What is it about the arrival of a new year that calls for a beverage alive with crystalline bubbles? Happy toasts delivered over spirits or still wine just don’t seem as festive as those made while lifting glasses teeming with ascending columns of sparkling light.
With all the attributes of a fine wine, Champagne pleases the palate, while tickling the nose and buzzing the tongue with delicate bursts of carbon dioxide. Not only beautiful to behold, those beads of gas help to transport alcohol—the happy byproduct of fermentation—into the bloodstream, giving the wine its famous quick kick.
Champagne and sparkling wine (as law requires it be called when made outside the French region of Champagne) have reigned at significant events and gala parties at least since the 19th century. With the rise of consumer culture during that time, members of the upwardly mobile classes routinely served Champagne at special events, regarding the beverage as an essential badge of elevated status.
Indeed a glamorous beverage, Champagne, such as Louis Roederer’s coveted Cristal and the celebrated Dom Pérignon, can command outrageously high prices. Fortunately for us, a number of Santa Barbara County wineries have met the challenges of producing the stuff to make some fine sparkling wines right here at home.
Norm Yost, owner/winemaker at Flying Goat Cellars, harbors a particular fondness for bubblies. He describes his own sparkling wine, known as “Goat Bubbles,” as a seriously made, fun wine that inspires a sense of celebration, no matter what day or time of the year it is opened.
Yost recently released his 2009 Rosé de Noir, a sparkler that features Pinot Noir grown in the Santa Maria Valley’s Solomon Hills Vineyard. The fruit is Clone 23, a Swiss selection that ripens early and at low sugar levels, making it the perfect raw material for sparkling wine.
Careful fermentation yielded a wine with a rosy hue and lively fruit components, including pomegranate, wild strawberry, and black cherry. Pressed and vinified as if intended to be a still rosé, the wine spent eight months aging in French oak barrels before Yost decanted it into heavy bottles, added a little sugar and yeast, and closed the bottles with a crown cap. The secondary fermentation that resulted released carbon dioxide, the “sparkle” in sparkling wine.
Yost and his crew rotated the bottles (called “riddling” in the wine trade) for five months to encourage sediment to settle near the tops of the bottles. Then, on November 8, 2010, they plunged the neck of each bottle into a slurry of salt and ice, freezing the sediment, so that when the crown caps were removed, the frozen plug of sediment literally popped out. Once they had quickly inserted a cork, secured a wire cage over it, and topped the cage with a signature dab of red wax, the wine was ready for the table.
Another local offering of liquid light comes from Riverbench Vineyard, where winemaker Chuck Ortman has dubbed his sparkling wine Cork Jumper. The 2008 Cork Jumper Blanc de Blancs is made entirely from estate Chardonnay and drinks like a far more expensive French Champagne.
The wine exhibits a delightful mousse of fine bubbles, delicate varietal fruit flavors, and a wonderfully toasty finish.
“I like to serve this bright yeasty wine with melty cheeses,” said Laura Mohseni, a North Carolina native and general manager at Riverbench. “Think Brie, St. Andre, and Explorateur triple-crème cheese. And shellfish. Or my favorite pairing … fried chicken. I am Southern, after all!
“It’s a 2008 vintage,” she added, “so it’s still young, but crisp, and it has a touch of caramel. It also has really tiny bubbles that go on and on.”
Mandolina, one of the labels vinified under the Lucas & Lewellen Vineyards umbrella, boasts a most unusual sparkler called Bianco de Bianco. The wine is finished to a brut sweetness—about one percent residual sugar—and made in the Metodo Classico, which means the secondary fermentation takes place right in the bottle.
Crafted from a blend of two-thirds Muscat Canelli and one-third Chenin Blanc grown in the winery’s Los Alamos Vineyards, it displays the lightly spicy flavor of coriander, as well as sweet orange and ripe peach from the Muscat Canelli. Heady aromas of quince and melon derive from the Chenin Blanc, and the sparkler makes a festive addition to any celebration.
The deliberate addition of sugar to wine to produce a sparkling beverage was first documented in the mid-17th century. Since then, the bubbly beverage has come to dominate holiday celebrations and events of note, because as Norm Yost rightly declares, “Sparkling wine delights with a freshness, crispness, and sense of celebration—no matter what day it is!”
K. Reka Badger likes the bubbly. Toast the new year with her at rekabadger@hotmail.com.
This article appears in Dec 30, 2010 – Jan 6, 2011.
