When you're tired from the day's work, when you want to add a touch of elegance to your everyday life, when you wish to spend quality time with close friends, or when you need to refresh yourself from the oppressive heat—sparkling wine is the perfect companion for all these occasions.
A well-chilled sparkling wine, with its delightful flavor and beautiful effervescence, elevates your mood and refreshes your spirit. Even in an ordinary moment of daily life, opening a bottle of Champagne instantly transforms the atmosphere into something special. Whatever the occasion, sparkling wine has the unique ability to add a layer of elegance to that moment.
The Tragedy of Gushing
However, the very sparkling wine that should beautify our moments can sometimes turn a joyful occasion into a nightmare. The culprit is gushing upon opening.
If it merely bubbles over slightly and wets the table, that's still manageable. But imagine this: the moment you open the bottle, wine shoots up a meter high, soaking the ceiling, furniture, and your clothes, leaving the bottle nearly empty. Such a scenario is truly devastating.
You might think such things never happen. But in reality, these tragedies do occur and will continue to occur. Perhaps the next bottle to gush spectacularly will be the very one you're holding in your hand.
Why does sparkling wine gush? The causes are not yet fully understood, but much has already been discovered. This article explores the fundamental aspects of the truth behind gushing.
Most Causes Lie in the Manufacturing Process
Those who drink wine regularly might think that gushing is a characteristic unique to sparkling wine. That's incorrect. Virtually every carbonated beverage in the world carries the risk of gushing. This includes sparkling wine, beer, chuhai, sparkling sake, sparkling juice, and even carbonated mineral water. It doesn't matter whether the carbonation level is high or low.
Yet, why is it that we almost never experience the frustration of having our relaxation time ruined and our rooms soiled by juice or mineral water after coming home from work?
The answer is that these beverages are manufactured with rigorous quality control.
As most people have experienced, carbonated beverages will gush if you shake them before opening. They'll also gush if you warm the container. When gushing occurs due to such actions just before drinking, the cause lies with the consumer. No matter how carefully a producer manufactures the product, there's nothing they can do if someone shakes the bottle right before opening it.
On the other hand, when bottles gush without such reasons, most of the causes lie in the manufacturing process. When sparkling wine ruins both your room and your mood, it's often due to the producer's negligence.
Is Gushing Inevitable?
As long as it's a carbonated beverage, the risk of gushing upon opening always exists. Unfortunately, it's difficult to completely eliminate this possibility. This tendency is particularly strong in beverages with very complex liquid compositions, such as wine and sake.
In this sense, it's understandable that some risk of gushing exists when opening sparkling wine. However, gushing itself should not be considered inevitable. Sparkling wine is meant for enjoying bubbles, not for spilling and wasting its contents.
Some producers include warnings on their bottles that assume gushing will occur, but this is deeply problematic. Being able to write a warning that presupposes gushing means they know it happens quite frequently. Knowing this high frequency yet failing to take measures and accepting the risk of causing damage is nothing but manufacturing negligence.
Why Bottles Gush
The phenomenon where carbonated beverages like sparkling wine suddenly gush 1-2 seconds after opening is called "gushing." While the causes of gushing are not yet fully understood, it's known that numerous factors are involved.
Limiting our focus to wine-related causes, most can be categorized into three factors: bottle handling before opening, fermentation management during production, and equipment-related issues such as the containers used. Among these, bottle handling is particularly relevant for those who enjoy wine.
Temperature and Light Require Attention
When consumers enjoy sparkling wine, three things require attention: vibration, temperature, and light. It's common knowledge that shaking carbonated beverages causes them to gush. Regarding temperature, some may have experienced store staff advising them to chill the wine well before drinking when purchasing sparkling wine.
The Importance of Temperature Control
Generally speaking, cooling carbonated beverages—not just sparkling wine—reduces the pressure inside the container. The phenomenon of gushing is caused by carbon dioxide gas dissolved in the liquid coming out and creating pressure from the inside of the bottle outward—the internal bottle pressure. The stronger this pressure becomes, the more vigorously the wine will gush when the bottle is opened.
Carbon dioxide gas has the property of dissolving better in liquid at lower temperatures. Therefore, chilling the bottle well before opening allows the carbon dioxide that was trying to escape to dissolve back into the wine, thereby reducing the internal bottle pressure. While it's difficult to provide exact figures because the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide varies greatly depending on the wine's characteristics, some data shows that the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide gas at 0°C is approximately twice that at 20°C. Chilling the bottle thoroughly beforehand is the simplest and most effective means of preventing gushing upon opening.
The Impact of Light
Less well-known than temperature's impact is the effect of light. Ultraviolet light is known to trigger gushing. While ultraviolet rays are abundant in sunlight, they're also emitted in small amounts from lighting that doesn't use LEDs. Even these ultraviolet rays from lighting fixtures can potentially cause effects.
Except for cases like rosé where showing the wine's color is desired, most wines—whether still or sparkling—are bottled in dark-colored glass. This is a measure to protect the wine from ultraviolet light, but research suggests that this measure alone may be insufficient against gushing.
Experiments examining the effects of ultraviolet light on gushing have confirmed that it can occur even in dark-colored bottles with UV protection.
Wines Suitable and Unsuitable for Sparkling Wine
Those who have experience adding powdered substances like sugar to carbonated beverages will understand this empirically, but when you add solids—especially fine particles—to liquid containing carbon dioxide gas, bubbles suddenly surge up. The added solid particles become nucleation sites for bubbles, causing bubbles to form there and increase in a chain reaction. This is actually the primary cause of producing sparkling wine that gushes upon opening during the manufacturing process.
While wine appears to be a transparent liquid at first glance, it actually contains many solid particles. Typical examples include the sediment seen in red wine and the tartrate crystals often found in bottles of white wine. If these solid particles aren't properly stabilized during the winemaking process, they can precipitate unexpectedly.
The precipitated solid particles directly become nucleation sites for bubbles, waiting inside the bottle for the moment to gush as foam. Then, when the bottle is opened and there's nothing left to suppress the built-up pressure, they forcefully shoot out of the bottle. This insufficient understanding of solid particles existing inside bottles creates many tragedies.
Red and Orange Wines Don't Mix Well with Bubbles
The Incompatibility of Red Wine and Sparkling Wine
When you look around at sparkling wines in the world, you might notice that there are relatively few red sparkling wines. While you often see rosés with pale colors, sparkling wines with deep red colors like red wine are not that common. This is because the properties of red wine are hopelessly incompatible with sparkling wine.
Red wine contains overwhelmingly more solid particles compared to white wine and rosé wine. When comparing bottles that have been stored for long periods, red wine bottles show significant sediment while white wine bottles show almost none—this is why.
Red wine is red because it contains polyphenols called anthocyanins that act as pigments, but these polyphenol components are also solid particles. Anthocyanins precipitate through multiple factors and settle as sediment at the bottom of wine bottles.
Furthermore, the astringency felt in red wine is also due to polyphenols. In other words, they precipitate at some point and settle. Having this many substances that precipitate from wine and settle at the bottom of the bottle means there's an equally high risk of triggering gushing.
To make sparkling wine from red wine while minimizing the risk of gushing, you would need to remove most of the polyphenols from the red wine. But doing so would also cause the wine to lose its red color. This is why the compatibility is hopelessly poor.
Note that the amount of solid particles contained in wine is somewhat related to the degree of extraction, maceration, or skin contact. This is because maceration aims to transfer polyphenols and other key components contained in grape skins and seeds to the liquid that becomes wine.
The Challenges of Orange Wine
While not to the same extent as red wine, orange wine—which has become increasingly popular recently—is also unsuitable for sparkling wine. Orange wine is made using white wine grape varieties but produced like red wine; simply put, it's deeply colored white wine. However, unlike red wine, this color comes primarily from oxidation rather than pigments like anthocyanins.
Sparkling wine must trap carbon dioxide gas inside the bottle, so the production process inevitably becomes reductive. This makes it impossible to maintain the color of orange wine that was achieved through oxidation. Does this mean it becomes like white sparkling wine? Not quite. Because orange wine undergoes extraction, it has a greater tendency to precipitate tartrates and other substances compared to white wine.
If the tartrates are allowed to fully precipitate before processing into sparkling wine, that would be acceptable. However, if this isn't done, the tartrates will precipitate inside the bottle, making the possibility of gushing far higher than when making sparkling wine from white wine or other wines without extraction.
Pét-Nat: The Highest Risk
The Popularity and Characteristics of Pét-Nat
In recent years, pét-nat (short for Pétillant Naturel) has become popular. Pét-nat is a type of sparkling wine, but unlike Champagne or Sekt—which are made by adding sugar and yeast to wine that has already completed fermentation and become finished wine, then inducing secondary fermentation—pét-nat is bottled during primary fermentation while the wine is still incomplete, trapping carbon dioxide gas inside the bottle. This is called the méthode rurale or méthode ancestrale. It's also generally recognized as belonging to the category of natural wines.
The characteristics of pét-nat are that it's bottled before the initial alcoholic fermentation is fully complete, so the bottle contains much of the lees that would normally be removed after fermentation, and the internal bottle pressure tends to be kept lower compared to sparkling wines that undergo traditional secondary fermentation. Due to these characteristics, pét-nat has become popular as a fresh, light, and easy-to-drink sparkling wine. The current preference for natural wines has also helped fuel this popularity.
However, despite this high popularity, in terms of the possibility of soiling rooms and clothing after opening, it's the highest-risk wine.
Structural Problems with Pét-Nat
Many producers making pét-nat tend to apply more extraction, perhaps from an awareness that it's a natural wine, and such efforts manifest as cloudiness in the finished pét-nat. While cloudy sparkling wine is rare, pét-nat is an exception. With pét-nat, this cloudiness is valued as a characteristic of the wine; in fact, clear pét-nat is often disliked by both producers and consumers. However, cloudiness is proof that it contains large amounts of solid particles. In other words, there's an extremely high possibility that massive amounts of bubbles will form using the cloudiness as nucleation sites.
What makes the problem worse is that many producers making pét-nat tolerate gushing. The reasons vary—from the producer's convictions to simple lack of knowledge—but the fact that risks of gushing aren't consciously avoided further increases the already high risk inherent in the wine's characteristics. There's even an atmosphere where consumers have developed the mistaken perception that gushing is natural.
People tend to think that pét-nat is easier to make than sparkling wine requiring secondary fermentation—easier in terms of equipment, labor, and mindset. Furthermore, because internal bottle pressure is often kept relatively low, even if it gushes, it might not be seen as that serious a problem. Both producers and consumers think, "This much is acceptable."
Conclusion: Neglecting Countermeasures Is the Primary Cause
Whether it's sparkling wine made through secondary fermentation or pét-nat, while it may not be possible to achieve perfection, measures can be taken to prevent bubbles from gushing upon opening. In fact, bottles from producers who thoroughly implement such measures rarely experience these problems.
When you examine it closely, the attitude of neglecting such known countermeasures and the atmosphere that tolerates this attitude may be the greatest cause of the tragedies created by bubbles when opening sparkling wine.
More specific techniques for avoiding gushing from a winemaking perspective will be explained in articles published within our online community. Note that parts of these member-exclusive articles are re-edited and also published in our note magazine. If you'd like to delve deeper into topics such as vine age and its relationship to wine, please consider joining the community or subscribing to the magazine.
