Originally, before I got into wine, I was a pre-med in college, and I had this whole idea of going to medical school. And I had this flash-forward, “Am I going to actually enjoy my quality of life in the future as a doctor?” And maybe I would, but maybe I could choose a more interesting profession.

So, I decided to come out to California. I got a job working in the laboratory at a large winery, which I did for about a year and a half, and then I went to Davis. I wanted a bit of work experience to contextualize how winemaking actually worked before I studied it academically. I studied the science, something I’ve always been attracted to, of winemaking to better understand the practice of winemaking.

From there, through my work experiences, I learned more of the craft and art of winemaking. It’s been a process of layering knowledge and experience in order to develop something new, like CARBONISTE, right? I had to develop the philosophy for CARBONISTE— that’s something that doesn’t happen overnight. Your mentors can’t give you your personal philosophy, you have to figure it out for yourself.

And so, from Davis, I ended up working in France at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and got a snapshot of what winemaking is like there and also a snapshot into Burgundy. I would certainly take away different lessons today than I did then. And so, I would love to go back, of course, as it were!

I’m certainly glad to have the science background because coming in as an uninitiated to the winemaking craft isn’t easy. You can certainly make good wines, but you end up working from an evolving recipe and you don’t always know why you’re making good wines or what to do when problems arise. Having the background in science helps.

I ended up working for Schramsberg, who makes very traditional-style domestic sparkling wines. The goal of Schramsberg was to elevate California and try to make Champagne here, which sounds very apocryphal in California today. We don’t make Champagne – we make sparkling wine! But at the same time, we don’t really have a good narrative around that… 

Sparkling wine doesn’t sound sexy; it doesn’t sound like “Champagne,” it’s not a brand in itself. And we can’t just call it our region, we can’t call it ‘Napa’, right? So, in working at Schramsberg, I saw what it meant to model yourself after this style of Champagne in California.

If you’re trying to make Champagne in California, from California fruit, you’re always going to fail. You can taste the difference between Sparkling Wine and Champagne instantly. You can taste the sunshine in the fruit here – the sweetness, the warmth. If you’ve got a piece of fruit sitting out in the sun, it tastes very different from an unripe piece of fruit that’s been growing in the shade. These are just very different pieces of fruit.

And so when I was at Schramsberg, I was thinking, “How could we make something that’s really special, respecting that difference in flavor from the beginning?” And to me, it really came down to how long you age it. There are some other inputs, but this question of how long do you age this wine after bottling, and before disgorging. If you age it for a long time, let’s say 18 months, or 60 months, or whatever, you end up with all these sweet, yeasty flavors; you hear people talk about brioche, and butterscotch, and caramel, and this sort of sweet component. So that flavor profile is happening, and the fruit is already sweet, like the fruitiness brings in sweetness.

And then you start layering on, like brioche, and caramel, and butterscotch, and I’m thinking, “why would you want mango with butterscotch?” It doesn’t sound good, right? It’s not a really compelling combination of flavors. And particularly as the fruit flavors age, they become more cooked in character. So, you go from this nice, bright orange, like mandarin orange, to marmalade, to marmalade and caramel. And it’s just too much.

And that’s how I started feeling about these California representations of Champagne. They’re too sweet just from their flavors. And then the other there’s relatively a lot of sugar in them, too, because they have a lot of acid. So, I was thinking, “how do we do it differently? How do we actually do it in a way that will help find a different balance point for California?” 

And to me, it’s not letting it age because we’ve already got flavor from the vineyard – we’ve got terroir and we want to make that front and center. We’re trying to create a wine that’s transparent, that really shows to the consumer what that vineyard is about and what these grapes can do in California.

We’re mechanically doing more or less the same process as the traditional method, but we’re able to re-evaluate the process and innovate a bit:

We shorten the en tirage aging.

In Champagne, they legally need a minimum of twelve months en tirage, of aging on the lees. And to me, three months is fine because, for example with the Albariño, I don’t want it to taste like yeast. I want it to taste like the grapes. I want it to be about the varietal.

We use a crown cap.

It may seem like a cheap-looking thing to put on the wine. Champagne has to have a cork in it legally, and while they can’t use the crown caps for the final product, almost every single bottle of wine in Champagne, in their cellars, is closed with a crown cap. It’s when they disgorge and go to sell the wines that they put a cork in it. So, the cork is really only for aesthetics. To us, crown caps work better all around. It’s easier to handle, it makes for a better closure, it doesn’t taint the wine—you never get TCA from a crown cap.

The crown cap really is in the same vein as this modern California sparkling wine narrative, as we really drilled down to think about what’s best for our product and to express the terroir in a way that’s not just mimicking Champagne.

I think each wine in our lineup is truly unique– truly each is their own concept. That’s particularly true in our Critter series.

We’ve got our Albariño, it’s bright and fresh and really encapsulates the purity of the grape.

And then we added our Rosé. It’s meant to be fruity and fairly simple. This sort of like crushable Rosé-all-day, it’s meant to be a happy, bright, colorful wine that you could drink really without thinking. 

And then we wanted to make a Pinot Grigio because we wanted to make a Pét-Nat. I like the concept of Pét-Nat — this idea of bottling during harvest and capturing that early essence of the wine and the natural sparkling wine concept, that the yeast is already there so let’s just use those to make the wine. We disgorge that wine to clean it up, so that there’s not a lot of sediment in the bottle. It’s still the essence of Pét-Nat, but it’s not dirty or mucky. It doesn’t have a lot of the issues that others, unfortunately, do have in the market. We didn’t want to make an unsophisticated, rustic product. We were aiming for something a bit more polished.

And then we made a sparkling red wine, which you guys haven’t seen yet because it will be released this summer.

The blend is 25% Merlot and 75% Albariño. We came up with this blend based on the fact that most sparkling red wines are too heavy; when you make a red wine, you got so much texture there that you then add bubbles, it can feel very muddy, it doesn’t lift and roll across the palette. It ends up being something you wouldn’t want more than half a glass of. 

I wanted to make a Sparkling Red that you’d actually drink a bottle of. It could be a nice aperitif or something you could have with food. We did that by using 75% white wine and only 25% red wine in order to bring in the red character. It has just enough weight, tannin, some red fruits, but then it’s still lifted and vibrant, with the Albarino. And that’s how we kind of formulated that concept.

So we have our Critter Series – they’re all around the same price, they’re all very easy to get into, there’s a big variety in the series, and it’s a great entry-point to introduce consumers to this new idea of modern sparkling wine.

Then we thought, “how do we elevate this?”

While I was working at Schramsberg, there’d make 85,000 cases at the time. I think they’re closer to 100,000 cases now, and their smallest SKUs are 1,000 cases, or 2,500 gallons. I’d see this thousand-gallon tank that had this beautiful Chardonnay. I’m thinking, “oh my god, this would be a wonderful single-vineyard wine,” but it’s only 1,000 gallons so we can’t make it. To put that into perspective, my smallest lot is 200 gallons that we’ll bottle – so it’s a very different scale.

We’ll make things that are one-tenth the size of what Schramsberg would make. And so the idea of being able to really isolate these unique vineyards and unique expressions is a very different story. We can do that; we can kind of delve into single blocks and single vineyards and make those as finished products and really take the time and craft each one of those wines.

The single-vineyard wines are a little bit older, they’re about a year older than the rest of the inventory in the Critter series because Pinot Noir and Chardonnay need time. We don’t necessarily want to develop on lees. I mentioned before, we don’t want a lot of yeast flavor, and so we’ll leave the wine to age in barrel. We age it longer in barrel than a Champagne house would normally. And then we’ll give it nine months between storage and disgorging, and then we age it a little bit longer in bottle because I want to balance it out. 

So we’ve got nine months in barrel, nine months on lees in bottle, and then nine months in bottle after disgorging. That, to me, is a really nice balance point to help the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay blossom.

And so we’re taking that as our model for production and applying it to different appellations, different single vineyards, and seeing how we can express a place like Marin County or the Santa Cruz Mountains with our ‘Corralitos’ wine.

Next year we’ve actually got a whole series of Santa Cruz wines coming out, focusing on distinctive areas within the Santa Cruz Mountains, which people may initially think of as monolithic, but these mountains are actually far more diverse than Napa County.