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WINEMAKING improved his white winemaking, and that in turn has improved his red winemaking. "Sparkling wine is hugely more chal- lenging than Pinot Noir," Soles says. "Just one little milligram change in the dosage can utterly change the character of the wine." Because of the learning curve, a small sparkling wine program at a larger vol- ume table wine producer can get over- looked. It's possible to do both, as several of these wineries do, but it requires a lot of care and attention. Argyle is unusual in its making both still and sparkling from more or less the beginning; wineries more often start with one and then add the other (such as adding sparkling to the Frank family portfolio after two decades, or adding a small proportion of table wines to the expanding Gruet sparkling production.) Jeanne Burgess mentioned a conversation with a start-up blueberry wine producer in Georgia who was plan- ning to begin with a sparkler; her advice was to get the still wine down first. The technology and methods of spar- kling winemaking on a small-to-medium scale are pretty much like those used by the big boys. The number of small, independent, grower-vintner producers lated yeast, which basically eliminates the need for riddling. In his years at Temecula's Thornton Winery, Jon McPherson produced up to 40,000 cases per year of méthode Champenois sparklers. During that time he says he developed a "disdain" for tank/ Charmat-fermented bubblies—an atti- tude he now thinks was based largely on naïveté and lack of knowledge. When South Coast's owner proposed doubling down on Charmat, McPherson and his crew started experimenting with what tanks could do, including every- thing from a year to 18 months of aging. The resulting wines not only sell well, they score well in competitions against Champenois sparklers. (L. Mawby also produces a mix of bottle- and tank-fer- mented wines.) like most larger sparkling wine producers, 10,000-case rack & riddle adopted a gyro- palette rather than riddling by hand. TonnellerieBoutes_Dir09.qxp 11/13/08 10:02 AM Page 1 in Champagne means that smaller-scale machinery is readily available—though sometimes without complete automation. Jeanne Burgess says that over time they have found ways to economize on time and labor, including the use of encapsu- marketing effervescence If your goal is simply to sell some spar- kling wine in your tasting room, that can be arranged rather simply: Have some- one else make it, and add your labels. Many sparkling producers are willing to do custom work for other wineries. Rack & Riddle does a brisk business—10,000 cases—with its own in-house production 40 Wines & Vines FeBRUARY 201 1