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 Entertainment | Restaurants & Dining | December 2006 
Napa Sparkle to Make a French Nose Twitch
 Eric Asimov - NYTimes
| | Hugh Davies runs Schramsberg Vineyards, which his parents founded in Calistoga, Calif., in 1965. (Jim Wilson/NYTimes) |
Calistoga, Calif. - Olive trees more than 100 years old arch over a wide forest lane on Diamond Mountain, a little southeast of this rustic spa town on the northern tip of the Napa Valley. The sun glints through the slender leaves, and occasionally the Napa Palisades show their craggy ridges off to the north.
Hugh Davies grew up on this land. He was born in 1965, the year his parents, Jack and Jamie, founded Schramsberg Vineyards and dedicated themselves to producing world-class sparkling wine.
Now he is 41 and president of Schramsberg. Dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans and a quilted blue vest, he greets cellar workers in Spanish.
He has a confidence born of doing what comes naturally. Still, when I asked him why some producers of sparkling wine in California persist in calling it “Champagne,” it touched a nerve.
“The notion of French Champagne still has a perception of quality and luxury,” he said, adding that Schramsberg itself dropped the “Champagne” from its label around 2000.
Playing catch-up with the French is difficult. But with sparkling wine, nothing is easy — not growing the grapes, not making the wine, not putting it in bottles. Even selling it is a challenge, except at the approach of the new year, when holiday thirst demands fizz.
Going into the sparkling wine business in California, then, requires considerable determination, along with a dollop of ignorance of the hazards lying ahead.
Jack and Jamie Davies were generously equipped with both back in 1965, when they acquired an abandoned vineyard on Diamond Mountain, with a crumbling gingerbread house and a network of cool caves that had been dug into the hillside by Chinese railroad workers in the 1870s and ’80s. But they also had ambition, enough to want their sparkling wine to be among the world’s best.
They called their wine Schramsberg after Jacob Schram, who bought the place in 1862, built the house and planted 100 acres of grapes. The Davieses issued their first sparkling wine, a 1965 blanc de blancs, at a time when nobody was making Champagne-style sparkling wines in California.
True to form, their path to greatness was not easy. But now with Hugh, the youngest of their three sons, at the helm, Schramsberg can take its place in the world’s sparkling pantheon. In fact, American sparkling wines, at least the elite, have never been better.
Several dozen California producers now make sparkling wine in the style of Champagne, but the best are Schramsberg, Roederer Estate and Iron Horse. Of these, Schramsberg has the best story by far, a story of perseverance in the face of obstacles, to do what nobody else had done.
The story, of course, is no good without the wine, and Schramsberg sparkling wine is very good, indeed.
The biggest seller today is the vintage blanc de blancs, made entirely from chardonnay. The 2002, which goes for around $25 a bottle, is dry, crisp and delicate with just a touch of pleasing yeastiness.
The high-end 1999 J. Schram, an $80 bottle, is richer and yeastier, with toasty, caramelized flavors that combine with a floral creaminess to achieve depth and complexity while retaining its delicate texture. The J. Schram is 74 percent chardonnay and 26 percent pinot noir.
The 2000 Schramsberg Reserve, an equally expensive bottle, takes the opposite approach and is dominated by pinot noir, giving it more tangible fruit flavors, though it remains crisp and elegant.
In 2006, just in time for the boom in rosé sparkling wines, Schramsberg issued its first J. Schram rosé, a 1998 vintage, dry yet deliciously juicy and structured, with berry and fruit flavors, though it is primarily chardonnay. The rosé retails for $120, unheard of for an American sparkling wine.
“You can make extraordinary cabernets outside of Bordeaux, and great pinot noirs outside of Burgundy,” Mr. Davies said. “Maybe it’s the one category of wine where it’s not yet understood that you can make beautiful sparkling wines outside of Champagne.”
Regardless, the top Schramsberg cuvées are superb sparklers and would be extremely difficult to pick out from a lineup of Champagnes.
California produced plenty of “Champagne” when the Davieses were getting started, just as it was making boatloads of “Burgundy” and “Chablis.” Some of it was even bottle-fermented in the true Champagne fashion, though the two leading producers, Korbel and Hanns Kornell, were using grapes like French colombard, chenin blanc and Johannisberg riesling in their sparkling wines. Fair enough, but not the traditional Champagne grapes of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier.
After moving from Los Angeles, where Jack had been an executive, the Davieses began to restore the old house. They rid the tunnels of a legion of bats, and insisted on planting their Diamond Mountain vineyard with pinot noir and chardonnay, even though little of either grape was planted then in California.
There was only one problem. As with much of the Napa Valley, Diamond Mountain is cabernet country. The summers here can be too warm for pinot noir and chardonnay, and this part of Napa is especially unsuited for grapes destined for sparkling wine, which are best when barely ripe, when the acidity is razor sharp and before the sugar levels shoot up. In the Champagne region of France the grapes rarely ripen enough to make a good still wine. But for Champagne they are just right.
In California, sparkling wine producers have to grow grapes in cooler regions, like Carneros or Anderson Valley in Mendocino County, and then pick them early before they ripen completely. It’s tricky and difficult, and it is one reason that California sparkling wine can often taste overly fruity and dull next to the more focused Champagne model.
The Davieses struggled with the fruit from their vineyard, always supplementing it from other sources. Today, Schramsberg gets grapes from 83 vineyards, from Marin to Mendocino Counties, leading to a logistical nightmare at harvest time. The estate vineyard was replanted in 1994.
“Once we decided to replant, it didn’t take too long for cabernet to enter the mind, and other Bordeaux varietals,” Hugh Davies said. The first release of the J. Davies cabernet sauvignon was the 2001 vintage. The 2003 J. Davies is polished, restrained and elegant, without the rugged tannins of some other Diamond Mountain cabernets.
“I think there was a little bit of chagrin for all of us, but we convinced ourselves that we could really make a go of a cabernet-based wine,” Mr. Davies said.
Schramsberg sparkling wines were recognized early on. They were first served at the White House in 1972, at a state dinner.
The first barrage in the invasion of California by French Champagne producers also took place in the 1970s, and eventually included such famous names as Moët & Chandon, Piper-Heidsieck, Mumm, Deutz and Roederer. Despite all their expertise, only Roederer Estate, in the Anderson Valley, has consistently produced great sparkling wines.
Meanwhile, the Schramsberg sparkling wines have never been better. Jack Davies died in 1998. Jamie Davies remains chairwoman of Schramsberg, although Hugh is largely running the place. From under 1,000 cases of sparkling wine in the first few years, Schramsberg now makes more than 55,000 cases.
Regardless of the quality of California sparkling wine, Hugh Davies feels that it doesn’t get a fair shake next to Champagne. To prove a point, he has held tastings around the country, matching Schramsberg’s best bottles against Champagne’s best. Schramsberg usually does pretty well.
“Our point is not to say we’re better than those guys,” he said, “but we have to be aggressive in our marketing, because people are not going to give us the benefit of the doubt.”
Paying $120 for a bottle of the sparkling rosé might say otherwise. |
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