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WINEMAKING Succeeding With Sparkling From Oregon to Florida, smallish vintners make bubbly pay By Tim Patterson For most wineries, this last consid- eration is decisive. Sparkling wines— especially méthode Champenois wines— are labor-intensive, require climbing a considerable learning curve, involve a very different approach to tasting and blending, call for both new equipment (and probably new grape sources) and can spend three years aging before a single bottle is sold. For many, these are enough reasons to stay away, leave the bubbly stuff to the big boys, or perhaps get a very small amount custom-bottled with very little winery involvement other than writing checks. S But some hardy souls do make a go of it on the small-to-medium scale—including several wineries outside California, in places as scattered as New Mexico, Oregon, Florida, Michigan and the Finger Lakes. There's a range of successful busi- ness models from sparkling-only to mixes of sparkling and table wines to custom- crush operations specializing in sparkling production. How these success stories came to be is worth a closer look. Varied motivations Rollin Soles, winemaker at Argyle Winery in Oregon's Willamette Valley, which has been making both sparklers and still wines since the late 1980s, acknowledges a key motivation for him is that, "I love drinking sparkling wine. I love making it, I enjoy the heck out of it. It keeps me young." Argyle's bet on high-quality sparkling wines also came in part from the still- emerging state of Willamette Valley grape- growing at the time. While it was clear to Soles that this could be great territory for ripening grapes for sparkling produc- tion, the results weren't all in yet for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay table wines—those came later with advances in viticulture. Argyle now turns out 12,000-14,000 cas- 36 Wines & Vines FeBRUARY 201 1 parkling wines are a great addition to almost any win- ery's lineup of offerings for the tasting room, the wine club and beyond. But sparkling wine pro- duction is also a pain in the... given the amount of care that goes into crafting sparkling wine, a compelling reason for making it is necessary. argyle Winery winemaker rollin soles' reason is simple: He likes to drink bubbly. es of sparkling wines in the $30-$50 per bottle range, within an overall production of 45,000-50,000 cases annually. Larry Mawby started growing grapes on southwestern Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula in 1973, making table wines in 1978, making sparkling wines in 1984, and converting to sparkling-only in 2000. Like Soles, he felt that the odds of getting grapes ripened properly for bubbly in his cool-climate region vintage after vintage were better than the odds for some table wine varieties. When he decided to go with an all-sparkler program, it meant junking 85% of his 2,000-case produc- tion at the time—a leap of faith that has turned out well, leading to today's 8,000 cases of sparklers retailing for $19-$50 per 750ml bottle. Dr. Konstantin Frank, a pioneer in Fin- ger Lakes vinifera winemaking starting in 1962, apparently was not much of a fan of sparkling wines. According to his grandson Fred Frank, he was known to claim that Champagne got produced be- cause the people in that region of France couldn't make a decent table wine. So when Dr. Frank's son Willy, Fred's father, decided to put his stamp on a Highlights • Most wineries steer clear of producing labor-intensive sparkling wine, but there are a number of success stories across North America. • Many different business models, grape varieties and production techniques have been proven to work. • The common thread in advice from suc- cessful producers is that a winemaker has to love sparkling wine to make a go of it. project of his own, sparkling it was. The venture used a separate facility with a separate license and bottled under the name Chateau Frank. Today the 4,000- case premium sparkling production (mostly $20-$30) bubbles along happily next door to the 10-times-larger Vinifera Wine Cellars.