Popping the Champagne Code

A number of California sparkling wine producers have come to realize that consumers should know how long a sparkling wine spends inside the bottle. Knowing the disgorging date helps wine lovers determine how long to keep the wine, and it helps them find wine that suits their palates.

The California sparkling wine producers who are indicating the disgorging date are using numeric codes, which you must be able to decipher. And you also need good eyesight to see the codes on many of these bottles.

Domaine Chandon, founded nearly 30 years ago as a division of Moet-Hennessy, laser-etches the data into the glass near the bottom of the bottle. Holding the bottle up to light reveals the code.

There are two dates. One is the date of tirage (when the wine was placed in the cellar with yeast), the other the disgorging date (when the yeast was removed and the bottle was ready to sell).

The dates are given in the form of six digits: ddmmyy. The first two digits (dd) represent the day of the month, the next two the month and the last two the year. So 260893 means Aug. 26, 1993. The more recent of the two dates on the bottle is, of course, the disgorging date.

Mumm Napa prints its codes onto the glass above the label. The form of this code is Ldddyy. Ignore the “L”; the first three digits (ddd) represent the Julian date, which is the number of days since Jan. 1 that year. The last two numbers represent the year. So L17395 would indicate a disgorging date of the 173rd day (June 22) of 1995.

Codorniu Napa uses a rather more obscure code for its non-vintage Brut, printed on the side of the back label, adjacent to the bar code. The form is LydddNy. After a letter, which you ignore, the first digit (y) is the final digit of the year of disgorging (3 would represent 1993) and the next three numbers (ddd) are the Julian date of that year. The N will be a number representing the cuvee, which you ignore, and the last digit (y) is the last number of the year of the primary vintage. For example, if a wine was disgorged on June 22, 1996, belonged to a cuvee coded 1 and was primarily from the 1994 vintage, the code would be L617314.

Gloria Ferrer’s bottles are not coded, but the disgorging date is printed on case boxes: month, day and year and the lot number. Almost all Domaine Carneros wines are vintage-dated; for non-vintage sparkling wines, the disgorging date is stamped on the case.

All J by Jordan wines are vintage-dated, so no coding is used.

Although all Iron Horse sparkling wines are vintage-dated, the disgorging date is printed on the front of each label, in the lower right-hand corner. Refreshingly simple.