Here is the dirty secret of great sparkling wine: the most important ingredient is not a grape, a vineyard or a famous name on the label. It is time. Months, sometimes years, of a wine sitting quietly in the dark, doing almost nothing, and becoming something extraordinary while it does.

Every bottle of Champagne goes through a second fermentation inside the bottle itself. Yeast eats a little added sugar, makes the bubbles, and then dies. And this is where the magic starts, because those spent yeast cells, the lees, stay in the bottle with the wine. Slowly they break down and give back flavour: brioche, toasted nuts, a creamy, almost savoury richness. The longer the wine sits on its lees, the deeper and finer it becomes.

Why the Clock Matters

The rules set a minimum. Non-vintage Champagne must spend at least fifteen months in the cellar before release, twelve of them on the lees. Vintage Champagne needs three years. Most of the big houses comfortably exceed those minimums for their standard bottles, but the economics are brutal: every month in the cellar is a month your money is sitting in the dark too.

Which is why the growers are so interesting. A grower is a family who farms its own vines and makes its own wine, rather than buying grapes from hundreds of farmers like most of the famous houses do. Freed from the need to make millions of identical bottles, many of them simply wait longer. Waris-Larmandier in Avize, in the heart of the Côte des Blancs, makes a Particules Crayeuses that tastes like chalk dust and lemon peel in the best possible way, and a single-vineyard Les Regards d'Avize 2015 that has had the better part of a decade to grow up.

Moons, Not Months

Now for the producer who has made the clock the whole point. Nicola Gatta makes sparkling wine in Franciacorta, the hills just south of Lake Iseo in Lombardy, and he names his wines not after vineyards or grapes but after the number of moons they have spent on their lees. 30 Lune has had thirty months. Quattrocento, 40 Lune, forty. The range climbs from there, and tasting them side by side is the clearest lesson in what time does that you will ever get from a glass.

At thirty moons the wine is bright and taut, apples and white flowers. By forty it has softened into something rounder, with a little hazelnut. Further up the ladder the wines turn golden, savoury and quietly profound, like a very good conversation that gets better after midnight. Many of Gatta's wines are bottled as "Nature", with no added sugar at all, so there is nowhere to hide. Every flavour has to come from the grapes and the time.

Champagne or Franciacorta?

Franciacorta is made the same way as Champagne, with a second fermentation in the bottle, from largely the same grapes: Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Its rules on time are actually stricter: eighteen months on the lees for the basic wine, thirty for a vintage, and sixty for a Riserva. What changes is the sun. Lombardy is warmer than Champagne, so the wines tend to be a touch riper and rounder, with less of Champagne's electric acidity. Think of them as cousins: one raised on cold northern chalk, the other by a lake in the sunshine.

The honest answer to "which is better?" is that it depends what you are eating. Champagne's chalky bite is made for oysters and anything fried. Franciacorta's softer, riper style is happier with a risotto, a plate of salumi or simply a long Sunday lunch.

How to Serve It

Not too cold. Ice-cold sparkling wine tastes of nothing but bubbles, and you have paid for the time it spent in the cellar. Aim for 8 to 10°C, which is about twenty minutes out of the fridge. Use a white wine glass rather than a narrow flute; the flavours need room. And older, longer-aged bottles can even take a few minutes in the glass before you drink, the way you would let a good red breathe.

By the Case

Taste what time does, by the case: Grand Cru grower Champagne, six of Nicola Gatta’s moons, or six of Podere Forte’s Ada Blanc de Noirs. Quantities are fixed.

• Grower Champagne: six bottles, £382.99 (15% off). Buy now
• The Franciacorta Collection: six bottles, £319.99 (15% off). Buy now
• Podere Forte, Ada Blanc de Noirs 2014: six bottles, £425.99 (10% off). Buy now

Each Buy now link opens a pre-filled email to Patrick in our team at pdiggins@houseofdecant.com. Change the quantity if you like and press send.

The Insider

Five facts to bring to the next toast.

• Researchers at the University of Reims have clocked a popping Champagne cork at around 50 km/h. Point it at the ceiling, not the guests.
• The pressure inside a bottle of Champagne is around six atmospheres, roughly three times the pressure in a car tyre. That is a lot of energy in a very elegant package.
• Riddling, the slow twisting of bottles that moves the lees into the neck, is credited to the cellar of Madame Clicquot in the early nineteenth century. She was running the house as a widow in her twenties.
• Franciacorta became Italy's first bottle-fermented sparkling wine to win DOCG status, the country's highest classification, in 1995.
• The story that Dom Pérignon cried "Come quickly, I am tasting the stars" is almost certainly a nineteenth-century advertising invention. It is still a very good line.

Give It Time

So next time you open a bottle of sparkling wine, ask how long it waited. The answer will tell you more about what is in your glass than the label, the price or the name of the house. And the best way to understand it is the simplest: open a younger bottle and an older one side by side, pour a little of each, and let the moons do the talking.