Red, White, and Blue Bubbles

This weekend was my first ever 4 July celebration, bringing to life Bruce Springsteen songs and Tom Cruise movies. During the day I received many comments, sometimes amusing, on how it must be for a Brit to be in the US. As most of my family are Irish I don't really care, but I still enjoyed making fun of the Americans having to rely on the French to be free of the British.

I spent the evening of 4 July at my wife's family home in Chico watching a spectacular firework display, followed the next day by a tasting competition between a Champagne and a California sparkling. A couple of days later I tasted an English sparkling wine, all of which made for a red, white, and blue stand-off.

California

The wine was Schramsberg's 2011 Brut Rosé, a blend of Pinot Noir (61%) and Chardonnay (39%). Schramsberg have successfully carved out a niche for themselves as California's premier indigenous sparkling wine producer, challenged only by Iron Horse and J Vineyards (sadly recently bought out by Gallo). They make their wine in one of the hottest parts of Napa Valley - site of Jacob Schram's winery, one of Napa's earliest - but source their grapes from northern California's coolest regions, Carneros, Sonoma Coast, and Mendocino. Despite those cooler climates, the wines are most definitely Californian: fruit forward with a much lower acidity than a region such as Champagne.

Schramsberg have been making sparkling wine since the mid-1960s - their 1969 Blanc de Blancs was served at the Nixon-Mao summit in 1972 - but there's still a long way to go before their wines match those of Champagne. That balance of acidity, sugar, fruits, and autolytic aromas is a unique combination that is very difficult to find in California. So it was with the Brut Rosé: an onion skin colour, a full, yeasty nose with aromas of strawberries, and a sweetness on the palate that the acidity could not counter. ✪✪✪

France

What distinguishes Champagne from every other sparkling wine is acidity: this is such a cool region that acidity is just as about as high as it could be. Most, though not all, Champagne houses put their wine through malolactic fermentation to soften that acidity, though even then it's still often noticeably bracing. Gosset, however, are a producer who do not do any favours for the drinkers' palate: their wines are made without any malolactic fermentation whatsoever.

The Gosset wine we tasted was the Grand Rosé Brut ($85; 58% Chardonnay, 42% Pinot Noir, 8% red wine) and I was expecting to be overwhelmed by the acidity. That acidity was a key characteristic of the wine, but it was wonderfully integrated with the sweetness (9 g/L of residual sugar), the red fruit aromas, and the light autolytic aromas. This really was Champagne at its integrated, elegant best. As expensive as it is, California really didn't stand a chance. ✪✪✪✪✪

England

And then came along the English, as they often do. The English inadvertently invented Champagne by making it bubbly, but the very recent movement of English sparkling wine was led by two Americans, Stuart and Sandy Moss, who in 1996 founded Nyetimber, whose 2003 Classic Cuvée won best sparkling wine in the world in 2009. Nyetimber's success revolutionised the tiny English wine industry; whereas plantings had previously been dominated by hybrids and German clones, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are now the two most planted grapes. There are many things set in place for England to produce quality bubbles, with the soils the same as Champagne's and a climate getting gradually warmer. The main disadvantage is that making wine is very expensive, and there's a great deal of vintage variation.

The main attribute of English sparkling wine is that acidity is even higher than in Champagne: these are wines that benefit from some sweetness, which is currently unfashionable. Balance that acidity and English sparkling wine could be as great as any in the world.

The wine we tasted was Gusbourne's Brut Reserve 2008 ($30; 36% Chardonnay, 37% Pinot Noir, 27% Meunier). Unlike the Gosset, the wine has undergone full malolactic fermentation, giving a pleasant creaminess to the wine and ensuring a balanced acidity - residual sugar is 10g/L. This was a yeasty, brioche wine, not as subtle as Gosset, but with very attractive mature aromas of bruised apples. ✪✪✪✪

By dad has a saying: the French are arrogant, but they have a lot to be arrogant about. Gosset were founded in the 1500s, and although Champagne has changed greatly over the last four hundred years, the region still produces the world's best sparkling wine.

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

Diploma Exams

I'm just two months into the Diploma and I've done three exams already. There's been some intense studying going on and it's a relief I can finally sit down with a glass of wine (Pieropan Ruberpan Valpolicella, since you're asking) and relax. Our next exam isn't till June, so I'm not sure why the WSET have found it necessary to cram these three very different exams into such a short period of time. Anyway, here's how they went...

Wine Production

The Diploma starts, obviously, with Unit 2 (out of 6), which focuses on all the technical stuff - what happens in the vineyard and the winery - the building blocks to everything we go on to study about wine. We took this exam in February and I wrote about it then. I passed with distinction, which I won't be doing for these next two exams.

Sparkling Wine

The next exam was Unit 5, on sparkling wine, which we had to study in conjunction with Unit 4, spirits. It was hard studying these two completely different and equally vast topics together. The amount of information we had to process, let alone the amount of drinks we needed to try, in just the space of a month, was at times overwhelming - not forgetting that we have other things to do in our lives as well. I was helped by going to a series of trade tastings where I sampled all the sparkling wine I could and by a blind tasting of nine spirits very kindly arranged by Sam of Manchester House. All that work doesn't quite prepare you for the pressure of the exam itself, though.

Both the sparkling and spirits exams are in the same format: three drinks to taste blind and three subjects you to have write a paragraph on. The exam's 65 minutes, so you have roughly just ten minutes for each drink and question. I decided beforehand to tackle the written answers first to get the factual information out of the way and, for the sparkling wines, to allow the wines to warm up and the aromas to become more apparent.

That cunning plan fell to pieces with the first question, which caused a wave of panic to rush through me as I read it. "CM (Coopérative-Manipulant)" was all it said. First question I asked myself as I fought off the panic: what's a Coopérative-Manipulant? Second question: even if I remember what one is, how do I dredge up enough information to write an answer? (Each question is worth twenty-five points, so you pretty much need to say twenty-five things.) Third, and final question, How and why would the examiners ask this question? A bad day at the office that they decided to take out on the whole world of Diploma students?

After the exam, we all clustered together to work out how we should, or could, have answered that question. First off, we reached for our study guides to see what it said about Coopérative-Manipulant. Here's what we found:

That's it, and half of that definition was the question. However, the WSET advise that we read other material to deepen our knowledge so when I got home I looked at the recommended further reading, Christie's World Encyclopedia of Sparkling Wine. This book is exhaustive and here's what it says:

Slightly more helpful, but that's not the only book I've got for further reading. We got sent a copy of the Oxford Companion to Wine with our study materials, and this is our go-to book. It did expand on the above entries a little.

Even with these books to hand, I'd be hard pressed to write a detailed answer and in exam conditions it was an arduous task requiring some imagination. What was particularly frustrating was its close emphasis on a term from a traditional wine-making area, rather than stretching out to newer areas. I was all prepared to write about Argentina (Moët & Chandon are just about to release their first Argentinian wine in the UK - one of a million facts I never got to use) or the issues around quality New Zealand sparkling wine reaching the market it deserves, but here I was blagging about two letters that sometimes appear on a bottle of Champagne.

My mood wasn't improved by the next question - "Saumur." That fashionable, high-quality, commercially important Loire Valley sparkling appellation. Oh, is that a question about France again? I was ready to answer a question about the Loire, but didn't think they'd ask about a specific appellation because they're not important enough. Wrong.

After the very specific and then the specific, came the massively broad - "Black Grapes," a subject I could have spent the whole exam writing about. I seem to have taken a different approach to answering the question than my fellow students, writing in detail about Pinot Noir and Meunier, the two black Champagne grapes, with a passing reference to Sparkling Shiraz at the end, rather than writing about every black grape used in the production of sparkling wine (and there are a lot). The difficult thing here was knowing what information you were expected to produce in just ten minutes.

I then went on to tasting the three sparkling wines, which presented fewer problems. The first was Prosecco, but from the higher quality Prosecco Superiore DOCG; the second was a fairly standard Cava, from major producer Codorníu, with a hint of toastiness at the end the only indication that it had been aged on its lees; and the third a Californian Blanc de Blancs. We didn't have to specify where the wines were from - instead asked to come to a conclusion about the quality of the wine - but I was quite pleased I had been able to work out that the third wine, by far the best, was New World and not Champagne.

Spirits

I'm not that much of a spirits drinker, though I've become more interested in them over the course of the last month, which is why I've been blogging about them incessantly. I think that's why I found the tasting (the practice) much more difficult than the written questions (the theory).

I again approached the written answers first, covering the spirits with a piece of paper in a vain attempt to mask the aromas emanating from the peaty whisky which I could smell from the other side of the room even before the bottle reached me. Before the exam, which took place a long three hours after the sparkling, a few of us joked about which obscure category would come up. So there were a few wry glances around the room when we all looked at the first question, "Cachaça," a subject we had guessed may appear as it's still not that well known but it is World Cup year. (Another relevant topic we also thought would come up was Jim Beam as it's been taken over by Suntory, a huge event in the world of spirits. It would also have given me a chance to write about Mila Kunis in an exam. Wrong again.) The second question was "conversion," probably the vaguest exam question I've ever faced. Most of my answer was about the conversion of insoluble starch into fermentable sugars in malted barley, which I hope is what the examiners were looking for. The third question was "Districts of Cognac." I read Nicholas Faith's book on Cognac last summer and answering this question was a process of distant recollection. Frustratingly, I could only remember five of the six regions (Bons Bois being the missing part). I then bluffed about soils as best I could.

For the tasting, we had to state where each spirit was from, what it was made of, what spirit it was, and how long it had been aged, all worth five marks out of the possible twenty-five. In short, get it wrong and you're screwed. The first spirit was water white and quite aromatic. At first, I smelt only tropical fruit flavours so concluded it was a white rum. But for the rest of the exam, something kept nagging me and I kept returning to it, desperately smelling it for enlightenment. I concluded it probably wasn't a white rum, but couldn't figure out what else it could be. It wasn't a vodka - too aromatic; it wasn't a tequila - no agave; it wasn't a grappa - not grapey or rancid enough; probably not a pisco - again, not grapey enough; not a Calvados - there was no age to it. There was nothing else it could be, so I reluctantly settled for white rum, knowing if that was wrong, all my tasting notes were wrong. It was pisco. Looking back, I'm not surprised that it was pisco, as it was so aromatic, but that's one tough spirit to spot. It was also one of the spirits we'd speculated, but feared, they'd ask us about.

The second spirit confused me too. It was amber coloured, with oaky aromas and dried fruits. It could either be a brandy or a rum, I thought, and I leant towards brandy because I could smell raisins and sultanas (from the grapes, I thought), because it wasn't dark enough to be a dark rum, and because I'd named the first spirit as a white rum. Answer: it wasn't dark enough to be a dark rum because it was a golden rum. From Jamaica's most famous producer, Appleton Estate, it was pretty good too.

The third spirit I barely needed to taste. Smell peat and write the tasting notes: peat, smoke, earth, smoked fish, seaweed, bonfire. After the problems of the first two spirits, I even felt confident enough to suggest it may come from Islay. The only confusing thing was its pale colour - it smelt rather than looked like a whisky. It was Ardbeg 10YO, which has a noticeably paler appearance than its neighbours Laphroaig and Lagavulin.

That tasting was one tough thirty minutes. I've done all the WSET courses and this is the first one that's focused in any detail on spirits. Not having being taught it thoroughly or consistently, the only way you could spot these three spirits with any confidence is by being a professional alcoholic. If I have to resit, that profession awaits.