Move over, champagne. California sparkling wine is better than ever

In 2012, Dan Person came to Schramsberg Winery, Napa Valley's esteemed sparkling wine house, with a desire to learn about bubbles – not just to learn, but to be part of the overall bubble zeitgeist. “Like everyone else,” he says, “when I heard the pop of a cork, I had to turn my head and see what was happening.”

Schramsberg's reputation rested on wines that were said to resemble Californian Champagne. But Person soon began to wonder what a real Californian sparkling wine, not a substitute for Champagne, would taste like. “I wanted to see if I could make something, not because it tasted like champagne, but because it didn’t,” he says.

In 2017, Person founded Carboniste Winery in Sonoma with his wife Jacqueline and launched a small line of sparkling wine bottlings, from pétillant Albariño to sparkling Merlot to long-aged prestige cuvées made using the traditional Champenoise method – all easy to do see what sparkling wines California was capable of.

They've joined a growing cadre of California producers — wineries like Cruse, Under the Wire, Sandhi, Melville, Blackbird, Patz & Hall, Forlorn Hope and Racines — in the movement to make sparkling wines in California that aren't wannabes.

For years, local sparkling wines were put in an ice bucket with “small wines”. But not anymore. Adjustments in the vineyard and modest tweaks in the cellar have created a new style of California bubbles.

At their best, they can express their sense of place as well or better than many of their French counterparts.

The rise of American bubbles

American sparkling wine has been around almost as long as American wine has existed. The son of one of California's early wine pioneers, Arpad Haraszthy, studied in Champagne as a youth and in the 1870s introduced a sparkling Zinfandel called Eclipse that was one of the most popular wines of its time. After Prohibition, several notable producers debuted, including Schramsberg in 1965 and Iron Horse in 1976.

But in the late 1970s and 1980s the category exploded as numerous French companies invested in U.S. satellites, including Mumm, Moët-Chandon, Piper-Heidsieck, Taittinger and Roederer, as well as Spanish Javanese producers Cordoniu and Freixenet. However, the domestic sparkling wine market remained well beyond this.

That lasted until after the 2008 recession, when wine tourism boomed and direct sales became crucial to the bottom line: offering a glass of sparkling wine was an essential icebreaker for a memorable tasting room experience. Individual winemaking operations like Rack and Riddle in Healdsburg have been able to help meet this demand with an array of sparkling wine options for brands in need.

Others began to take matters into their own hands. Inspired by dramatic new developments in Champagne, where small producers like Jacques Selosse and Ulysse Collin released exciting new sparkling wines made from their own grapes (and chose not to sell to the big houses or Grandes Marques).

These not only broke with the style of the Grandes Marques, but also expressed something few had expected from Champagne – a crystalline sense of place, that fabled French concept, terroir.

California terror

California winemakers took notice. Producers like Michael Cruse, Morgan Twain-Peterson and Chris Cottrell, Sashi Moorman and Rajat Parr began drinking and loving these new Champagnes, eventually creating their own vineyards that met the requirements of sparkling wine – where coolness is the rule.

At first glance, sparkling wine is an unlikely way to gain a sense of place. Most are the product of at least two fermentations and the addition of sugar and yeast – in other words, a whole lot of manipulation and handling. For centuries, Champagne producers have achieved large yields, harvesting unripe fruit and making ample use of their laconic vineyard efforts by adding copious amounts of sugar (dosage), with uniformity and consistency as the goal. In order to maintain a global product, the industry had ignored terrorism at virtually every turn.

Viticulture has improved dramatically in Champagne – winemakers and producers have made sure of that – but climate change has imposed all sorts of obstacles on the region, from excessive heat to rain to hailstorms.

California is obviously no stranger to the exigencies of global warming, but right now, says Winzer Cruse, “the Pacific Ocean is exerting one heck of a moderating influence.”

The grape source for Cruse's top wine is a western Sonoma vineyard called Charles Heintz, which is exposed to such extreme coastal conditions that it inspired him to name the wine Ultramarine.

“Charlie is one of those places that stands out because of its climate,” Cruse says. In fact, the wine has so much natural acidity that it can start out quite tart in its youth and needs a few years in the bottle to mature and stabilize before it can be marketed.

Since then, Cruse has been bringing more expressive wines using the Champenoise method onto the market under the Cruse Tradition label. He admits it was a process getting her there. Because he had less extreme locations than Charlie, the sense of place sometimes just seemed fruity and too simple for him.

“Sometimes you have to stay away from something like lemon water or berry spritzer, you know?” He found himself having to curb her natural exuberance. Therefore, he could adjust the time the wine spends on the lees or expose the wine to oxygen in a controlled manner. “I think in the end it tastes more like California, more like cowboy, more like sunshine,” he says.

Sunshine in a bottle

Sunshine is something that California sparkling wine producers have in abundance and often have to work against; New viticulture techniques have made this prospect easier.

“It’s a lot easier to grow fruit for sparkling wines than it used to be,” says Under the Wire’s Twain-Peterson. Shading the fruit with a canopy of leaves, adjusting harvest quantities per vine and very precise selection of picking decisions contribute to a more detailed base wine, the juice that precedes the second fermentation – the one that creates bubbles.

That was always the goal of Under the Wire. Cottrell, Twain-Peterson's partner, says the brand is committed to two things: single-vineyard and single-vintage wines that rival California's sparkling wines. This means they are not afraid of maturity. “We’re always looking for flavor intensity and flavor density, even with low sugar,” says Cottrell, “and each location is usually a hallmark of that.”

They've found several vineyards, including Alder Springs in Mendocino County, Brosseau Vineyard near Pinnacles National Park in San Benito County and their own Bedrock Vineyard in Sonoma County, that can fully express themselves when the fruit isn't quite ripe . You could say the sparkling wines are like tight, electrified versions of the still wines of these places. But both Cottrell and Twain-Peterson believe they achieve the best site differentiation using a small dosage as a kind of corrective lens.

After Schramsberg, Person's first out-of-the-box wine was a sparkling Albariño from the San Joaquin Delta—a modest piece of land that doesn't exactly scream terroir. The wine is not exactly deep, but delicious and pure: salty, apple and apricot-like – fragile, as we say in our time.

His California Brut, V.20, however, has some serious Method Champenoise gravitas, including hints of nutty yeasty notes, built on a decidedly Californian fruit core. “I can capture some elegance and finesse, but I want my wines to have sunshine and warmth, which ultimately defines the terroir.”

Unusual grapes

Mara Ambrose of Forlorn Hope worked with Person at Schramsberg and motivated her to continue making sparkling wine… just not the kind that Schramsberg was making. Ambrose experimented with bubble bottlings from a half-dozen strange varietals that she and partner Matthew Rorick sourced from the Sierra Foothills vineyard Rorick Heritage. She chose two, a Chenin Blanc and a Mondeuse, a grape from mountainous Savoy in France; Rorick has difficulty maturing, making it ideal for blistering.

“Making sparkling wine from non-traditional varieties led me to try to capture grape typicity in a sparkling form,” says Ambrose. “I can't express how happy it makes me when other winemakers say, 'Wow!' “It really tastes like Mondeuse!”

The winemakers of the French wineries were also not left out of this effort. In the Anderson Valley, Roederer Estate, probably the most qualitatively successful of all expatriate houses, has been run for many years by the Frenchman Arnaud Weyrich, who could not overlook the success of Cruse and others.

“I have to say, these little wineries, Ultramarine, they kicked my butt a little bit,” Weyrich says.

But among Roederer's vast vineyards (approximately 340 planted acres in Anderson Valley), a few parcels continued to rise to the top as standouts; This year Weyrich bottled two bottles.

The first, on Clark Road, is a Pinot Noir vineyard, one of the coolest they own, and produces a racy, structured wine. A slightly warmer block, Apple Alley, is ideal for Chardonnay. In France such plots would be called Grand Cru. Weyrich simply calls them his “top dogs”. Each is dramatically different from the other and from the winery's flagship wine, L'Ermitage.

Racines is another notable French company, founded by Étienne de Montille, scion of the prestigious Domaine de Montille in Burgundy, and his winemaker Brian Sieve. In 2016 they founded a winery in Sta. Rita Hills (hires Oregon veteran Ryan Hannaford as on-site viticulturist and winemaker). In 2018, when it became clear that this windswept region would be suitable for good sparkling wine fruit, De Montille called in his friend Rodolphe Péters, who represents the sixth generation of the Péters family on the Côte de Blancs in Champagne.

The Racines Grande Reserve achieves the feat of tasting like a Californian wine and like a Péters wine, but not necessarily like a Champagne wine. Its generous, golden middle flavor and precise finish are exactly the hallmarks I associate with Péters, although its Californian touch – expressed by the Sta. Rita Hills-Nebula – I would never take champagne. This is exactly the kind of synergy that the best domestic sparkling wines are currently achieving.