Wine · Terminology

Riddling

Gradually tilting and turning sparkling wine bottles to work the lees down into the neck.

Riddling — rémuage — is the process of moving the sediment in a bottle of traditional-method sparkling wine down into the neck, so it can be removed in one clean plug at disgorgement.

After the second fermentation in bottle, the spent yeast lees coat the side of the horizontal bottle. Riddling gradually rotates each bottle a fraction of a turn while tilting it steadily further neck-down, until the lees slide into the neck against the temporary crown cap.

In practice

  • The traditional apparatus is the pupitre: two hinged boards drilled with holes, invented at Veuve Clicquot in the early 19th century.
  • A skilled remueur handles tens of thousands of bottles a day, each getting an eighth-turn and a small tilt; the manual process takes six to eight weeks.
  • The modern equivalent is the gyropalette, a computer-controlled crate of 500 bottles that does the same job in three to five days.
  • The result either way is the bottle sur pointe — vertical, neck down, lees collected.

Where you'll meet it

  • Champagne and every traditional-method sparkling wine: Crémant, Cava, English sparkling, Franciacorta.
  • The sparkling wine guide.
  • Cellar tours, where the pupitres are kept partly for show and partly for the prestige cuvées.

Where riddling sits in the traditional method

  1. Base wine, then assemblage.
  2. Tirage — bottling with liqueur de tirage (sugar and yeast), sealed under crown cap.
  3. Second fermentation in bottle: CO₂ is trapped, pressure reaches 5–6 atmospheres.
  4. Lees ageing — 15 months minimum for non-vintage Champagne, 36 for vintage.
  5. Riddling — lees moved into the neck.
  6. Disgorgement — the plug ejected.
  7. Dosage, cork, cage, ageing, release.

Why the method survives

Gyropalettes are cheaper and faster, and blind tastings show no reliable difference in the finished wine. Hand riddling persists for prestige cuvées and for bottle formats the machines cannot handle — magnums and above are still riddled by hand nearly everywhere.

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