2021 Brut – Extended Tirage

The third and final release of our inaugural Brut

Our third and final bottling of the 2021 Brut has completed disgorgement and is ready to be savored. As our very first sparkling wine, the 2021 Brut has been a journey of craftsmanship and discovery, with each release revealing a new expression of the same base wine: 80% Pinot Noir for depth and roundness and 20% Chardonnay for added structure.

Our inaugural Brut went through a 30-month tirage, receiving a small dosage after disgorgement for balance and finesse. The second, our Extra Brut, shared the same tirage time but skipped the dosage entirely, delivering a crisp, bone-dry sparkling wine.

This final release takes the experience one step further, with an additional six months of tirage. The result? A sparkling wine of remarkable depth; richer on the palate, with luxurious brioche notes and a layered complexity that only time and patience can achieve.

A fitting finale to the story of our first sparkling wine—crafted to be enjoyed, remembered, and celebrated.

2021 Brut – Extended Tirage

“A beautiful golden hue with aromas of baked apples and poached pears. The palate is well-balanced with notes of white peach and brioche. The extended tirage time has added a weightiness to the mid-palate, resulting in a richer and more luxurious mouthfeel.“

Producing a first-quality, sparkling wine using the méthode traditionelle, a/k/a méthode champenoise, is an infinitely fascinating process. These wines require not one, but two consecutive yeast and sugar fermentations. The first produces the “base wine,” which must be a relatively low alcohol and high-acidity wine. The acidity provides structure, and the second fermentation will add an additional point to a point and a half of alcohol in the finished wine. For our 2021 B Cellars Brut, the base wine was created by co-fermenting Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, without skin contact.

Sparkling Wine Terms

The base wine is bottled in a very particular manner: in each individual bottle, an additional dose of yeast and sugar is added, and then the bottle is capped with a “crown cap.”  (For “crown cap,” think of a bottle of beer or soda.)  This in-bottle fermentation produces some very important characteristics of the final wine.  First, as mentioned above, it increases the alcohol content, as the live yeast converts the sugars into ethyl alcohol.  (Yeh!).

Second, the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by this fermentation is “captured” because the crown cap seals each bottle.  So, the CO2 goes into suspension, pressurizing the bottle—this is what makes it a sparkling wine!  Finally, after the fermentation is complete, the yeast cells die off due to a lack of food and produce lees.  Lees is simply the French word for dead yeast cells.  During tirage the wine is being aged sur lees, or “on the lees” and these yeasts are adding flavors, textures, and aromas to the finished wine.

Since we had never previously produced a sparkling Brut at B Cellars, we experimented with two different tirage periods: the first one was roughly 3 1/2 years.  And for this release, our tirage time was 4 years!

During tirage, the wine in the bottle is cloudy with the lees.  In order to bottle a wine that is clear, visually as well as one with a crisp mouth feel and presentation on the palate, we must first remove the lees.  To do this, the bottles are stacked in a rack, more or less horizontally.  Over time, the bottles are agitated and turned, while at the same time, the angle of the bottle in the rack is increased.  The bottles move, during riddling, from a horizontal position to a neck-down, vertical position.  This agitation and movement sends the lees down into the neck of the bottle, forming a disc against the cap.

Traditionally, riddling was done in wooden racks by hand, bottle by bottle.  Today, the process can also be accomplished using a very clever mechanical system.  Bottles are loaded into cages which are then suspended, shaken, and turned over and over again to accomplish the same movement of lees into a disc against the cap.  Either way, this process is incredibly precise, demanding, and time consuming.

After riddling, the wines are crysal clear, but the lees are still in the bottle, nestled in a disc against the cap.  For the next step, the bottles are positioned neck-down in a very cold glycol solution which freezes the lees.  Specialized bottling line equipment then flips each bottle up and removes the crown cap.  The pressure inside the bottle, from the CO2, blows the lees cap out along with a very small (less than half an ounce) of the wine.

Immediately following the disgorging, a small amount of liquid is replaced in each bottle.  This liquid is comprised of wine and a small amount of sugar in solution.  This is called the dosage.  The dosage serves two main functions. First, it replaces any liquid lost during the disgorging, so that each bottle contains the correct volume of wine (typically 750ml).  Second, it is a tool for the winemaker to make small, incremental changes or additions to the wine.

For high-quality, brut (i.e., dry, not sweet) sparkling wines, the winemaker may choose to add a very small amount of sugar, usually an amount so small that most human palates cannot actually taste it as “sweet.”  Rather, this small addition of sugar will simply add a balance to the bracing acidity of a good sparkling wine and will add some smoothness and texture to the mouthfeel.  Immediately after the dosage addition, the wine is corked, with a sparkling wine natural cork.  Then the cage and foil are added, and the wine is, essentially, finished.

For our 2021 B Cellar Brut Blanc de Noir, we released three different dosage levels (including this one).  The first release was a sugar addition of 1.5g/L.  At the same time, we also bottled and corked a wine with a dosage that included zero additional sugar, known as a brut nature.  For this latest release, with a full 4 years of tirage, and aging sur lees, we bottled with a small dosage addition of 1g/L.