San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE WINEMAKER THAT LEFT CHAMPAGNE BEHIND.
New boss at Napa destination leaves French tradition behind
“Excuse me — does anyone have a minute to give their opinion on some rosés?”
This is how Pauline Lhote, Domaine Chandon’s director of winemaking, conducts her best R&D: by making an impromptu focus group out of unsuspecting tourists at Chandon’s Yountville tasting room, one of the most bustling and highly trafficked destinations in Napa Valley.
As soon as Lhote asked the question, hands shot up. She led her volunteers to a white-tablecloth-draped surface with glasses containing eight sparkling rosés — some from California, some from Champagne, France, all identities disguised. She asked the customers what they thought.
An imprecise experiment, maybe, but a useful one to confirm some of Lhote’s suspicions. Most people liked the fruitier, more expressive wines. All gravitated toward the rosés with darker colors.
It was a crucial moment because Lhote was in the process of making some big changes to Chandon’s brut rosé. She was named head winemaker at Chandon in 2016, and promoted to director of winemaking in 2017. That meant that, after more than a decade of working in the Chandon cellar, it was finally her chance to put her own spin on the wines. This summer, the first wines under Lhote’s total control were released.
Putting one’s own spin on a wine is a trickier proposition for sparkling wine than for most other wines. For larger sparkling houses like Chandon, the goal is more about perennial consistency than it is about expressing a particular vineyard or vintage. The vast majority of Chandon’s bubblies, like many Champagne-method wines, are nonvintage — blends of several years’ worth of wine, masterfully composed in order to maintain a signature style year after year. Typically, it is the role of the winemaker simply to preserve the style, not reinvent it.
Lhote wanted to reinvent it. And the way she has begun to reinvent Chandon’s style is not what you’d necessarily expect from her. Although Lhote grew up in Champagne, attended winemaking school there and worked at famous houses like Moët & Chandon and Nicolas Feuillatte, she is not interested in mimicking Champagne’s wine style. Although she is young, at 35, she is likewise uninterested in making the sort of racy, edgy sparkling wines in vogue today — so acidic they threaten to rip away your tooth enamel.
She answers to a different ideal. “It’s not just about what I want the wine to be,” Lhote says. “It’s about what my consumer wants.”
Chandon is not a boutique operation. Although the company declines to disclose precise production figures, it will acknowledge it is the largest producer of traditional-method sparkling wine over $15 in the United States. As director of winemaking, Lhote has a lot of puzzle pieces to put into coherence: three large estate vineyards (in Yountville, Mount Veeder and Carneros), contracted fruit from vineyards spanning Mendocino to Lodi to Monterey and, each year, hundreds of individual lots of sparkling wine that must be blended together to create Chandon’s 17 cuvees.
What makes Chandon especially unusual is that unlike virtually every other winery of its size, it sells its wines only in the United States and Canada. Founded in 1973 by the French Champagne company Moët & Chandon — the producer of Dom Perignon — the Napa winery is part of a network of Chandon offshoots around the world. Chandon California was the second to be established, founded after Chandon Argentina; Chandons in Brazil, Australia, India and China have followed.
Each is focused on its own domestic market, tailoring its sparkling wines to the drinkers in its own backyard. In some cases, that means the sparkling wines don’t resemble Champagne very much at all. In Brazil, for instance, grapes like Riesling and Malvasia form the foundations of many of the sparkling wines; in India, Chenin Blanc is a star. Lhote may have grown up in Champagne, but not in the wine industry’s centers of Reims or Epernay. The daughter of farmers, she lived in the countryside, helping her parents cultivate potatoes, sugar beets and barley. From a young age, she wanted to be a winemaker. After studying enology, she landed a job at Moët & Chandon, helping to make the red wine that would be blended into its rosés. When she expressed interest in spending a harvest abroad, they gave her the choice to go to any of Chandon’s global locations. She chose California.
“I was supposed to stay three months,” she says. “It’s been 12 years.”
She considers herself a beneficiary of the American meritocracy. “In the U.S., if you prove that you can do it, they let you do it,” she says. “In France you have to be there so long to be given responsibility.” Had she stayed in Champagne, she’s certain she would not be a director of anything.
Lhote recognizes that the American palate loves sweetness — and Chandon produces two outright sweet wines, the Sweet Star (32 grams per liter sugar) and a sparkling red of Zinfandel and Pinot Noir (38 grams per liter) — but her bid to please her customers is founded primarily not in sugar but in fruit intensity.
“I’m looking for the wines to be a little gentler,” Lhote says as she pours two glasses of wine side by side. We’re sitting outside Chandon’s Yountville tasting room, under the shade of one of the sprawling property’s oak groves.
In the glass on my left is the Chandon brut based on the 2015 vintage, made by Lhote’s predecessor, Tom Tiburzi; on the right is the 2016-based version, Lhote’s own creation. This $24 wine is Chandon’s most widely distributed, its calling card to America. Lhote’s version includes a greater proportion of Chardonnay than Tiburzi’s — 65 percent as opposed to 51 percent — and she let the Chardonnay ripen a little bit longer on the vine, to allow the grape’s apple and pear flavors to become more vibrant.
She significantly increased the percentage of the blend that went through malolactic conversion — from about 30 percent to about 70 percent — by which the wine’s harsh, sharp acid is transformed into softer, creamier acid. That softness meant that Lhote could actually reduce the wine’s dosage, the sugar solution added to the wine for balance, from 10 grams per liter to 8.5 grams per liter.
The result is that Lhote’s new brut tastes fresh and energetic, while at the same time more generous than the earlier brut: weightier on the palate, fruitier in its flavors.
Thanks, presumably, to the feedback of those tasting-room customers last year, Lhote’s new rosé is darker in color, and much more aromatic, expressing bright red-fruit flavors of strawberry and raspberry. The blanc de noirs — now, under Lhote’s direction, completely colorless, a departure from the wine’s longtime copper hue — has both lush apricot and zippy grapefruit, finishing with allspice and nutmeg.
For Etoile, the top-tier nonvintage cuvee, Lhote has blended in more young wine, rather than relying on reserve wine. Her approach eschews some of the nutty, elegant, complex notes that Tiburzi’s version favored, but Lhote doesn’t mind. Smoothness, approachability, gratification: These are the goals.
If there is a stereotype about a snooty French vigneron, Lhote defies it. She likes to pour wines at Chandon’s tasting bar incognito, blending into her surroundings to try to get customers’ unfiltered opinions. And she fully embraces aspects of Chandon that some might find kitschy or lowbrow — such as the 187ml, floralpatterned, screw-cap-topped aluminum bottles that Chandon released for the first time this summer, intended to populate all those pesky zones where glass is forbidden, like outdoor concerts, beaches and parks.
A semisweet sparkling wine in a tiny aluminum bottle at Dolores Park is probably not how most French winemakers would prefer their wine to be consumed. But then, Lhote is not a Champagne winemaker, she insists. “We are not really tied to the French tradition.”