Entering Graff into competition - What is petillant

I made some Graff (Brandon, your recipe rocks), and i want to enter it into the local cider competition.

I can't figure out what the difference between petillant and sparkling is.

Also, I backsweetened with two cans of apple juice concentrate. It seems lightly sweet, but not terribly sweet. should i list it as "semi-sweet" or "sweet"?

Thanks for your help!

Sparkling would be champagne-like.

I think petillant is a mild level of carbonation.

Graff is sort of like beer... it has a lacy head... not sure how to classify that

I guess I could ask, would you classify a wheat beer as petillant or sparkling?

sjlammer said:

I guess I could ask, would you classify a wheat beer as petillant or sparkling?

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It all depends on how much YOU carbonate it. Most of the wheat beers I've had are fairly well carbonated. I guess you would probably call them sparkling. Some of the English styles that are only mildly carbonated would probably be petillant. Although, I've mostly heard that term used to apply to cider.

How much priming sugar did you add or did you force carbonate? If you carbed it to 2 or more volumes, I'd probably say it was a sparkling cider. That's how I normally make Graff.

From thewinedoctor.com:

Pétillant (France)
A term used to describe a lightly sparkling wine. Pétillance may occur in many wines not intended to be sparkling at all, such as top German Rieslings which may often be bottled with a small amount of residual carbon dioxide, hence the sparkle.