In February 1972, in Beijing, Richard Nixon raised a glass to peace with China’s Premier Zhou Enlai, and the glass held a Californian sparkling wine, Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs. It was a remarkable choice at the time, when few people outside California took its sparkling wine seriously, and it made Schramsberg’s name. I was thinking about that toast as I sat down to a dinner at 67 Pall Mall with Hugh Davies, whose family has run the winery since 1965.
One of the pleasures of Californian sparkling wine, for me, is that I so rarely taste it that I arrive with no expectations at all. Only small quantities of the top wines make it to London, mostly to places such as The Vineyard, the Berkshire restaurant known for its Californian list, which hosted the evening.
Bottled poetry
Schramsberg’s history goes back much further than Nixon. Robert Louis Stevenson visited Jacob Schram at his Calistoga winery in 1880, while he was on honeymoon in the Napa Valley, and wrote about him in The Silverado Squatters, his account of that summer. It’s the book in which Stevenson called wine “bottled poetry”, which is about as good a review as any winery could hope for.
Hugh told us that on the flight over he had been thinking about the Carlton Club in London, whose wine list featured Schramsberg in the 1880s. By the time his parents, Jack and Jamie Davies, took over the abandoned estate in 1965, that history had long been forgotten. Eight years later, in 1973, Moët & Chandon arrived in Napa to found Domaine Chandon, and other Champagne houses soon followed. Perhaps Nixon’s toast had something to do with it. Schramsberg has since been poured at the White House under every president from Nixon onwards, including Donald Trump, who doesn’t drink, and so missed out on some very good fizz.
The acidity puzzle
What makes a great sparkling wine, for me, is bright acidity, and Californian sparkling wine poses a puzzle here. How do you keep that freshness in such a warm climate?
In Champagne, grapes picked at around 10% potential alcohol are ready to go. In California, grapes picked at the same level are often not yet physiologically ripe, with green, bitter seeds. Getting the balance right can make or break the wine. Schramsberg’s answer is careful blending and cooler vineyards. The winery is in Calistoga, at the warm northern end of the Napa Valley, but much of the fruit comes from cooler areas such as Carneros and Anderson Valley, which nobody was looking at for sparkling wine back in the 1960s.
What was in the glass
I’ll admit I expected the sunny uplands of Napa to produce something like a sparkling version of a big Napa Chardonnay, rich and full of fruit. The ripe fruit was certainly there, but it was well balanced by the acidity, making for a richer style of sparkling wine that speaks clearly of California. We also tasted older vintages of the top cuvée, J. Schram, which showed how well the wines develop, growing more complex and elegant with time in the cellar.
If, like me, you’re looking for an elegant, balanced sparkling wine, it may be worth looking beyond Champagne. As Stevenson wrote in the same book, there are no foreign lands, and it is only the traveller who is foreign. Nixon, it seems, already knew.
Archive note: First published in July 2018. We tasted J. Schram 1997, 2003, 2007 and 2008, and the 2008 J. Schram Reserve, at a dinner hosted by The Vineyard at 67 Pall Mall.
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