California Sparkling Wine I: Schramsberg, Mumm, and Gloria Ferrer

"I'm trying to find something similar to Prosecco," I overheard a customer explaining at Iron Horse, a premium producer of sparkling wine. Everybody loves bubbles in their wine, but it's surprising how few know the difference between styles of sparkling wines and how varied they are.

Prosecco, it turns out, is as ubiquitous in the US as it is in the UK, and why not? It's cheap, simple, and fun. What it most emphatically not is Champagne. The latter, and any wine made in the same style, has a complexity and flavour derived from years ageing in the bottle on its lees (dead yeast cells that form during the second fermentation when the bubbles are formed). This is the style that top producers around the world, including England, Franciacorta, and California, attempt to emulate. I've visited five different sparkling wine producers in California to see how they match up to the original Champagne. Here are the first three, including the state's oldest sparkling winery and two off-shoots from large European producers.

when is sparkling wine not Champagne?

this is not Champagne

The term Champagne is often used as a catch-all for any sparkling wine, but it can only be used to describe wine from the Champagne region in north-eastern France. Under EU law, the words "Champagne" or "méthode Champenoise" cannot be put on a bottle unless they are from that area. For many years, the Champagne industry have also been trying to outlaw the term "méthode traditionelle," but with no success.

These rules exist as a guarantee of style and (hopefully) quality. When a consumer sees Champagne on a bottle, they should know where it's from and what it's going to taste like. Despite an agreement between the EU and the US in 2006, some Californian producers continue to put the word "Champagne" on the bottle - not only does this shamelessly trade on the success and quality of Champagne, the wine is not likely to be any good.

Schramsberg

Schramsberg is the most historic sparkling wine producer in California. The winery dates back to 1861, when a German immigrant, Jacob Schram, bought 120 acres on top of a hill between St Helena and Calistoga. This was only the second winery in Napa and was successful enough to be at one point making eighteen different wines. Upon his death and the onset of Prohibition, the winery fell into disuse, to be rescued by Jack and Jamie Davies in the 1960s. The success of the project was almost instant: the 1969 Blanc de Blancs was served on Richard Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972.

The settings of the winery are stunning, a long, winding drive leading up to a tranquil set of hilltop buildings. What's even more impressive are the underground caves. The winery is located in one of the hottest spots of the region where Jacob Schram found it impossible to store wine properly, so he had his workers dig a series of underground caves in the hillside. In 1982, the Davies extended these caves further, so that they are now able to store 1.3m bottles. These cool caves wind through the hill, with bottles and bottles stacked up to the earthy ceilings which have weeds and plants growing downwards out of them.

The wines are all made using the traditional method, imitating the Champagne producers to the point that all the wines apart from the Blanc de Blancs are hand-riddled. The Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes are sourced from the cool regions of Sonoma Coast and Anderson Valley - Bordeaux grapes more suitable to the local hot conditions are planted around the estate for increasing production of red wine. The 2011 Blanc de Blancs, of which 20,000 cases a year are produced, is great value at $38, bready, with stone and tropical fruits, green apples, and a crisp, fresh, young palate. The J Schram 2006 ($110) is their tribute to the founding father, stored in extra fat bottles which take longer to riddle. It's yeasty and toasty, with red apples and citrus fruits, with an elegant depth and length from the mainly Chardonnay content. The 2010 Rosé ($50) is full of vibrant red fruits - strawberry, cranberry, redcurrant, raspberry - toasty, and with some tannins. The fullest bodied and yeastiest of the four wines I tried was the 2005 Reserve ($110), which is 74% Pinot Noir and has been aged for seven years. A mature wine with bread and brioche, nuts and mushrooms, caramel and butterscotch.

Mumm of Napa

In the 1980s, the Champagne house G. H. Mumm sent their winemaker Guy Devaux over to the US to find the ideal site for sparkling wine production. Perhaps surprisingly, he decided to base the winery in Rutherford, right in the centre of the hot Napa Valley, but it was a commercially very successful decision. The grapes are all sourced from 115 acres of vineyards and forty other growers in the cooler Carneros region of Napa and Sonoma, but the winery is located right in the middle of the tourist trail; when I visited on Monday lunchtime, the attractive outside terrace was already very busy.

steel fermentation tanks, with blending tank behind

The industrial nature of Mumm is highly impressive. 340,000 cases of wine are produced annually, by far the highest amount of any Napa winery I’ve visted. Mumm use the traditional method, but it’s all as high-tech as can be. There are 130 large stainless steel tanks for the first fermentation, after which the wines are pumped into a mammoth, 750,000L blending tank – our guide told us that if you drank a case a day it would take 72 years to finish all the wine the tank can fill. The wines are aged on their lees, but, rather than in underground caves as at Schramsberg, in large wooden crates in rooms that can hold up to a million bottles. As with most modern Champagne houses, the bottles are not hand-riddled but turned for seven days on a gyropallette. There’s even a machine called Bob, who puts and takes bottles in and out of the wooden crates, able to hold thirty-six bottles at once.

 

Two equally effective ways of storing and ageing wine: Mumm to the left, Schramsberg to the right

All this industrial mechanism may make the wines seem characterless, but the three I tasted all had a distinct personality. The Brut Prestige ($22), Mumm’s biggest selling wine, is aged for 18 months and has a delicate breadiness, high acidity, and light aromas of crisp apples. This is a good introductory wine: its flavours are immediate enough to appeal to the casual drinker, but just complex enough to satisfy the more experienced sparkling wine drinker. It sells at a very good price too. Unusually, there is a little Pinot Gris in the wine, as well as the three Champagne grapes. The Brut Prestige Extended Tirage ($32) is the same wine, but aged for twice as long. It’s still delicate, but breadier, with lightly bruised apples. For that length of ageing, I’d expect some more complexity. The final wine was the Demi-Sec ($32), which has 35g/L of residual sugar. At first the sweetness dominates, but there’s a nice breadiness to it, with a long spicy finish – this would be a great wine to have with Asian food.

There are a series of other wines, including a rosé and two sparkling reds, one solely from Pinot Noir and a sweeter one with 3% Syrah. They also make a wine in collaboration with Carlos Santana and another for the San Francisco Giants baseball team. This is one serious, high-profile operation.

Gloria Ferrer

Enter another sparkling wine giant, this time the world's largest producer of sparkling wine, Freixenet from Catalunya. Cava, meaning cellar, is the protected Spanish term for sparkling wine. Nominally made in the same way as Champagne and mainly produced in Penedès just on the coast outside Barcelona, Cava is inexpensive, rubbery, and vaguely off-putting.

Freixenet's California offshoot is quite different, however. Pedro Ferrer, who converted Freixenet into a sparkling wine concern at the beginning of the twentieth century, came to the United States to look for land to plant grapes for sparkling wine production in the 1930s, but was forced to return to Spain for the Civil War, in which he died. His youngest son and successor José fulfilled his father's dream in the 1980s, settling on Carneros in Sonoma. The winery is named after his wife, still living in Barcelona.

It was quite a far-sighted move. Carneros, despite the hot days, has cool mornings and nights and is ideal for the production of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, the two major Champagne grapes. Equally foresighted was to abandon the traditional, obscure Cava grapes of Xarello, Parellada, and Macabeo (which Freixenet have until recently stuck to in Spain) in favour of the Champagne grapes. Hence, the wines of Gloria Ferrer have more in common with those of Champagne than those of Catalunya.

Gloria Ferrer's production room; "Roberto" is at the front; at Mumm he is called "Bob"

The winery is quite different from the clean efficiency of Mumm, though; Ferrer's winery is, or seems, haphazard and small (the wines are aged elsewhere), with none of the impressive vastness of production of Mumm's. It wasn't helped by the tour guide describing Pinot Noir and Chardonnay as "light Rhône grapes, like Sangiovese," or admitting she didn't know what the winery's Chardonnay tasted like because she didn't like white wine. A bitchy comment on my part, yes, but the tasting rooms and winery tours of California are all about selling the wine to the eager consumer.
   
I tasted three wines. The Blanc de Noirs NV ($22) is a misnomer: it was 92% Pinot Noir, with 8% Chardonnay. It had also received 12 hours skin contact, giving the wine a light golden colour. It is a very well priced wine: crisp red apples, with a nice acidity, light sweetness and toastiness, and a lingering cinnamon finish. The 2010 Blanc de Blancs ($40) is 100% Chardonnay and a winery exclusive. A much paler colour, with oranges and apple blossom, but quite simple. The 2006 Royal Cuvée Brut ($37) has been aged on its lees for six years, with lightly complex aromas of brioche, apples, and cinnamon, more so on the nose than on the palate.

In the next blog, I'll be looking at two other California sparkling wine producers, Iron Horse and J Vineyards, and posting my summary of Californian bubbles.

beautiful views from the Gloria Ferrer terrace