(Wine-Searcher) - Making one of the world's favorite wine styles is a long and complicated process, Tom Jarvis reports.

If there is one wine associated with success and celebration it is, of course, Champagne.

At parties, weddings, and hundreds of other get-togethers, corks are popped by the million, as people  express their joy by releasing a stream of bubbles through the neck of a bottle. And it makes no difference whether it's a non-vintage, vintage, blanc de blancs, blanc de noirs, or zero dosage style of Champagne – it might be Dom Pérignon or it might be a supermarket brand – but the production method has remained the same for the past two centuries.

The "fizz" in traditional method sparkling wines (Méthode Champenoise until the EU outlawed the term on wine labels) is created during a second fermentation in the bottle in which it is sold.

This contrasts with basic carbonation (soda method), the Charmat method, which uses pressurized tanks, and the transfer method, where sparkling wine goes from bottle to tank for sweetness adjustments and clarification before being re-bottled. Méthode ancestrale is similar to traditional method but leaves some spent yeast in the bottle.