The explosion of Prosecco over the past 20 years is a happy trend because we believe it’s good to enjoy life with bubbly on a regular basis. And, of course, when it comes to real celebrations, many people splurge on Champagne. But how about America’s finer sparklers? We think maybe they get lost in-between sometimes.
The modern California sparkling wine industry is very young. Jack and Jamie Davies were among the pioneers when they founded Schramsberg in Napa Valley in 1965. In 1973, Moët & Chandon founded Domaine Chandon in Napa and it was such a big deal that we had a sparkling-only dinner at its onsite restaurant in Yountville on our honeymoon in 1979. Chandon led a surge of interest among foreign companies to make bubbly in the U.S. Considering that sparkling wine has been made in Champagne for hundreds of years, the development of Méthode Champenoise wines in the U.S. has happened in the blink of an eye.
So we were curious and eager when we were invited to a tasting at Corkbuzz wine bar in Manhattan of California bubblies going back to the 1990s. Laura Maniec, owner of Corkbuzz, moderated a panel with our hosts: Remi Cohen, CEO of Domaine Carneros in Napa, which is owned by Champagne Taittinger (founded in 1987); Arnaud Weyrich, vice president and winemaker at Roederer Estate in the Anderson Valley, owned by Champagne Louis Roederer (founded in 1982); and Hugh Davies, president and vintner at Schramsberg and son of the founders. All were pouring the American equivalent of France’s tête-de-cuvées, their top of the line.
(Dottie with Hugh Davies, Schramsberg Vineyards)
We have a long history with these wineries. For example, for Dottie’s birthday in 1981, we had a Schramsberg 1977 Crémant Demi-Sec about which we wrote, in part: “Delicious. Beautifully made. You can taste the winemaker.” Here are some takeaways, including our difficult choice of our very favorite wine of the tasting.
--Champagne produces about twice as many bottles of bubbly every year (300 million) as California, they said, but most of those California sparklers are not made, as theirs are, in the traditional Champagne method. Weyrich said that “we have differences that we hope to show in the tastings but we like to bring elegance, craftsmanship, and knowledge from France into the glasses.” Davies added, “Our evolution on this track has been slow and deliberate."
--To an expert, what is the signature of a California sparkler versus a Champagne? All three first said “California’s sunshine.” Weyrich said that California bubblies, while dry, “have fruit forwardness that shows a perceived sweetness from the ripeness of the fruit. That is the main difference. Also, the fact there’s no limestone on any of our properties. It’s more like sandy, or clay.” He added: “It’s easy to grow your grapes in California, it’s easy to get the maturation. In Champagne, you have the race to keep your grapes on the vine so they could get as ripe as possible before the rain gets on you. Sometimes in California the race is to pick the grapes early enough so they don’t get overripe because it’s possible that it’s just sunshine every day. So basically, we are both racing, Champagne and California, racing to the same point, to pick the fruit at the perfect time.”
--Malolactic fermentation plays a role in the difference. ML, as wine geeks sometimes call it, transforms malic acid into softer, creamier lactic acid. The panelists said ML is much more widely used in Champagne, whereas its restrained use leaves California bubblies with brighter fruit and higher acidity. Davies said: “It takes the acidity down like 25, 30%. There are some exceptions to that rule. Whereas if there’s no malolactic, then the fruit might shine a little bit more, generally. Just a little general statement there. And so sometimes you’ll see French Champagnes that really seem like they’re from California, except they’re not. And those are probably not the ones that have been 100% malolactic. And so it’s interesting to note. I get it that no one wants to say the French Champagne is from California, but some of them definitely remind us of that.”
--And then there’s Chardonnay vs. Pinot, the two primary grapes in Champagne and finer California bubbles. “Chardonnay is bright and tends to bring more acid to the blend, it has a more lemony crisp type of character, very bright,” Weyrich said. “It’s kind of the dancer in the glass. And Pinot is more the serious guy in the glass. It brings the texture, the backbone, the structure…In Champagne, it’s mostly Pinot-driven. And going to California actually it doesn’t work, being totally Pinot-driven. You need to have a bit more freshness from the Chardonnay.”
--Eileen Crane, the founding winemaker at Domaine Carneros and one of the legendary figures in California wine, worked with Taittinger to create a proprietary terroir yeast for the Chardonnay that goes into Le Rêve “for the tiny bubbles, but also the complexity in terms of the creaminess,” Cohen said.
--Times can be really tough. Some vintages are particularly challenging, of course, and so many decisions have to be made. “Sometimes picking grapes for sparkling wine is like sending your rocket to the moon. There’s a very small window of opportunity so that they’re not too ripe, not too acidic,” Weyrich said, just before Davies noted that the harvest of grapes for white and sparkling wines was beginning any day. But, in addition, producers of finer bubblies are particularly hit hard by economic downturns. The years after 9/11, for instance, were deeply challenging, as were the recessions over the past couple of decades. But the millennium was great for business, Davies said.
--Given that, we asked Davies how Schramsberg could keep bubbly, in some cases, for more than a decade before selling it. He said the winery has slowly built up its inventory and now has 20,000 cases in the cellar and doesn’t want to raid that because there’s a good market for older wines.
--We loved how Cohen described how bubblies age, comparing the 2006 to the 2016 Le Rêve Blanc de Blancs. “I think it’s fun to see this wine on a 10-year perspective where the kind of iconic characters of Le Rêve come out, but they’re changing. So you’ve got the pear becoming a little bit more poached pear. You’ve got the creaminess becoming more crème fraîche, the ginger’s getting a little more candied. Maybe the lemon meringue pie crust is turning into more of like a brioche character. So it’s really kind of fun to see the evolution of this wine.” Davies said of his 1997 J Schram Late Disgorged sparkler: “The fruit starts to condense, it starts to dry. So if you had a little bit of pineapple initially now the pineapple becomes dried pineapple.”
(Dottie with Remi Cohen, Domaine Carneros)
--When Cohen, who is from New Jersey, first told her mother that she was going to study wine, her mother “thought for a minute and she goes, oh, maybe you’ll meet a Duke or a Baron.” When Cohen later became CEO of Domaine Carneros, which sits on a magnificent site in Napa, “I called her and I said, remember when you said that? Well, I never met a Duke or a Baron. I have a wonderful husband, and I have a château.”
--Over the years, because of changing consumer tastes and other factors, including global warming, the amount of dosage in these wines has dropped. That’s the sweet stuff that’s added when the wine is disgorged (when the dead yeast cells are extracted). With less dosage, the wine is drier. “The right dosage is the good dosage. What is a balanced wine?” Weyrich asked. “I always like to say a sparkling wine made by a quality house is actually a very nice base wine to start with. There’s nothing magic about making bubbles. It doesn’t make a bad wine better because you have bubbles in it. And if it’s balanced, then the dosage just helps to finish and extend the finish. So it makes the wine. You have a start, a middle and a finish. The start is really the fruit by itself. The middle is how much you have worked on the winemaking side.”
--Can fine sparkling wine age? You bet. All three speakers said acidity contributed to a wine’s ageability. The more moderate use of malolactic fermentation and the high acidity in California makes California sparklers “actually very age-worthy. Because if you have the acid, that acid is this thing that doesn’t leave the wine but it stays forever. Acid never drops,” Weyrich said. “The wine might change to get some oxidative notes, some tertiary aromas. But what never changes is the actual acid content of wine. That’s something that’s really nice.”
We’ve always been fans of older Champagne (what Weyrich called “British style”), toasty, complex, layered. For our own millennial celebration, we had a magnum of 1959 Bollinger that is the best bubbly we’ve ever had. In this tasting, the older wines still had so much elegance and depth. The 1995 Domaine Carneros Le Rêve Blanc de Blancs, for instance, still tasted fresh and vibrant, with so much zest that we would have guessed it was quite a bit younger. Because the older vintages are rare, we got the prices and production figures on the current releases: 2016 Domaine Carneros Le Rêve Blanc de Blancs, $125, 1,125 cases; 2015 Schramsberg Vineyards J Schram Blancs, $150, 2,489 cases; and 2017 Roederer Estate L’Ermitage, $75, 2,780 cases.
(Dottie with Arnaud Weyrich, Roederer Estate)
--Our favorite? When we go to a tasting like this, we can’t compare notes at the time, so it’s always fun later to ask each other what was their favorite. John chose the 1997 Schramsberg Vineyards J Schram Late Disgorged, which was 70% Chardonnay and 30% Pinot Noir. It sat on its lees in the winery for years and was disgorged in 2022. Only 200 cases were made. John wrote: “Rich, elegant, beautifully aged and very, very special, with a long, toasty finish.” He called it “Churchillian,” which he doesn’t say often and, if so, usually about red wines. The 1997 Roederer Estate L’Ermitage rang Dottie’s bells. Disgorged in 2002, it was 55% Chardonnay and 45% Pinot Noir. “Delicious, earthy, with rich baked fruit. Complete.”
We can’t pick up these older wines at the corner store or, as far as we can tell, anywhere, but they make a critical point: California is making some outstanding bubblies that more than compete with similarly priced Champagne. And if you ever get a chance to drink a fine California sparkler with some real age on it, jump at the chance as fast as you can and, ever so reverently, coax that cork out of the bottle.
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher conceived and wrote The Wall Street Journal's wine column, "Tastings," from 1998 to 2010. Dorothy and John have been tasting and studying wine since 1973. In 2020, the University of California at Davis added their papers to the Warren Winiarski Wine Writers Collection in its library, which also includes the work of Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. Dottie has had a distinguished career in journalism as a reporter, editor, columnist and editorial writer at The Miami Herald, The New York Times, and at The Journal. John was Page One Editor of The Journal, City Editor of The Miami Herald and a senior editor at Bloomberg News. They are well-known from their books and many television appearances, especially on Martha Stewart's show, and as the creators of the annual, international "Open That Bottle Night" celebration of wine and friendship. The first bottle they shared was André Cold Duck. They have two daughters.
