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More sparkling wine is consumed during the winter holiday season than any other time of year. But what makes Champagne so special (and so expensive)?
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Mike Supple: You're watching Screw It on SuppleWine. I'm your host, Mike Supple.

We're heading into that time of year where lots of bubbly gets popped, particularly for New Year's Eve. Of course you can get sparkling wine from just about anywhere in the world, but what is it that makes Champagne so special? And, usually, so much more expensive?

Here's the quick and dirty version of how most wines are made. You start with grapes and squish them to get the juice out. Add some yeast - the yeast turns the sugar in the juice into alcohol - and you end up with wine.

Champagne starts in a similar fashion. Start with the grapes, squish them to get the juice out, add some yeast and turn it into wine. It's a dry wine just like any other. What makes Champagne so special is what they do with that base wine after they make it. With regular wine - whites and reds - after it's done they put it in a bottle, and maybe age it, but it's ready for the consumer. With Champagne, there are still several steps to go before it's ready for the consumer.

They take the base wine and put it in a Champagne bottle - the same bottle that you will eventually buy and drink. To that bottle they add what is called liqueur de tirage - that's sugar, yeast and nutrients. They put that in the bottle and seal it with a temporary closure. When you put sugar and yeast in a bottle and seal it, the yeast will begin to turn the sugar into alcohol, producing CO2 as a byproduct. The CO2 remains trapped in the bottle, and that is what makes the bubbles.

Having the wine and yeast trapped in the bottle together affects the flavor of the Champagne - it gives the final wine the "autolytic" flavors which include yeast, bread, toast, honey and more. The longer the wine and yeast stay in the bottle, the more flavors like this will develop. There are some disagreements as to how long this process should last, so different Champagne houses age the wine for different lengths of time. By law in Champagne they must age it for at least 15 months, but many houses age for a lot longer than that. Because of this aging process they have to store the wine for a lot longer and storage costs money. This is one of the reasons Champagne is so expensive.

This isn't the end of the process. If they just shipped the Champagne out to you like that, the bottom of every bottle would be filled with sludge make up of dead yeast cells. They get rid of this sediment through a process called "riddling." During this process the bottles are slowly turned and moved to a vertical upside-down position, so the sediment all gathers in the neck. Once it is all in the neck they can freeze it into a solid plug that can then more easily be expelled from the bottle. This final process is somewhat complicated and there are a few more steps involved in getting it ready to ship to you. I took some video footage inside the caves of Champagne Louis Roederer to show you how this process is done.

[Video footage of the bottling process.]

In the back right you can see some bottles that are upside-down. They are being dipped into a solution that freezes the sediment in the neck. Once that plug is frozen it has to be removed from the bottle. This can be done by hand or by machine. In this video you see a machine removing the temporary crown cap and the frozen sediment plug.

Just about all Champagne is fermented dry, meaning it doesn't have any sweetness. Yet a lot of bottles of Champagne have sugar in them. This is because during the next step they add the liqueuer d'expedition or dosage, which is a mixture of wine and can sugar. They do this to top up the bottle from wine lost during the sediment removal process, as well as adding the sweetness to make the desired final product, whether it is Brut, Dry, Extra Dry or whatever.

After they've added the dosage, they put the cork in the bottle. The cork is a fat cylinder that requires over 2 tons of pressure to force it into the neck of the bottle. It's important to have this giant expanded cork in the neck to keep air from getting into the bottle and to keep CO2 from escaping.

Of course, if the cork was left by itself as with most bottles of wine, the bubbles would send the cork flying out of the bottle within a short period of time. To stop this, they add a wire cage and cap on top of the cork to hold it in place.

Once the cork and cage are secure, they mix the bottles. This mixes the dosage sugar with the rest of the wine, making it all uniform.

The final step at Louis Roederer is to put the bottles back in the cellar for at least another 6 months. This allows the wine to settle so when they ship it to you it is ready to enjoy!