It’s harvest time in many U.S. wine areas, and the first grapes to be picked annually, almost everywhere vines grow, are those that make sparkling wines.
Wine with bubbles, a most celebratory beverage, is almost always made from grapes that are earlier harvested, mainly because the best of these wines call for higher acidity.
And it is usually best to use the natural acids found in grapes to make a balanced sparkling wine.
For that reason, grapes for sparkling wines are typically harvested as early as August, sometimes at the beginning of the month. On rare occasions the sparkling wine harvest begins as early as late July….