California’s new sparkle
Michael Cruse’s reinvention of bubble finesse takes classical tack, helps peers
The past few years have been a very good time to be a thoughtful drinker of sparkling wine. In France, Champagne has distanced itself from its own hype and started to focus on serious winemaking.
California, however, has been struggling — at least until now. While the state’s relationship with bubbles is long, dating back at least to Paul Masson in the late 1800s, it’s also a bit fraught. For much of the modern era, most Californian bubbles have been either dirt cheap (André, anyone?) or Champenois attempts to post New World beachheads.
In the 1980s, the industry had the means and equipment to support a sparkling boom; nearly 100 American wineries made Champagne-style wines. But the economics were brutal, and much of the industry’s sparkling sector vanished or went downmarket. There are some outliers like Schramsberg or Iron Horse, but it’s a small roster. And while Champagne is rushing toward artisanship, California has struggled to do the same.
Which brings us to Michael Cruse. From his small facility in Petaluma just off Highway 101, Cruse makes very good Champagne-style wines under the Ultramarine label. But he has more to contribute: He is turning himself into a one-man intensive in classical Champagne methods — the rare winemaker willing to acquire and share the elaborate equipment needed to produce tiny batches of sparkling wine. This quirky mission stands to be the real contribution to California’s progress.
Making sparkling wine requires a lot of tools: elaborate bottling equipment, riddling boards (those angled wooden planks with holes to hold bottles), machines to disgorge sediment caps, and so on. In Champagne, even in the smallest cellars, winemakers typically own such things. But they’re rare in California. (Odd, because California winemakers time-share so much other equipment, like bottling lines.)
Enter Cruse, who wanted not simply to make the wines, but to give others a rigorous education in how to do so.
As for his own Ultramarine wines, they are made in the fine-tuned ways now fashionable in Champagne: all from single vineyards, fermented using indigenous yeasts (although with the breweries nearby, the local yeast population is rich), aged in oak and given almost no dosage at the end to polish the wine.
The results are richly textured. A Blanc de Noirs (a successor to his debut rosé) tastes of red currants and crackers, very much a Pinot Noir in its soul. A Chardonnay from the Charles Heintz site in western Sonoma brims with acidity and freshness. They are precise and nervy, and they diverge from California’s usual sparkling party line, which is that its bubbles should be riper and fleshier than Champagne.
As for that serious side? Cruse got his start while studying microbiology at UC Berkeley, with a push from one of the university’s noted microbiologists, Terry Leighton, proprietor of Kalin Cellars, one of California’s legitimate mavericks. He moved to UC Davis but also worked in the lab at Sutter Home. Along the way, he found a book on Champagne-making by Jules Weinmann, published by Champagne’s enology institute in the early 1900s; it detailed Champagne’s state of the art at the turn of the century — a process with no automated machines.
That inspired Cruse, who took a job as associate winemaker at Merryvale Vineyards in St. Helena. If California vintners were learning to em- brace low-tech in the cellar — going back to the future — why not with sparkling too?
It’s an important question, one I’ve struggled with for years. While the state is bursting with a sense of reinvention for its wines, bubbles seem to have been left out. Along with Cruse, a handful of other labels, like Under the Wire in Sonoma and Wenzlau in Santa Barbara, are going the low-tech route. (There are very good sparkling wines made in the more mainstream manner, particularly wines from Roederer Estate and Schramsberg, but they’re still largely the wines they were a decade ago.)
Cruse leaned on his hardscience background, and Weinmann, to find answers. Champagne-style winemaking is exponentially harder than still wine; techniques are passed down by apprenticeship and the occasional error. But Cruse had the right disposition — seriousness and scientific rigor, but also a resistance to modern gadgetry. He visited many producers doing similar work in Champagne: Marie-Noelle Ledru, Jerome Prevost, Anselme Selosse and Alexandre Chartogne of Chartogne-Taillet.
The resulting balance mixes science with craft. He might measure sugar levels with an old-fashioned sucrometer, but he also takes cell counts of yeast and bacteria.
“It’s self-taught, kind of, but it’s hard to say that it’s fully self-taught,” he says. “But I didn’t learn it anywhere.”
It’s also tough to learn because sparkling wine takes time. A single vintage can require two years or more; the Ultramarine 2010s only showed up last year. I was struck by Cruse’s sense of the long game when I visited him earlier this year. His warehouse facility, not far from breweries like Lagunitas and HenHouse, contains “not no machinery, but damn close.” All the riddling, disgorging and such is done by hand by Cruse and just one assistant.
But Cruse’s real master stroke was to set up a service bureau of sorts, helping others to finesse their own bubbles. He now hosts eight clients.
And he has expanded beyond Champagne dreams. He’s determined to perfect the equally complicated process of
pétillant naturel, in which wine is bottled while still fermenting, creating the bubbles in a single fermentation. “Pet-nat” has become au courant everywhere; Cruse, having witnessed too many failed California efforts, wanted to show how to do it right. He helped make a Trousseau pet-nat for Combe, a Santa Barbara project involving Rajat Parr, as well as several for himself and other clients.
Cruse wants to normalize pet-nat — to make California versions less experimental and more an affordable alternative to Champagne. The shorter aging times and less cellar labor could make it so.
But that doesn’t mean he’ll tolerate the rusticity that marks too many efforts. “We are trying,” he says, “to make it a serious thing.”
A Cruseian statement if ever there was one.
“It’s self-taught, kind of, but it’s hard to say that it’s fully self-taught.” Michael Cruse