be concluded in just a few weeks.
To give you an idea, manual stirring took 6 weeks, automatic stirring allowed us to significantly reduce the time since it only takes a week to complete the step. Manual or automatic stirring, it doesn't matter, the result is just as convincing for both, with perhaps the beauty of the gesture less when the machine intervenes.
History of stirring
To slide the deposit along the neck of the bottle, it was necessary to be ingenious and many processes were developed, some of them frankly exotic. It was not until 1818 that the stirring table emerged. It is made up of oblique holes so that the bottles can be tilted at various angles. It represents a real work of reflection on gravity. In 1864, a certain Mr. Michelot perfected the concept and filed the patent for the desk as it still exists today. It holds 120 bottles.
At the end of this stage comes the disgorging, a process that is also manual (increasingly rare) or mechanical (the most frequent). It consists of plunging the neck of the bottle into a solution at -27°. The ice cube that forms in the neck traps the sediment and facilitates their extraction.
Riddling has played a major role in the elegance of champagne. Over the decades it has been refined with the sole aim of always offering more limpidity and clarity to champagne.
