In 2012, Dan Person joined Schramsberg Winery, the esteemed sparkling-wine house in the Napa Valley, with the desire to learn about bubbles — not just to learn but to be part of the whole bubbles zeitgeist. “Like everyone else,” he says, “when I heard the pop of a cork, I had to turn my head and see what was happening.” Schramsberg’s reputation had been built on wines meant to approximate Champagne in California.
But before long, Person began to wonder what a true California sparkling wine, not a stand-in for Champagne, would taste like. “I wanted to work out whether I could make something not because it tasted like Champagne but because it didn’t,” he says. In 2017, with his wife, Jacqueline, Person founded Carboniste Winery in Sonoma and embarked upon a minor riot of sparkling wine bottlings, everything from pétillant Albariño to sparkling Merlot to long-aged prestige cuvées made in the traditional methode champenoise — all to see just what sort of sparkling wines California was capable of.
They’ve joined a growing cadre of California producers — wineries like Cruse, Under the Wire, Sandhi, Melville, Blackbird, Patz & Hall, Forlorn Hope and Racines — in the movement to make sparkling wines in California that aren’t wannabes. For years, domestic sparkling wines would have been lumped into an ice bucket of “lesser-thans.” But no longer.
Adjustments in the vineyard and modest tweaks in the cellar have rendered a new style of California bub.
