Late last year, Bruce Lundquist, founder of Rack & Riddle, made some calculations and determined that his company was making more than half a million cases of sparkling wine a year. “I realized,” he told me, “that we had become the third-largest sparkling-wine producer in the United States.” What makes this remarkable is he doesn’t have a brand to his name.
Rack & Riddle is a custom crush facility based in Healdsburg, California, devoted to sparkling wine. Those production numbers are spread across more than 200 clients, some making tens of thousands of cases, most making far less—for special clients, for their tasting rooms, wine clubs, special events or their own enjoyment. Clearly, Rack & Riddle had tapped into a need.
The last decade has seen a proliferation of sparkling wines being made all over the country. For this issue alone, we tasted 130 sparkling wines from the US in our West Coast office, recommending close to half of them.
This insurgency follows the model of Roederer Estate and Iron Horse, two seminal California producers that started with a grower perspective on sparkling wine. Today, just as grower-producers have transformed Champagne, small grower-producers are changing America’s sparkling-wine landscape with new bottlings, new energy and, perhaps most compellingly, a new focus on site expression.
Meanwhile, the emergence of custom crush facilities like Rack & Riddle and Cruse Wine Co. (also in California) and the Radiant Sparkling Wine Company (in Oregon) have brought the means of production to practically anyone who wants it. Once-formidable barriers to entry, like pricey equipment, the storage and time demands of long elevage, and above all, access to know-how, have all become less prohibitive. And in a market shifting to direct-to-consumer cellar-door sales, demand is strong. “We ask our clients for a minimum commitment of 132 cases, or three pallets,” says Lundquist. “Almost everyone comes back saying, ‘I wish we’d ordered twice that much.’”
If you live in California and have any desire to make sparkling wine, chances are you’ll take a meeting at Rack & Riddle. Founded in Hopland in 2007 (most of its facilities are now in Healdsburg), Rack & Riddle’s services cover nearly every aspect of sparkling-wine production.
Inside Rack & Riddle’s facilities are millions of dollars’ worth of specialized sparkling-wine equipment. In addition to the usual winery trappings, like barrels, tanks, lines, presses, cold rooms and forklifts, they have storage bins by the hundreds, a specialized bottling line, a disgorging line and neck freezers to dislodge the yeast from the second fermentation; there are massive gyro-palettes for riddling hundreds of bottles at a time, bottle washers, toppers, corkers, wire hooding units, heavy-duty labeling contraptions (sparkling wine labels are glued on, to keep them from falling off in an ice bucket) and a special machine to properly crimp the pleated capsules found on sparkling-wine bottles.
You can, if you wish, walk out with a line of sparkling wines on the same day: The company offers several styles of unlabeled, finished wines (called shiners) that you can taste, select and slap a label on. “If one of them passes the test,” says Bruce Lundquist, “you can be off and running.”
Most clients, however, take a ‘base-to-bottle’ approach, where they supply the base juice and have it finished with the help of Rack & Riddle’s winemaking team, led by Penny Gadd-Coster (both she and Lundquist are alumni of J Winery), who will offer a range of style options based on the raw material. “More often than not,” Lundquist says, “clients want to express the origin of their fruit.”
That’s true of Cartograph, a winery based in Petaluma, where Alan Baker and Serena Lourie focus on a range of single-vineyard pinot noirs. Their late-disgorged Brut Zero and Brut Rosé are wines that Baker chose to make because he was obliged to take several tons of chardonnay fruit he didn’t want in order to complete a contract for one of their pinot vineyards.
He opted to make a sparkling wine, in part, because he was lucky enough to count Forrest Tancer, former winemaker at Iron Horse, as a friend. Tancer advised him on picking decisions and on producing his base wine, which he then conveyed to Gadd-Coster at Rack & Riddle.
“We showed her our wine and made sure what we wanted was within the realm of reason,” says Baker. “We had a pretty clear sense of what we were going for; we were taking a vintage Champagne approach: a wine with some age and lees character, not something young and fruity. Through tirage and elevage, the team at Rack & Riddle kept Baker apprised of every step. “They bring a technical sophistication—documenting it all really well,” Baker says. “They take control of the process. Once I’d made a base wine I liked, I knew it would be taken care of.”
The 2013 Cartograph Brut Rosé, reviewed in this issue, comes across as complex and vinous, golden-fruited, with elements of red-apple-skin flavor from the pinot noir, and a lasting, lees-aged creaminess, all conveyed with a low-dosage nerve and tension.
Rajat Parr always had sparkling wine in the back of his mind during the cool El Niño summers of 2010 and 2011 in the Santa Rita Hills. He was spurred on by visiting Champenois growers, like Cédric Bouchard of Champagne Roses de Jeanne, who told him, often, that the climate was more than viable.
And, so, one weekend in 2012, without telling his winemaking partner Sashi Moorman, he scheduled a pick of chardonnay— at 17 brix. “Sashi calls me from the winery and says, ‘Hey, there’s some fruit in the winery here, and it’s seriously underripe, even by your standards,’” says Parr. “I said, ‘I know—we’re going to make sparkling.’ He said, ‘How?’ I said, ‘I don’t know yet. We’ll figure it out.’”
Parr called another contact in Champagne, Alex Chartogne, and asked him how best to press the grapes. Chartogne sent him an email with advice on adjusting the press cycle, and the Sandhi sparkling-wine program was off and running.
With his on-the-fly vin clair, Parr and his team went searching for someone who would help with the next step. Their goal was to work with little sulfur, no fining, no filtering, no additives. They soon found Michael Cruse.
In 2008, Michael Cruse had started experimenting with sparkling wine for what was to become Ultramarine, one of California’s most prized and rare sparkling wines. (He founded Cruse Wine Co., his sparkling-wine consultancy, in 2013.)
At first, he’d set out to make “something to drink on the back porch,” he says. And for three years running, that’s more or less what he got. “My early wines still seem amateurish to me,” he says, “like home brew on some level.”
Then, in 2010, he met with Michel Salgues, who was making the wines at Caraccioli, in the Santa Lucia Highlands, after he’d retired as chef de cave at Roederer Estate. Salgues tasted Cruse’s vin clair, and didn’t seem pleased. He shook his head, turned to Cruse and said, “Beaucoup de puissance, pas assez d’elegance” (“too much power, not enough elegance”). “I thought ‘Yes! That’s perfect!’” says Cruse. “It was exactly what I needed to hear.”
Two years later, Cruse began working with fruit from the Charles Heintz Vineyard on the far Sonoma coast, a cool site near Occidental, just six miles east of the Bodega Bay. “I knew it was the right vineyard for what I wanted to do,” he says. The vineyard was planted to chardonnay in the early 1980s, with a large canopy and wide spacing, conditions that, for him, represent the perfect ratio for ripening. “Charlie’s vineyard,” as Cruse calls it, became a kind of muse for him as he fine-tuned Ultramarine.
Bedrock Wine Co.’s Morgan Twain-Peterson and Chris Cottrell were similarly lured to sparkling wine by an old-vine chardonnay block at Brosseau Vineyard, in a cool stretch of the Chalone Mountains. The two of them started a new brand, Under the Wire, to pursue it. They worked briefly with Rack & Riddle, and were pleased with the early results, but when Michael Cruse contacted Cottrell and offered to help them with their sparkling project, they jumped.
The affinities between Bedrock and Cruse Wine Co. are easy to discern: an allegiance to California vineyards of character, and a minimal winemaking approach, to vouchsafe that character’s expression. At least some of the steps that Cottrell and Twain-Peterson wanted to explore in the service of preserving vineyard character were difficult to pull off at a facility like Rack & Riddle—little tweaks, like going to tirage unfiltered, or eschewing cold-stabilization. Cruse was unfazed by such experiments.
“I still have the strong sense that a California sparkling wine should be distinctly Californian,” says Cruse. “I want to hold onto French techniques, but make them applicable to our sites, our soils, our climates.”
Cruse is used to working on a small scale and his close collaborations can lead to some absorbing experiments. Working with Parr on Sandhi, Cruse recalls a day in 2014 when he flew down to Lompoc to retrieve some yeast cultures Parr had isolated from a pressing of Bentrock chardonnay. Cruse then propagated those yeasts and used them in his tirage of the vin clair from the same vineyard. The aromatic family resemblance between the still and the sparkling wine, according to Parr, is uncanny. “You get the same reductive quality, the same shading of lees,” he says.
Meanwhile, Cruse continues to develop his own sparkling wine business. This year, he introduced Cruse Tradition, a methode traditionelle sparkling wine with which he hopes one day to reach 5,000 cases.
A blend from multiple sources, Tradition is, in many ways, Ultramarine’s opposite: Where the latter can feel distant and contemplative in its complexity, Cruse Tradition feels open, bright and exuberant, more Beyoncé compared with Ultramarine’s Erykah Badu.
With Tradition taking up more of his time and his resources, Cruse plans to cut back on his consultancy, though he hopes to continue working with Parr and Cottrell as friends, clients and creative foils.
When Andrew Davis started the Radiant Sparkling Wine Company in McMinnville in 2014, he did it out of a conviction that Oregon was one of the best places in the country for growing grapes for sparkling wine.
After studying sparkling-wine production at Lincoln University in Christchurch, New Zealand, Davis worked from 2003 to 2013 alongside Rollin Soles at Argyle Winery, the beacon of Oregon sparkling-wine production. Every year, he made at least a half-dozen wines, playing with vintage and nonvintage, single varieties and blends, extended tirage, late disgorgement: It became the principle proving ground for Oregon sparkling wine, and was practically the only one until Tony Soter moved there in 2002.
Davis left Argyle in 2013 and founded Radiant the following year, investing in the equipment required to pull off a legitimate consultancy—a setup equivalent to Rack & Riddle’s, “plus a kickass stereo.” He makes wine with fruit from all over the valley, coaching, consulting and taking winemakers through the many extra steps that traditional-method sparklers require.
He now has more than two dozen clients, including Adelsheim, Sokol Blosser, Stoller, Lundeen, Brooks, Rex Hill and Raptor Ridge. “I get to play with so many more wines than I ever did at Argyle,” he says. “There’s a great diversity of styles and shading within all these wines: Some are tight and lean, some are rich and full, some are primary and brilliant, others more tertiary and aged.”
Traditional-method sparkling wine is “an incredibly technical wine to make,” he says. “There are a million ways to mess it up; but once you put the crown cap on, there’s no going back.” Add to this the fact that few in this country had acquired the sensorial experience of tasting a wine and knowing where it would likely end up. “People didn’t know what it was supposed to taste like,” says Davis. His biggest contribution to his clients may be, in fact, his deft approach to pressing off the vin clair. “You have to be really careful about how you press for sparkling wine,” says Davis. “It is so much more delicate; the press is based on finesse. You can’t have too much phenolic uptake, since a high phenolic content inhibits good bubble formation.”
James Frey of Trisaetum, who has a sparkling-wine brand called Pashey (named for his grandmother), is one of Davis’s many acolytes. Frey came to sparkling wine with perhaps fewer trepidations than other still wine producers because he is no stranger to acid; for Trisaetum, he makes a halfdozen rieslings each vintage, drawn from many blocks, at least some of which approach the acid levels common to sparkling base wine. Also, he’s technically inclined, which is extremely helpful for making bubbles. “When I found a Champagne I loved,” he says, “I’d take a bit of it and run it through the spectrometer, and could find out whether it had gone through malo [-lactic conversion], what its residual sugars were, and break down why I liked it.”
Armed with this information, he can consider which of his vineyards are coming closest to meeting those numbers. For sheer nerve and marginality, that is Frey’s Coast Range Vineyard, on the westernmost edge of the valley, set in the coastal hills. Cold, breezy and shaded much of the day by surrounding conifer forests, it’s the sort of place that almost never ripens up; in fact, Frey harvests his sparkling-wine fruit after he’s harvested the pinot noir and chardonnay for still wines at his other sites.
His Pashey label has three bottlings, with more debuting next year that reflect a range of styles. The Pashey 2015 Blanc de Blancs was a top scorer in this issue, a wine that feels laserprecise in its lean citrus scents, and girded by minerality.
“Precision” is not a word often associated with American sparkling wine; it seems like a concept that mostly resides in the province of Champagne. And yet there are wines among this new wave of sparklers from California and Oregon that have earned the distinction.
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
This story appears in the print issue
of August 2019.
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