Bubbles

The traditional method puts a second fermentation inside the finished bottle and leaves the wine on its spent yeast for months or years; that covers Champagne and Cap Classique. The tank method runs that second fermentation in a sealed pressurised vessel and bottles under pressure, which is how Prosecco is made. Carbonation injects gas into a still wine. The ancestral method bottles a wine before its first fermentation has finished, so nothing is added at all. Each route leaves a different mark on the glass.

Sweetness runs on a scale and the terms are not intuitive. From driest upward the order is brut nature, extra brut, brut, extra dry, sec, demi-sec and doux. Extra dry is therefore sweeter than brut, which catches almost everybody once and is worth committing to memory. Brut is the default setting for most sparkling wine and reads as dry without being austere. Where a bottle says nothing at all, brut is the safe assumption.

A fully sparkling wine holds several atmospheres of pressure inside it, more than a car tyre carries. That is why the glass is thick and heavy, why the base is pushed up into a punt to spread the load, and why the cork needs a wire cage holding it down. Lightly sparkling styles, labelled petillant or frizzante, sit at lower pressure and often close with an ordinary cork or a crown cap. The bottle is engineering before it is packaging.

The tulip does the most for the wine: wide enough in the bowl for aroma to gather, narrow enough at the rim to keep it there. A flute preserves the bubble stream but gives aroma nowhere to collect. The coupe loses both. A plain white wine glass is a better substitute than it sounds.

Chill it properly first, because cold wine holds its gas better and pushes less hard. Take the foil off, keep a thumb over the cork before loosening the cage, then hold the cork still and turn the bottle. Done slowly it releases with a sigh. Never point it at anyone.

Better than most people assume, provided you use a proper sparkling stopper and put it straight back in the fridge. A day or two later it will have lost some pressure but should still be pleasant. The old teaspoon trick does nothing. Cold does the real work.