The Ortega still white wine is pressed immediately after picking and then put into stainless steel vats for a cool fermentation. This keeps a fresh taste for the wine. It is bottled about a year after fermentation, labelled and then available for sale. The sparkling wine is more complicated. The pressing has to be very gentle as we are also using red skinned grapes (the juice is white though) and from this lightly pressed juice we make a "base wine". This is then put into the thick sparkling wine bottles and a dose of sugar and yeast is added to promote a "secondary fermentation". This is what differentiates the best sparkling wines- they are "bottle-fermented". The wine is then left to lie on the "lees" (i.e sediment) for 18-36 months and this helps the wine acquire a yeasty/biscuity flavour and aroma that is characteristic of the best sparkling wines. After this the "disgorgement" takes place where the beer cap that has been on the bottle is knocked off and the high pressure in the bottle forces out a frozen plug of sediment. The bottle is then topped up ( they used not to do this and that is why the now familiar large foil was put on these bottles to hide the fact that some of the wine had been lost). All in all this takes 3-5 years and a lot of equipment which goes some way to explain the cost of sparkling wine!