Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 19
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.
R
ajat 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.
BRUCE LUNDQUIST AND
PENNY GADD-COSTER
OF RACK & RIDDLE.
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
WINE & SPIRITS
AUGUST 2019
19
Wine & Spirits - August 2019
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - August 2019
Contents
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 1
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 2
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 3
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 4
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - Contents
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 6
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 7
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 8
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 9
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 10
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 11
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 12
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 13
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 14
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 15
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 16
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 17
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 18
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 19
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 20
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 21
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Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 23
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Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - Cover3
Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - Cover4
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