Riddle me this

The Monmousseau winery specializes in sparkling wines made using the Champagne process, or méthode champenoise. Of course, French wine industry rules prohibit winemakers outside the Champagne region from using those words, so producers of sparkling wines in other regions use the words méthode traditionnelle to describe the process.

A hand-crank riddling machine at Monmousseau. Each cube or palette holds 520 bottles.

The sparkling wine process includes a second fermentation inside the bottle. Sugar and yeast are added to the still wine and the bottle is capped and stored on its side. The yeast consumes the sugar but its waste, carbon dioxide, cannot escape the bottle and stays dissolved in the wine. During this second fermentation, sediments (dead yeast) collect on the bottom of the bottle. These sediments need to be removed from the bottle before it can be corked and sold.

To move the sediments down to the neck of the bottle, wine makers would use special wooden racks that hold each bottle by the neck. A worker would turn each bottle one quarter turn daily and at the same time increase its angle slightly in the rack. This action, which takes considerable skill, would slowly move the sediments down toward the neck of the bottle until, about eight weeks later, they would all be collected at the cap. This is the process known as "riddling" or remuage in French.

These days, only very special bottles are riddled manually. Instead, large crates are turned using gears and cranks so that thousands of bottles can be riddled faster and with less effort (and skill). Many riddling machines are fully automated and require very little human intervention. The riddling process that once took skilled workers eight weeks can now be completed in a matter of days or even hours.