Here are the definitions for the letter "c"

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Centrifuge

A centrifuge is a rapidly spinning device for the purpose of separating out mixed materials. It has found in use in the winery as it may be used to clarify the must. It may also be used to separate out fractions of the liquid must, which has led to its use as a dealcoholisation tool. Also known as a spinning cone.

CENTURION

Red grape cross with same parents as Carnelian above and created by same viticulturist. Used for blending with lesser wines to improve perceived quality.

Cépage (France)

Grape variety.

Cépage améliorateur (France)

An "improving variety", as this translates, is one encouraged for viticulture in order to improve the quality of a region's wines. In the Languedoc the term refers to varieties such as Mourvèdre, Syrah and Grenache, which are encouraged in place of Carignan, Cinsaut and other lesser grapes. The minimum quantity of "improving varieties" is laid down in appellation regulations.

CERCEAL

Variety, used in white wine production, grown in Portugal. The Sercial grape grown on the island of Madeira is identical and is the corrupted english synonym name.

CESANESE

(aka Bonvino Nero). Red wine grape of ancient origin mostly found in the Latium region of central Italy.

CÉSAR (Noir)

Synonyms include Celar, Gros Monsieur, Picargniot, Romain and Romano. Recent (2001) DNA analysis has established that this variety is possibly a cross between Pinot Noir and Argant. Red-wine producing grape grown in area close to Chablis region of Northern Burgundy, France. Mainly blended with Pinot Noir to create a light red wine known as "Bourgogne Irancy". Also some acreages in Argentina and Chile where it is reportedly used to produce a varietal wine labeled as Cesar (?).

Champagne

A variety of grape that is grown in clusters that produce very small diameter grapes. It is a seedless grape that provides a very sweet flavor for salads, appetizers or as a snack with cheese. The stem, which is also very tiny and tender, is often consumed with the grape rather than attempting to detatch the small connector from the main stem. Champagne grapes that are dried are referred to as currants, a named derived from this variety also being called the Zante Currant grape. Although it may be confused with common black, red or white currants that grow on bushes, it is similar only in shape and size, but is not the same type of fruit. The dried grape that becomes a currant is often used like raisins as an ingredient when baking cookies and sweets. In addition to Zante Currant, this grape may also be known as a Black Corinth grape. See our Champagne guide.

Champagne Guide

When it comes to this famous wine region, there aren't many different appellations to remember. In fact, there is just one: Champagne. The Champenois, as the producers are known, are fiercely protective of this name, and do not shy away from taking legal action against anyone who uses it incorrectly. Hence, if you see a bottle with the word 'Champagne' on the label, it acts as a guarantee that this wine has been produced in this cold, northern French region, and nowhere else. It also almost always ensures a hefty price tag. Unfortunately, like all appellations, it does not ensure quality.

Making Champagne
Effectively there are just three grapes used to make Champagne. There are tiny quantities of a few other obscure grape varieties planted and legally included, but for our purposes we shall concern ourselves with the three important ones. They are Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. The first two are black grapes, the latter is white.

Firstly, most houses will take a selection of still wines made from the grapes of more than one area, as this far north it is not commercially viable to rely on just one or two individual vineyards. Most Champagne is white, and may be made from any combination of the three grapes above. The pulp, and therefore the juice, of the two black grapes is white, so a white wine is obtained form these grapes by gentle pressing and taking the juice off the skins before they have had time to impart any colour. Once the wines are assembled, the cellar-master of the house will decide how they should be blended, before the bubbles are created by the Méthode Champenoise.

A recipe for making fizz (Méthode Champenoise):

Step 1: take one bottle of still wine, appropriately blended so as to maintain the house style. Ensure the glass is thick and strong to resist the increased pressure that will be created in the bottle.

Step 2: add a dose of sugar solution and yeast, known as liqueur de tirage, and seal the bottle with a good fitting cap - like a beer bottle cap.

Step 3: wait for the yeast to ferment the added sugar, creating more alcohol and, more importantly, carbon dioxide. As this gas cannot escape and is held under pressure, it will dissolve in the wine. This is where the bubbles come from. The pressure inside the bottle is now perhaps 80-90psi, equivalent to three or four times the pressure in the tyres on the average car.

Step 4: leave the wine for some time, perhaps several years. The lees (dead yeast cells) will impart richness to the wine.

Step 5: gradual turn and tap the bottle over time, so that eventually it is facing neck down, with the dead yeast cells sitting in the neck. This is known as remuage, or riddling.

Step 6: dip the neck in freezing brine to create a frozen plug of wine, containing the dead yeast cells, in the neck of the bottle. Pop the cap and the plug, complete with lees, flies out. This is known as dégorgement.

Step 7: top up with a dosage of sweetish wine, seal with a cork, wire capsule and foil, and sell it for a handsome profit.

Many wine writers talk about a famous old monk, called Dom Pérignon, and they credit him with the discovery that wines could be made fizzy by second fermentation in bottle. This is of course, absolute nonsense. It was an Englishman, Christopher Merret, who discovered this. If Dom Pérignon is to be credited for anything, it should be the introduction of the cork stopper, an event in which he did play a role.

Champagne Regions This isn't vital information, unless you are a true Champagne expert, so I'll deal with it quickly. There are just five main regions within Champagne where the grapes are grown, and where the houses source their grapes will influence the quality and style of the final product. It's not really of much use to the general consumer, however, as you won't find these names on the label.

Firstly, the Montagne de Reims is the most northerly area, and is planted mainly with Pinot Noir, mainly on north facing slopes. Wines produced here are firm and austere. The Côte des Blancs is a mostly east-facing region south of Epernay. It is almost entirely planted with Chardonnay, and produces a wine much less hard than the Montagne de Reims. There is a little Pinot Noir planted in the very south of this region. The Vallée de la Marne runs west-east, and is planted with all three grape varieties, although the Pinot Meunier dominates. Furher south is the Côte des Sézanne, primarily Chardonnay country, and finally the Aube, the southernmost of all five regions, is planted mainly with Pinot Noir. This latter region is quite a distance further south than the other four, and is thus warmer, so it is planted with mainly Pinot Noir.

The Wines What determines how much you pay for a bottle is the style of wine inside it. A non-vintage (often abbreviated to NV) wine is a blend of wine from several different years. They are blended so as to maintain a house style, and this is the entry level for Champagne. Vintage wines are produced from a single year, and most houses will only release a vintage wine if they deem that the grapes harvested that year are of sufficient quality. Accordingly, they are more expensive than the NV wines. They are identifiable simply by the presence of a vintage year on the label. Prestige cuvées are released by some of the top houses, and here quality can be excellent. Some examples include Dom Pérignon (Moët et Chandon), Comtes de Champagne (Taittinger), Belle Epoque (Perrier-Jouët), Dom Ruinart (Ruinart), Bollinger RD and Grande Année (Bollinger), Cristal (Roederer), La Grande Dame (Veuve Clicquot), Cuvée Winston Churchill (Pol Roger - named after the Prime Minister, who had a penchant for Pol Roger as well as cigars), among others. I taste many of these wines in this Prestige Cuvée Champagne tasting.

To be really helpful, acknowledging the fact that NV wines do taste different from year to year, regardless of how well the house style is maintained, the late Daniel Thibault introduced cellaring dates to the NV wines at Charles Heidsieck, and I wouldn't be surprised if more houses follow suit. The wine in the bottle is still a blend of wines from several years, the year on the label indicating only the year which the finished, blended wine was laid down in Heidsieck's cellars to mature. But the date allows us to differentiate between bottles containing different blends, and with different amounts of bottle age. I once popped in to one wine merchant and found the 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996 on the shelves. Without the cellaring dates these would have looked like five bottles of identical NV wine, which in truth they most certainly were not.

Other points of interest include the rosé Champagnes, which may be made by either allowing the wine to stay in contact with the red grape skins for a while (the saignée method), or by adding in a little red wine to colour the product. The terms Blanc de Blancs and Blanc de Noirs indicate wines made solely from white grapes (Chardonnay) and black grapes (Pinot Noir and Meunier) respectively.

As an aside, you may notice as you are inspecting the label, the letters NM (most commonly) followed by a number. Some mistakenly regard this as some of sort of secret code, giving only those in the know a guide to the true quality of the wine within. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each letter-number combination is unique to the producer, and is therefore a helpful guide as to who has made the wine, nothing more. There are four groups of producer in Champagne, and this is the purpose of the letters within the code. The most important producers are the négociant-manipulants (NM), these being large companies which buy in, blend and produce very large quantities of wine. This group includes the famous names which for many drinkers typify Champagne; Pol Roger, Bollinger, Charles Heidsieck and so on. All these houses buy in huge quantities of fruit for their wines. Then comes the récoltant-manipulant (RM) group, growers who make and sell their own wine. These are much smaller operations, often family-run businesses, which because of their small size are often overlooked. Nevertheless, the wines can be excellent and there are some suggested names to look out for given below, although theu can sometimes be hard to track down; using a specialist onlne merchant is the best bet. Then come the co-opératives-manipulant (CM) Champagnes; these are the co-operatives, where good wines can occasionally be found, and finally there are the marque-auxiliaire (MA) wines, this being a designation used for own label Champagne.

Top wines: Good quality grand marques include Bollinger, Veuve-Clicquot, Charles Heidsieck (particularly in the 1990's, under the now deceased Daniel Thibault), Piper Heidsieck (Daniel Thibault was also involved here, now Regis Camus is in charge), Perrier Jouët, Pol Roger, Jacquesson, Billecart-Salmon, Roederer, Lanson, Taittinger, Bollinger, Laurent-Perrier, Krug, Moët et Chandon (Dom Perignon more than the vintage and NV wines), Salon, Vilmart, Gosset and Ruinart, among others. Duval-Leroy has seen improved quality over the last 10-15 years, and there are some good wines to be found here. Don't forget the individuals, those that tend their own vineyards and bottle their own wines; look for Pierre Gimonnet, Pierre Moncuit, Arlaux, Gatinois, Dumangin and Serge Mathieu, among others. Decent co-operatives include Blin and Jacquart. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

CHAOUCH BLANC

(No other details other than it is a V. Vinifera cross cultivar with several synonym names).

Chaptalisation (France)

The process of adding sugar to the fermenting vat, which is converted to ethyl alcohol by the yeast. The intent is to increase the final alcohol content. A surprisingly widespread practice in many French wine regions, but particularly in Burgundy. So much so that French sugar sales absolutely rocket at harvest time.

Chaptalization

To add sugar during the fermentation process when the grapes have not ripened adequately, for the purpose of raising the alcohol level of the wine. It is not done to make the wine sweet, as the sugar is fermented into alcohol. Chaptalization is common in northern Europe, where grapes have to struggle to fully ripen. It is legal in some regions (Burgundy) and not allowed in others (California).

CHARBONO

Is a Californian alias name for the french Douce Noire variety. Many other synonym names (noted in the Geilweilerhof database above) include Corbeau Noire. The subject name is of the red-wine creating grape grown on small acreages in California. There, th

CHARDONNAY

(aka Feinburgunder and Morillon in Austria). This variety is the best-known white-wine producer grown in France and known to be one of the recently determined (1999) 16 possible direct descendants of the original ancestral Pinot cepage x Gouais Blanc anci

Charmat

Also known as bulk process, this is an inexpensive way to create bubbles in sparkling wine. The wine undergoes fermentation in stainless steel tanks rather than individual bottles, and is bottled under pressure rather like pop. The result is coarser, larger bubbles and simpler flavors-but bulk process sparkling wines can be sold much more cheaply than methode champanoise wines. Popular American examples include brands such as Cooks and Andre.