Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Unlike white wines, which are usually ready to drink shortly after bottling,
many of the best red wines improve with aging in the bottle. Napa and Sonoma
cabernet sauvignons, for example, often reach a plateau of best drinking condi-
tion that ranges from 7 to 12 years after the vintage, the year that appears on the
label. However, there are no rigid rules. Some self-proclaimed cabernet freaks pre-
fer their reds rather rough and ready. Only you can say what you like.
A few wine drinkers claim that the presence of sulfites in reds makes them feel
mildly ill. There is still no evidence that proves sulfites are to blame; it's possible
that for those people, feeling unwell may be triggered by tannins, yeasts, or bac-
teria specific to reds, or by an as-yet-unidentified interaction of them.
SPARKLING WINE & CHAMPAGNE
In Sonoma and Napa, sparkling wine plays the role of a serious specialty—seri-
ous enough to have drawn major investments from four of the best-known
houses of Champagne, France, as well as two from Spain, in addition to 10 or
12 local producers.
The bubbly wine in the fancily dressed bottle may be called “sparkling wine”
or “champagne,” and most untrained tongues can't tell much difference. It
is
legal
for wineries in America to call their product “champagne,” though it galls the
French, pun intended. Wineries that use the
méthode champenoise
as their produc-
tion technique (it's marked on the bottles) tend to be regarded as making the best
stuff. In Champagne, that method takes the form of regulations that, for the most
part, codify practices. Those regulations have no force in California. Less finicky
techniques include the
bulk
or
Charmat
processes.
There is no better way to understand the fascinatingly intricate “champagne
method” than to see it firsthand, walking through the process with a knowledge-
able guide. The harvest begins in August in Napa and Sonoma, with the picking
of pinot noir, chardonnay, pinot blanc, and pinot meunier, the grape varieties of
champagne. The grapes are picked a bit underripe by
still
(non-bubbly) wine stan-
dards, both to retain crispness and to avoid excessive body and flavors. The grapes
are then pressed and the juice is fermented into plain—austere, in fact—still
white wines. That takes two weeks. By November and December, the new wines
are clear, or “bright.”
Now the winemakers
really
go to work, because they need to blend the new
wines in preparation for a second fermentation—this one taking place over 4 to
6 weeks right in the bottle, the very bottle that eventually comes to your table.
After that, you have primitive champagne with a yeasty sediment in each bottle—
a bit of a mess that must be cleaned up before sale (ask each winemaker how they
do it). But for now—and perhaps for as long as 3 to 7 years—it's a benign mess.
Yeast plays two virtuous roles in making sparkling wine: First, it produces the
bubbles. Second, as the yeast cells decompose over time, they give sparkling wines
made by
méthode champenoise
their special fragrances and flavors. Each house has
its own flavor style—light or heavy—and tries to replicate it each year. That's why
people say, “I'm a Mumm drinker,” or “I'm a fan of Krug.”
Making fine sparkling wine, and making it well, constitutes the ultimate wine-
making challenge. The general belief among winemakers is that great white wines
and great red wines are derived mostly from their place of origin: the right grape
planted in the right soil and the right climate. Sparkling wine, though, depends
more on craft and involves finesse at every step.
