What Does Disgorging Mean?
In sparkling wine and champagne production disgorging is the process by which excess yeast or “yeast lees” are removed from the bottle before the cork is inserted. Disgorging sparkling wine is an integral part of the production process.
How The Bubbles are Created
When sparkling wine is made in the ‘Traditional Method’ or Champagne style, the secondary fermentation, to put the bubbles in the wine, takes place in the bottle. So the wine is ‘bottle fermented’ as opposed to Prosecco where the secondary fermentation takes place in a large tank and then bottles are filled with the fizzy wine from the tank (the Charmat method), like Coca-Cola.
To get the bubbles in the wine you need to add a little yeast and a bit of sugar to the wine which then ferments in the bottle creating CO2 (fizz) and a little more alcohol.
Why is Bottle Fermented Sparkling Wine Better?
You may ask what are the benefits of making ‘bottle fermented’ sparkling wine? The main one is that the bubbles are finer and so they last longer in the glass. You also get wonderful flavours from the yeast when it’s in contact with the wine in the bottle. This process is called ‘autolysis’ and the longer you leave the wine in contact with the ‘yeast lees’ the better, up to a point. Prosecco, in large vats, doesn’t have the same yeast contact and therefore does not have the depth and complexity of flavour that bottle fermented wine has.
Riddling and Disgorging
However, after the secondary fermentation, you are left with ‘yeast lees’ in the bottle, which you need to remove. Historically this was done by an army of men, ‘Les Remueurs’, who laboured in dark cellars turning the bottles a small amount everyday until they got the yeast into the neck of the bottle.
Thankfully it is not done like that any longer. We now have machines that ‘riddle’ about five hundred bottles at a time over a week.
But once the yeast is in the neck of the bottle you need to remove it. That is done by freezing the neck of the bottle and allowing that frozen yeast plug out of the bottle and this is called disgorging or in French, dégorgement.
