Bubbling along….

A really exciting new venture for us this year – we decided to make some sparkling rosé. We harvested our Cabernet Franc grapes early especially for this wine – we needed to do this because the alcohol level of the base wine needs to be around 11% so we didn’t want too much sugar in the grapes (the secondary fermentation – more in a minute – increases the alcohol in the finished wine). The process is exactly the same as that used to make champagne – a base wine is put into bottle along with a small amount of sugar and yeast (called a dosage) and a second fermentation then takes place inside the bottle that creates the fizz. We don’t have the facilities to do all this so we searched around for someone who could take our base wine and put it through this process for us. We were really lucky to find a local company who seem excellent but it was with some trepidation that we loaded our wine into a container and watched it disappear on a lorry in October last year. Good news though, we’ve just been sent some pictures of our wine being bottled, having the temporary caps fitted and being stored. All looking good so far – next step is to taste it in a couple of months to test how the secondary fermentation is progressing and sample the first ever sparking Chater wine! We’ve decided to call the wine “Eclat” (roughly speaking this is French for sparkle) and we’re just putting the final touches to the label.