The bubble according to the primal method: method ancestrale

No Champagne today, but another special sparkling wine in the spotlight. During my search for the unknown, I stumbled upon the French town of Gaillac, near Toulouse. Here, the bubbles aren't produced in the same way as in Champagne. A completely different method is used, called the méthode ancestrale .

How does that work exactly?

In 1531, a farmer in Gaillac made sparkling wine, almost by chance... Let's start with a mini-course on winemaking. To make wine, you need grapes. The grapes are pressed, and the juice is fermented: the sugars are converted into alcohol. Once all the sugars have been converted, you're left with a dry wine. Voila, c'est ça—ready for bottling.

Or maybe not? Things were different back then in Gaillac. The cold stopped fermentation prematurely: the sugars hadn't fully fermented yet. The winemaker was clueless and stuck to his routine: harvest - press - ferment - bottle. A few months later, he opened a bottle and discovered the bubbles and a hint of residual sweetness. Wow!

The wine had started fermenting again in the bottle. A natural byproduct of alcoholic fermentation is carbon dioxide. Normally, this escapes into the open air (the tanks are open), but now it had nowhere to go. The result was sparkling wine!

Okay, it's not all roses and sunshine. Back then, a few bottles also exploded due to the high pressure...

#nerdtalk: Sparkling wine made according to the méthode ancestrale preceded Champagne by 100 years.

What is the ancestral method?

Today, we know this method as the méthode ancestrale. It's no longer a fluke. The juice is fermented in stainless steel tanks, which are stopped early by cooling the must to 0°C. The wine is bottled, and the remaining yeast creates bubbles. This "ancient method" is called the méthode ancestrale.

The main difference between the méthode ancestrale and the méthode traditionelle (the Champagne one) is that with the ancestrale, only one fermentation takes place—the alcoholic fermentation. With the méthode traditionelle, two fermentations take place: the first in the tank and a second in the bottle. Incidentally, the pressure in the bottle with the méthode traditionelle is much higher (due to more yeast and sugar), resulting in more and finer bubbles.

Bubble tips

During a club night at "the forgotten grape," we tasted L'Enclos de Roses from Gaillac. No sooner had we taken a sip than everyone was shouting "apple." The Mauzac is definitely leaving its mark. It has a different kind of bubbles than Champagne. A little less so, more like the bubbles you find in beer. Delicious and refreshing.

In Limoux, besides Blanquette and Crémant de Limoux—both made using the traditional method—bubbles are also produced using the ancestral method. One example is Le Proprietaire from Sieur d'Arques. These wines generally have a lower alcohol content and therefore a slight residual sweetness.

Want to know the ins and outs of sparkling wine? Then the book Champagne and Sparkling Wine by Tom Stevenson and Essi Avellan might be just what you're looking for. I used it extensively for the Sparkling Wines exam during my WSET Diploma .