V21Solera' Brut

There is a method, in Champagne, called solera. You build a stack of barrels, and each year you draw a fraction off the bottom and refill the top with the new vintage. The wine in the youngest barrel is always tasting the wine in the oldest. Memory becomes a winemaking technique.

V21 California is our walk toward that method. The newest component is from 2021. The oldest, from 2018. They have been kept in barrel without sulfur for as long as eleven to twenty-three months apiece, then assembled, then bottled with a little fresh yeast and a little sugar, then left for twenty-one months in bottle to develop its bubble.

We source from the cool corners of California: Santa Cruz, Marin, Santa Rita. These are the appellations we believe in for sparkling wine in this state. The blend is seventy-three percent Pinot, twenty-seven percent Chardonnay, dosed at five grams per liter, finished under cork.

What does this taste like? Barrel weight. Acid that doesn't quit. A finish that keeps unfolding. The kind of sparkling that handles fatty food without flinching: steak tartare, moules frites, marrow on toast.

This is the first of the Reserves because it is the most generous, and the most useful. Not the rarest, not the most expensive. The wine you can pour on a Tuesday and have it make sense. Champagne is from France. CARBONISTE is California, and this is the wine that says so.