Looking to put some sparkle in your holidays — and "Buy Local" at the same time?

Two of the county's wineries are out to help you.

Mount Hope Estate and Winery, 2775 Lebanon Road, Manheim, and Twin Brook Winery, 5697 Strasburg Road, Gap, both offer sparkling wines: Mount Hope its Mount Hope Estate Champagne, and Twin Brook its Esperanza.

And there's good news for sparkling wine enthusiasts. Both are made using the traditional method, or methode champenois — Mount Hope's in partnership with the Mazza Winery near Erie, and Twin Brook's in Gap.

The key to the process, according to Twin Brook winemaker Tim Jobe, is refermentation in the bottle.

It's not a quick process, and it's labor-intensive. But it's one Tim says he's grown to love.

It all begins with grapes, of course — in Twin Brook's case, chardonnay grapes harvested in 2008 — harvested early, in fact, so they're higher in acid and lower in sugar. The grapes are then crushed and the juice placed in stainless steel vats, where it ferments, then is held in a tank for a year.

It's then dispensed — along with more yeast — into bottles, where it ferments a second time. But these aren't just any bottles. They're specially designed not to shatter, as the pressure inside grows to 90 pounds per square inch, and each contains a bidule — a small plastic cup that fits in the bottle's neck and into which the sediment eventually settles — and has a special cap, similar to a beer-bottle cap, designed to handle the intense pressure.

The wine — in bottles lying on their sides, stacked in neat rows — then lies in a corner of the winery basement for two years, a process called triage.

Then the real work begins.

The bottles, 300 at a time, are taken from the stacks, turned upside down and put into a gyro rack, a cart-like bottle holder that sits at an angle on the basement floor. Twice a day the rack is shifted from one side to the other — a process called riddling — to help shake loose the yeast, which falls down into the bottleneck, where it collects in the bidule.

After 10 days of riddling, the bottles are placed in a freezer, where they're cooled to 24 degrees Fahrenheit.

Then, one by one, Jobe takes the bottles out of the freezer, holds them upside down and pops the caps. The sparkling wine literally explodes out of the bottle, pushing out the bidule full of yeast. Jobe then tops off the bottle with sparkling wine from a previously opened bottle, adds a bit of sulfite, corks the bottle and wires in the cork. The bottle is then labeled and, at last, ready for the shelf.

It's a process that Jobe, who majored in viticulture at Mississippi State University, knows well. He used it at a winery where he worked in Louisiana, and a few years back he joined forces with Stargazers Vineyard in Coatesville to make a sparkling wine that went on to win a gold medal in 2007 in the International Eastern Wine Competition.

This is the first time, however, that Twin Brook has made sparkling wine entirely in-house: its own estate-grown grapes, its own triage, its own riddling, its own bottling.

It's a lot of work: It takes about two hours to do two 12-bottle cases. So why go to all that trouble?

Well, Jobe said, because "It's fun."

Fun that is, "as long as you don't have to be a production line."

It's a change of pace from his other winemaking responsibilities. And there are some added benefits as well.

It sparkles. It's local.

And, "all the extra goes in my glass," Jobe added.

jroberts@lnpnews.com