You’d think that the less sugar you add to a sparkling wine, the drier and sharper it would taste, in a neat straight line. That’s what I assumed until I tasted the same wine at four different levels of dosage at Hambledon Vineyard in Hampshire. The least balanced of the four wasn’t the one with no sugar at all. It was the one with just a little.
Dosage is the small dose of sugar added to sparkling wine just before it’s corked, and it amounts to little more than a pipette. Here’s what we tasted:
- Zero dosage, Brut Nature (no added sugar, under 3 g/l residual sugar)
- 4 g/l, Extra Brut (between 0 and 6 g/l)
- 6 g/l, at the top of the Extra Brut range
- 10 g/l, Brut (under 12 g/l)
The 6 g/l was the most balanced, while the 4 g/l felt oddly out of kilter, with a topsy-turvy quality I didn’t enjoy. The zero dosage, meanwhile, was thrilling in its own right. It turns out that dosage has less to do with sweetness than with balance, and that a tiny amount of sugar can either complete a wine or throw it off entirely.
The purist’s dilemma
Zero dosage wines pose a real dilemma for purists. They show you the wine exactly as it is, with nothing added to smooth the edges. Yet the idea can sound suspiciously like a marketing remix, the Coke Zero of the wine world, or the “limited edition” perfume that appears every year just before Christmas. Plenty of us like to think we prefer things sugar-free, but I wonder how many would say so if handed a glass at a party without being told.
“You either love it or hate it,” said Joe Wadsack, our guide at Hambledon. “It does take a while to get used to, like jumping into a cold sea, but that shock is also what you want.”
Why dosage matters
Hampshire is a little cooler than Champagne, so its grapes come in with high acidity, and the right dosage brings that acidity into balance. Dosage is also quite different from adding sugar during fermentation, which raises the alcohol. It’s added after fermentation, just before corking, and works more like a finishing touch.
Hambledon’s Classic Cuvée NV usually has 8 g/l of residual sugar, while the Première Cuvée has 6 g/l, which, judging by our tasting, is exactly where the balance lies.
Making (or not making) my own bottle
At the end of the tasting, we each chose a favourite to bottle ourselves. Hambledon doesn’t make a zero dosage wine, so I decided to make one, or rather not make one, since there’s nothing to add. Without the dosage step, the bottle goes straight to corking and labelling.
I’ll be honest: part of my reason was impatience. A dosage takes a few months to integrate with the wine, whereas a zero dosage can be opened much sooner and will carry on developing in the bottle.
Greed aside, leaving out the sugar lets you taste what happened in the vineyard rather than in the winery. If there’s one thing everyone knows about English sparkling wine, it’s the chalk, and without any added sugar you can really taste it.
The chalk soils of Hampshire, highlighted in black
As Joe put it, “A Zero Dosage is like driving in a Porsche, you can feel the crenulation of the road under the wheel.” It’s exciting, but it isn’t for everyone, and anyone with a sensitive palate may find the acidity too sharp. For everyday drinking, I’d still choose the Première Cuvée at 6 g/l.
Final thoughts
Sparkling wine is always about the blend, with each component working together like a finely tuned machine, and dosage is the last adjustment before it leaves the workshop. Get it right and everything clicks into place. Get it slightly wrong and, as that 4 g/l sample showed, the whole thing can wobble. I’m looking forward to seeing how my zero dosage bottle develops over the coming months, with no make-up at all.
Thanks to Hambledon Vineyard for the Première Cuvée Experience. I was invited as a guest, and all views are my own.
If you’d like to try this yourself, the Première Cuvée Experience is a hands-on introduction to how sparkling wine is made, including disgorging your own bottle to take home. Hambledon is in a beautiful part of the world and a short train ride from London Waterloo.
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