At the Château, we have two very different bottling techniques…

Conventional bottling

This is for “quiet wines”, i.e. all the non-sparkling AOC wines we produce.
At the end of ageing, the wines are filtered before bottling and corking.

Bottling of sparkling wines

The second technique only applies to our Jeu de Bulles wine which is sparkling.

This bottling method has the distinction of marking the end of alcohol fermentation in tanks and the start of another alcohol fermentation in bottles: the creation of the wine’s sparkle.

For this stage, we use yeasts that naturally transform sugars still present in the wine into fine bubbles. This phase lasts around three weeks, depending on the sugar levels. To know the state of progress of this transformation, we regularly measure the pressure in the bottle.

Once the threshold of 5 to 6 bars has been reached (6 times ambient pressure), the bottles are returned to us for the last stage: disgorging and setting.

– The bottles are presented head down. The neck is placed at a temperature of -28 °C to freeze the yeast and the stopper is removed (disgorging) to extract yeasts and thus stop fermentation.
– Bottles will then be turned over, corked and set with an iron wire cage that holds the cork.

One more stage remains before you can discover our work: capping and labelling.