Georgia vineyard makes strides in sweet science of sparkling wine

Mary Poppins let it be known what wonders a spoonful of sugar could do with medicine. She should have tried some in her wine.

The question of just how much sugar was needed to help a sparkling wine go down was the subject of a "dosage" (pronounced doe-SAHZJ) trial staged recently by Wolf Mountain Vineyards on the outskirts of Dahlonega. 

I was there, accompanied by a group of strangers with whom I'd been loaded into a black stretch limo (decked out inside with tinsel for a rad prom) and driven from a Buckhead office tower to Wolf Mountain's lovely Lumpkin County estate. There, we met the winery's owner and winemaker Karl Boegner, along with his son Brannon, who manages the vineyards.

We settled around tables in the winery's great room, which looked like a Tuscan villa by way of an Appalachian mountain lodge. Through every window I could see soft green hills, some striped with terraced vineyards. I made a mental note to drive up for the Sunday brunch, stretch limo or not.

Then the bottle caps popped. More permanent closures would come once the dosage was determined.

The Boegners had just bottled their pioneering vintage of Georgia sparkling wines. In the past, other local wineries have injected still wines with carbon dioxide gas to render them effervescent. But here they produced their bubbles using the méthode champenoise.

This multistep process, developed in France's Champagne region, puts the still wine through a second fermentation in the bottle. The Boegners claim they are the first Georgia winemakers to do so.

By the time we sat down to the wines, many of the steps had already been completed. The chardonnay grapes had been grown and crushed, the juice aged on its lees and bottled. Then, it got its first dosage of sugar syrup and yeast, which resulted in plenty of bubbles as well as some sediment.

The bottles were then placed with their spouts leaning down in a riddling rack so the sediment (essentially, a fresh batch of lees) could collect in the neck. A daily twist of the bottle over a period of time also helped sediment migrate from the sloped shoulders of the bottles to the neck. Then the bottlenecks were frozen so that an icy plug containing the lees could be disgorged.

Which brought us to the dosage trial.

The twice-fermented sparkling wine comes out not only bone dry but acidic enough to wrinkle your tongue. So, typically, when winemakers add base wine to cap off the disgorged bottles, they also throw in a little sugar. For the Boegners, that means topping off their wines with a simple syrup of water and Dixie Crystals.

They started us with side-by-side tastings of their blanc de blancs brut. Neither tasted sweet, but the one with more sugar seemed to have length of flavor, while the one with less sugar had a stronger flavor of yeast. Both were very appealing sparkling wines that I wouldn't hesitate to buy.

Next were two bottles of brut rosé, the same chardonnay finished with a dosage of Wolf Mountain's red blended wine called "claret." Again, the difference wasn't so much a perception of levels of sweetness but of flavors.

We finished with side-by-side tastings of demi-sec, the sweetest of the three. Karl Boegner said the sweeter demi-sec contained 35 milliliters of syrup, nearly 5 percent of the bottle's content. Not to my taste, but still a lot more interesting to drink than some sparkling wines I've been served at weddings.