Opening Champagne, along with other sparkling wines needs care and attention beyond what a regular wine bottle demands...
Unlike their flat, no-fizz siblings, bubbly wines like Champagne and Spumante require a completely different approach to be opened.
In fact, if you were to try to open a bubbly wine using a regular wine’s corkscrew, you could in fact end up with the cork and corkscrew flying out with a vengeance right towards your eye!
Instead of risking unnecessary flying objects and injury, heed this simple advice: never use a corkscrew on a bottle of bubbly!
What to do instead? Read on.
First of all, calm your bubbly wine down by either letting it sit upright for several hours, or ideally up to a day. If time is of the essence, you can submerge it into a filled ice bucket for around a half hour to achieve the same effect.
Just make sure you’re aware of how much cooler the wine is below its regular serving temperature. Chilled sparkling does not mean ice cold like a beer, so after its half hour ice box vacation, keep it at room temperature for several minutes to reach its ideal serving temperature.
Bubbly wine corks are also shaped differently than with regular wines - with a mushroom top that protrudes out of the bottle’s rim that’s encased with a thin wire netting that looks a bit like a cage. This is meant to keep the cork in place despite the pressurized wine below that’s inevitably trying to push the cork out and escape!
If you come across an especially stubborn Champagne cork, run the bottle neck under warm water for three to five minutes.
This sudden heat should agitate the carbonation inside the top of the bottle enough to want to push out the cork faster.
It’s a similar effect to shaking up a can of soda!
* * * * * * *
New Jersey Wineries › Wine Accessories › Opening Champagne |
Do you have a great story about this? You can share it here without needing a Facebook account! You can even upload pictures!
Dec 04, 14 04:30 PM
When France lost Algeria in 1960, a great worry of winemakers wad what are we going to do now? French wines from many regions WERE B,ENDED WITH MUCH STRONGER
Dec 04, 14 03:26 PM
How to make port wine - delicious, heart-warming, the perfect gift
Nov 01, 14 04:25 PM
Wine accessory shopping for the holidays
New! Comments
Have your say about what you just read! Leave me a comment in the box below.