There is a person in your life who says, when the subject comes up, that real Champagne is only from Champagne. They say it with a small, satisfied inflection. They say it because they read it, at some point, in a book or on a wine list. They are not wrong, exactly, the word is legally protected, the region is real, the chalk soil under those vines is doing something specific, but they are also, we should say, considerably more certain than the facts on the ground would support. The Champenois did not invent bubbles. They have, however, spent about three hundred and fifty years marketing them, which turns out to be the more important thing.
There is also, at the same time, a person in your life who says American sparkling wine is every bit as good, if not better, and that we should stop paying French premiums for essentially the same product. This person is also, in most cases, wrong. Most American sparkling wine is not, structurally, competing with real Champagne. Much of it is Charmat-method, which is a different beast - sparkling wine made in tanks rather than in the bottle, faster, cheaper, appropriate for a swimming pool and for keeping the mood up during a bachelorette weekend. Some of it is sold on price. Some of it is sold on the fact that it comes in a bottle with a foil top. Very little of it, if we are being honest, is actually engineered to sit next to a proper vintage Grand Cru Champagne without embarrassment. That handful, however, is where the real fight lives.
The Champenois did not invent bubbles. They just spent three hundred and fifty years marketing them.
Which brings us to Schramsberg. The estate has been on Diamond Mountain in Napa since 1862. The caves, hand-dug into the volcanic hillside by Chinese laborers in the 1870s and 1880s, are among the oldest wine caves in the United States. If you have walked through them, you know exactly what we mean — they do not feel like a marketing exercise. They feel like a Champagne cellar. Cold, damp, dark, silent, old. The wine, made since 1965 in the traditional method, (which is what American producers must call méthode champenoise, because the French name is legally reserved for the region), is sourced not from the mountain itself but from cooler California appellations, Anderson Valley, Carneros, the Sonoma Coast, chosen specifically because their climate mirrors what makes Champagne work. The fruit is harvested where the climate is right and brought back to the mountain to be made into the wine. Schramsberg has been quietly, systematically, and occasionally publicly beating French Champagnes in blind tastings for decades. It was famously poured at Nixon's 1972 toast with Zhou Enlai — a detail that has, in the intervening years, been buried under everyone's collective confusion about whether or not to like Nixon. The wine, in any event, has not confused itself.
Here is a fact that tends to end this argument for anyone who hears it. Much of the best American sparkling wine has been made, quietly, by the very French Champagne houses one is supposed to be arguing with. Roederer Estate in Anderson Valley is Louis Roederer. Domaine Carneros in Napa is Taittinger. Domaine Chandon is Moët. Mumm Napa is, unsurprisingly, Mumm. Each of these houses decided, at some point in the 1970s and 1980s, that Northern California had climate and soil serious enough to warrant transplanting the process. That decision was, itself, an admission. The French know. The French have quietly known for forty years. The rest of the argument is, at this point, mostly a matter of who has time for it.
So the working position, which we will now hold, is this. Champagne is a place. Sparkling wine, made in that method, is a wine. The two share a technique — the same secondary fermentation in the bottle, the same tirage, the same disgorgement, the same three grapes if the American producer is being serious — and produce, at the top end, wines that are, on any honest palate, more similar than different. The chalk of Champagne is real. So are the cool marine climates of Anderson Valley and Carneros. The mistake, on both sides of this argument, is treating the answer as if it is the same for every bottle. It is not. Some Champagne is not worth its label. Some Schramsberg is worth twice its price. Some domestic sparkling is a swimming-pool novelty. Some vintage Champagne is a life event. The person to trust, in any of this, is the one who has, at some point in their life, blind-tasted.
Vinly, briefly. We sell both. We sell Champagne, houses you know, growers you should. We sell American sparkling… Schramsberg, obviously, and Roederer Estate, Iron Horse, and one or two producers from Anderson Valley we are quietly excited about. We list them all with the same posture: this is a wine. It is a wine that happens to have bubbles. It is not a symbol of a nation. Open it.
The best bubbles are the ones actually in your glass. Just drink it.
— The Sesh Architect (currently opening a Schramsberg, entirely unironically)
NEXT DISPATCH · COMING MONDAY
“The wine that changes people.”
Summer has a couple of good weekends left in it. Fall, however, is loading… and this one is going to be a very good one. The food, the light, the reasons to open something with a little thought behind it. Next week we start prepping for it with Pinot Noir, the most misunderstood grape most Americans have ever bought, the one that has changed more serious wine drinkers than any other in the last fifty years, and the category the mediocre bottles have quietly, and unfairly, damaged. Bring an open mind. Bring a real glass. Pinot, more than any other grape, deserves the glass.
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