Gleaning For Bubbles In San Diego: Biblical Winemaking

I have been thinking about sparkling wine for years now.  I started making pet nats in my garage three years ago and two years ago for Los Pilares with Eric Van Drunen at Vinavanti.  I'm really proud of the results -- LaDona (a dry, sparkling pet net of Muscat), and our customers love it.  Our initial method was freezing fresh must and using it for the liqueur de tirage (the dollop of sweet juice added before sealing the bottle) instead of bottling before primary fermentation is finished (méthode ancestrale) or adding sugar and yeast to the bottle (méthode champenoise).  I thought that freezing must was original until I learned that a few people are doing it in Franciacorta and other places.

Then I ran across this in Leviticus:  "And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God."

I have said for a long time that San Diego has great potential for growing and making wine but is sort of a blank slate.  San Diego also may be the site of the very first vineyard in Califoria, but until very recently, what little we were known for was not good.  A few winemakers here see this as an opportunity.  No orthodoxy to oppose.  No rules.  We have the chance to establish varieties, methods, and styles here.  I think innovation is our birthright.

That got me thinking about gleanings, and I realized that we could use gleanings for the liqueur de tirage and avoid refrigeration.  So the method we are going to is:  harvest.  ferment dry.  go back to the vineyard to glean. Crush the gleanings.  Measure brix.  Calculate the volume of liqueur de tirage to end up with the right amount of C02.  bottle and add gleanings as liqueur de tirage.  I'm insanely excited about this.  I think it's poetic, efficient, pre-industrial, biblical, and natural.  Or, as I said to Joanie, The Italian Wine Geek, "Gleaning is a beautiful and even biblical notion.  And I find it very poetic that the vines could hold their grapes for us while we finish the first fermentation.  This would eliminate the need for adding sugar and yeast or even freezing juice.  It could be a lovely way to make the best of what nature gives, because careful hand picking can leave behind the less ripe bunches for gleaning later.  That means consistent grapes for the main harvest and less waste.”  http://italianwinegeek.com/sandiegowine/

Natural winemaking or adaptable winemaking?

This essay -- http://blog.lescaves.co.uk/2014/08/19/natural-whine-week/#comment-3058 -- inspired me to make this comment:

I like this sentence you wrote, “Natural winemaking is naturally evolving, suiting the grapes and the quality of the juice – as reason dictates. ” It suggests an important truth — that winemaking should adapt to the available grapes, not bully them into a corner where they are “supposed” to be. I think this is true whether or not the winemaker fancies himself or herself a natural winemaker. However, low-intervention winemakers tend to take this adaptability further, out of necessity. We try to harvest when grapes are healthy and tasty, not when they have X Brix or Y pH. Vintage variation can be pretty extreme. Therefore, at harvest and during fermentation we may make some big, last-minute choices. Red or rosé? Still or sparkling? Blend or not? Adaptability is the quality that puts the vineyard and the vintage in the glass.

Dreaming of Collioure

There is a tiny sub-appellation in the Rousillon region of France called "Collioure."  In this beautiful stretch of coastline, the mountains meet the Mediterranean, as they do around the French Riviera, but these are the Pyrenees and slopes here are covered in Grenache and Mourvedre instead of condos.  In fact, they have a special legal status as a national monument and cannot be paved over.  The vineyards are among the most beautiful in the world.  Mostly on narrow terraces, ancient, head-trained vines growing in schist rock on steep slopes of the Pyrenees that come right down to the Mediterranean.  On the wall in my home office, I have a framed snapshot of such a vineyard with its terraced rows interrupted by some immovable boulders (the very spine of the mountains) and a fruit tree.

Grenache and Mourvedre may become the varieties that San Diego is known for.  Right now, we are only known for being south of Temecula and north of the Guadalupe Valley.  That's got to change.

Machiavelli & San Diego Wine

Machiavelli said, “It is not titles that make men illustrious, but men who make titles illustrious.”

I say, “It is not appellations that make wines illustrious, but wines that make appellations illustrious.”  But that phrase will not always be true when spoken.  It takes good wine a long time to make a growing region famous. I guess about 50 years.  Maybe that’s when San Diego County will be an illustrious appellation.

Wine has a long history in San Diego, probably longer than in any other part of California.  But San Diego has no reputation for wine.  Therefore, ambitious winemaking in San Diego is a very long-term project.  The project has begun.  And it’s not just a twinkle in my eye.  Important wine journalists and critics are beginning to notice.

Serious winemakers here find themselves at the very beginning of something they hope will last.  For now, it’s almost a blank slate.  The potential is real.  The county is vast, more than 4,000 square miles, and varied.  It includes coastal areas, of course, but also hills and mountains and valleys.  A lot of the land available for planting vines is granitic.  At higher altitudes this soil seems to produce extraordinary Mourvedre and Grenache.  Gamay might be very good here too.  We need to work on it.  There are vineyards at well over 3,000 feet of elevation.  So, altitude plus decomposed granite is typical here and, I think, special.

How good a region might it be?  Only a half century will tell.  We are beginning to have the first hints of what San Diego wine might become.  A handful of innovative and determined winemakers are trying to figure it out.  My partners and I hope to be a part of it.  Each year we try to make the great prototype, a bottle that people will hold up some day and say, “that’s when San Diego found its way.  That’s what wine in the area is all about.”  Every step we take is into the unknown.

Taking risks is required and comes naturally in a place with no great reputation to defend and no traditions to offend.

Recently, my winemaking partners and I took a big risk that paid off.

Imagine you are an inexperienced, untrained, uneducated, unfunded group of winemakers in a region of California not currently known for good wine.  And yet in your first vintage you produce a very successful red blend that attracts nationwide praise and promptly sells out.  Miraculously you repeat that trick with the next vintage.  You know nothing about making white wine and less about making sparkling wine.  Should you employ your sparse means to make, or try to make a sparkling white wine?  The obvious answer would be “no.”  Ours was “yes.”

It’s not like making Merlot in Burgundy.  We are utterly free to discover what can be done here.  There is no San Diego orthodoxy, no equivalent of Napa-Cab or Rioja-Tempranillo or Chianti-Sangiovese.  We can write our sonnets with no deference to iambic pentameter.

With so much freedom and a growing love for bubbly, we began to think about sparkling wine and do a little research.  A short, superficial history of methods for making sparkling wine goes like this:  Accidental Method → Rural Method → Méthode Champenoise (or Méthode Traditionelle) → Charmat Process → Gas Injection.

Accidental:  If you unintentionally put wine that has not finished fermenting in a sealed vessel, you get accidental carbonation and pressure and possibly an explosion.  Rural:  The rural method (pétillant naturel, “pet nat,” or “méthode ancestrale”) is really just using the accidental method on purpose, bottling wine before the primary fermentation is finished.  Traditionelle:  The Champagne method is a way to exercise more control by bottling finished wine and then adding sugar and yeast to it (“liqueur de tirage”).  Other:  The Charmat and gas injection processes are cheaper, large-scale methods that I won’t describe here.  

In our quest for bubbles, we “invented” a hybrid of the rural method and the Champagne method.  We always use natural, wild yeast fermentation, so we didn’t want to add sugar or cultivated yeast.  Instead, we chilled a little bit of the grape juice to arrest fermentation.  When the main tank finished fermenting, we added the chilled juice and bottled.  Fermentation finished in the bottle, and we had sparkling wine.  Thanks to the knowledge and connections of our friend Jeremy Parzen, we have since learned that others have begun to use the same natural technique, notably in Franciacorta (where the method is described as “revolutionary”).  

The result is a traditional San Diego grape, Muscat, transformed into a natural sparkling wine that smells like honey and flowers and ginger but is dry and a little tannic on the palate.  We love it and so do the critics and our distributors and customers.  We are happy to make wine in a place where there are no rules.

If we and our colleagues and our heirs can reproduce this sort of success for two or three generations, “San Diego wine” will come to mean something very good.