7 Steps for the Perfect Sparkling Dosage

Here’s How We Do Dosage Trials at Amista Vineyards

...and it’s the most fun part of my “job”!

 

 

The dosage is added to the finished wine to “top up the bottle” just before inserting the cork. Dosage is just a fancy word for the addition of a sugar syrup or liqueur. A dosage trial is done to determine the level of dosage to add to a sparkling wine to help balance the acidity and showcase the natural flavors. Here’s how we do it.

1. Assemble a group of tasters who love bubbles (easy). We always gather in our kitchen around our big island.

2. Prepare five – sometimes six – bottles of one of our sparkling wines, one bottle of the base wine and each of the others with a different level of “dosage”. We leave this to winemaker Ashley Herzberg (hard).

3. Line up the appropriate number of glasses in front of each taster and pour one of the samples into each glass (easy).

4. Sniff each sample and make notes about the aromas. This step is supposed to be done in silence (hard). If we’re tasting just one sparkling wine, we pretty much follow the rule. If we’re doing three or four, not so much!

5. Taste each glass and make notes of the flavors and the way the wine feels in your mouth. Again, in silence (hard).

6. Winemaker Ashley Herzberg then calls on each of us to share our notes, and pick the sample we think is best, reminding us there are no right or wrong answers (hard).

7. Then we all discuss the samples and try to come to a consensus on which one achieves the perfect balance of acidity, flavors, and mouthfeel. Surprisingly, we almost always reach agreement (easy). In those rare instances where we don’t agree, we all agree that the final decision rests with winemaker Ashley!

Note: Watch Ashley's video showing how the dosage is done

 

Sparkling Wine in Sonoma?

Amista Vineyards, A Grower Sparkling House

...and the 1st grower sparkling house in Healdsburg

 

 

Is Amista a Grower Sparkling House?

Yes! We grow our own grapes from a single estate and craft them into Amista Vineyards sparkling wines. In the picture above, my husband Mike Farrow, winemaker Ashley Herzberg and I bless the grapes during the first harvest of the season.

Not only is Amista a grower sparkling house, but we were also the 1st in Healdsburg. We made our first sparkling wine from our estate-grown Syrah in 2008. But what does it mean to be a grower sparkling house and why should you care? Let’s start with some background from Champagne, the quintessential region for making sparkling wine.

What is Grower Champagne?

Grower Champagnes are grown and produced by the same entity. The makers have their eyes (and hands) on their own vines year-round, meaning that they are the ones controlling how the land is being cultivated and when the grapes are picked. And they make and bottle the wine according to their winemaking style and philosophy rather than selling the grapes and letting someone else make the finished product. Grower Champagne houses are usually small, and family owned.

That may not be such an unusual idea in the U.S. since most wineries are small, family owned and produce wines from their own vineyards (even though the largest volume is produced by a few large companies). However, that is not the norm in Champagne.

How is Grower Champagne Different from the Large Champagne Houses?

Traditionally, Champagne is produced by large houses – “maisons” in French. They purchase grapes from thousands - yes, thousands - of growers in the Champagne region of France. These production houses are multi-national corporations that make hundreds of thousands of cases. They are essentially Champagne factories. They are well known because they also have big advertising budgets. You’ll recognize the big names like Moet & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, and Perrier-Jouet.

Another difference is that the large houses blend their wines from that vast number of vineyards across multiple vintages. The climate in northern France is variable and challenging and not every year is perfect for growing grapes. Blending across vineyards and vintages produces a more consistent flavor profile and style. When you are making large volumes sold around the world, people want the product to taste the same year after year.

Why Grower Champagne Has Become Sought After

Grower Champagne has become more popular in the last two decades as growers in Champagne decided to make their own wine in addition to selling to the large houses. Grower Champagnes are treasured because they are limited and hard to find. People love to discover hidden gems!

Grower Champagnes are rarely known outside of France because they are made in extremely tiny quantities. Unlike the large production houses, they typically don’t make enough to export. So, you have likely never heard of them unless you travel to France.

The other reason they are coveted is because they have become known for producing exceptional quality Champagne. When it comes to Grower Champagne, these farmers are working with the same parcels every year, carefully managing how the vines are farmed and choosing the right time to harvest to bring out the best flavors in the wine.

Sparkling Wine Comes to California

The early sparkling houses in California were introduced by iconic French Champagne houses like Louis Roederer and Moet & Chandon, which began investing in California in the 1960s and 1970s.

In California, it is more common for a winery to grow and produce wines from its own grapes. Sure, there are very large wine production corporations that source grapes from hundreds of growers and make the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of cases of wine, sold in bottles, boxes, and cans.  

But over 80% of the wineries in California are under 5,000 cases. It is common for the smaller wineries to grow and produce their own grapes. The idea of “grower wines” is more traditional in California that has been the case in Champagne.

But that wasn’t the case for the new sparkling wine producers in California. The early sparkling houses followed the model of Champagne – large production houses that purchased fruit from many growers rather than growing their own.

Grower Sparkling Houses Emerge in Sonoma

As happened in Champagne the Sonoma sparkling wine scene is also transforming. The pioneers of sparkling that came in the first wave, are large producers owned by a parent corporation in Champagne and most continue to source grapes from other growers.

In the second wave, family-owned wineries emerged that craft sparkling wines from their own vineyards. These also tend to be large producers since making sparkling wine is more complicated and requires a greater capital investment in production equipment than needed for making still wines. Producing in volume enables the winery to take advantage of economies of scale.

Only recently, in the last 15 years has Sonoma seen the emergence of a handful of small, sparkling wine houses making wines from their own estate vineyards – “grower sparkling houses”. This was enabled in part due to the opening of a local custom crush facility with the equipment to make sparkling wines. Small, family wineries suddenly had a facility where they could make sparkling wines from their estate vineyards crafted by their own winemaker.

Why Should I Care about Grower Sparkling Wine?

For those of you like me who are true lovers of bubbles, there a several reasons to care. One is the pure joy of finding beautiful sparkling gems made in very small batches and knowing that the same winery and winemaker nurtured that wine all the way from the grape to the glass.

If you appreciate experiencing the little variations from vintage to vintage based on the idiosyncrasy of the vineyard and the weather the year the grapes were grown, then you will enjoy exploring grower sparkling wines. It is more of an adventure than sipping the brand-consistent character of big sparkling houses – not that they aren't delicious, just less varied and interesting.

Another reason to care is because the wine is hand crafted by small wineries rather than produced in large volumes by a big corporate producer. It is a way to support the small family growers who have an intimate connection with the land, understand its peculiarities and can control the farming practices to ensure optimum quality.

You get a sense of their stewardship of the land and their love of turning their grapes into a finished product for others to enjoy. It's the same reason I go to the farmer’s market and choose a variety of freshly picked ripe tomatoes and talk directly with the farmer who grew them.

Come taste with us and explore a grower sparkling house for yourself!

What's the Best Season in Wine Country?

Every season is splendid when you're surrounded by vineyards!

How about a Spring rainbow watching over the mustard?

Or do you prefer Summer roses blooming next to the vines?

Maybe a spectacular harvest sunset?

Or a gentle Winter mist floating over the vines?

7 Hot Tips for Stomping Grapes

If This is on Your Bucket List

I'll let you in on what I learned about stomping grapes from Amista winemaker Ashley Herzberg.

 

 

1. They’re COLD! We harvest our grapes in the early morning hours for two reasons. One, it’s easier for the workers before the temperatures rise during the day. Two, it’s better to bring the grapes in when they’re cold to control the sugar levels and avoid oxidation. It’s not so comfy for the stomper and my feet got a bit numb.

2. They hurt your feet. You’re stomping on whole clusters of grapes - stems included - not just the berries. The good news is that after a few minutes, your feet quit hurting because they’re numb!

3. You don’t really stomp. In fact, our winemaker calls it “foot treading” not grape stomping. The idea is to gently tread on the grapes to extract the color. Plus, the pressure of human force is gentle enough so that the seeds won't break which creates bitterness in the wine.

4. It’s hard to keep your balance. The clusters are lumpy and as you tread first one foot then the other sinks into the juice.

5. It’s hard work! In fact, it’s a great cardio workout.

6. It’s sticky. You’ll want to turn the hose on your feet and legs when you finish just like you did – hopefully - before you started.

7. It’s fun! It’s also rewarding to use a traditional, natural technique to kick off the fermentation process.

How Do You Find a Female Winemaker?

She Found Us!

…and spearheaded our journey into sparkling wines.

 

 

I’ll never forget the day (December 2, 2010) when Ashley said, “I would like to be your winemaker.” I was honored and thrilled to hear her question and knew my husband Mike would feel the same. We had been working with Ashley in her role as assistant winemaker for several years at the winery where we custom crush our grapes. Custom crush refers to making wine in a facility with equipment and resources provided by the facility under the direction of your own winemaker. It’s a great way to make wine without the overhead and capital investment of a dedicated winery.

Ashley had decided to strike out on her own and become a consulting winemaker so she would have more flexibility to start a family. She identified us as potential clients because she liked the quality of our fruit, both from our own estate and that purchased from our Dry Creek Valley neighbors, and she enjoyed working with us – go figure! We didn’t hesitate to say “Yes” because we felt the same way about her.

Little did we know that when Ashley joined us, we wouldn’t just get an amazing female winemaker, we would also get two delightful children in training. From the time her kids were very little we would see her walking our vineyards holding one by the hand with the other in a baby sling. They have grown up in the vineyards and have become experts in knowing when to pick. Ashley brings her talent and unbridled enthusiasm to everything she does, from leading our shift in focus to Rhône varietals and sparkling wines, to being an incredible mother, gardener, and friend.

5 Fabulous Pairings with Sparkling Syrah

I’ve had such fun learning to pair wine and food

Impress your friends with these great pairings!

 

Our Sparkling Syrah is a Rosé. I call it “joy in a bottle” because its shimmering cranberry color makes it festive. When we first launched Amista Vineyards, the only thing I knew about pairings was that Cab was good with steak. Then we started making Sparkling Syrah! You might be surprised how versatile this wine is and how much fun it is to try it with a wide variety of foods. Here are five of our favorites.

1. Thanksgiving. There are so many assorted flavors on the Thanksgiving table, it’s hard to find a wine that works. Enter Sparkling Syrah! Because it spends several hours on the skins, it has added heft that enables it to work with the bigger flavors of roast turkey and stuffing. At the same time, its fruit characteristics pair well with the cranberries and sweet potatoes. The bubbles cleanse the palate and the wine’s effervescence is a welcome counterpoint to the richness of the Thanksgiving feast. Added bonus – the brilliant color turns any meal into a celebration.But don't take my word for it. It comes highly recommended by the Jetsetting Fashionista.

2. Taco Salad. This is a casual summer meal for us. The combination of spicy taco meat coupled with garden fresh lettuce, tomatoes and cilantro makes this a challenging pairing. Sparkling Syrah comes to the rescue. Plus, it is so refreshing on a warm summer evening.

3. Cranberry Brie Phyllo Cups. This is a delicious and beautiful appetizer that is spectacular with Sparkling Syrah. The tartness of the cranberries, the creamy brie, and the crunchy phyllo cup come together with the Sparkling Syrah and everything pops! This easy appetizer is sure to impress your friends.

4. Hot and Spicy Baked Crab is a favorite of our winemaker, Ashley Herzberg. It has long been a tradition on Christmas Eve and serving it with our Sparkling Syrah has become her family’s new tradition. In fact, Sparkling Syrah is a fabulous choice with all kinds of spicy cuisines, like Thai, Szechuan, and Indian dishes.

5. Panna Cotta with Raspberry Coulis. We served this at one of our annual Sparkling Holiday Soirees and it was a homerun! The Sparkling Syrah was dazzling with the tart, sweetness of the raspberry coulis and the silky panna cotta.

Have fun pairing this unusual bubbly with your favorite dishes. I’d love to hear what you discover.

 

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Why A Blog?

As a woman winery owner, I have been asked lots of questions about what it’s like to be in the wine business and live the wine country life after spending decades in the corporate world. Here are my stories about the wonderful world of sparkling wines – which I love – and owning a vineyard in Dry Creek Valley. I am grateful I get to live near the charming town of Healdsburg, California, in the heart of Sonoma Wine Country. As with any endeavor, there are glorious moments and difficult moments. For me, each of them brings new discoveries and learning, which is why I call them “sparkling moments”.

About Me

I started with an education in psychology - pretty much useless for getting a job - which led me to explore breakthrough leadership and a career as an executive in several global corporations. Following my corporate career, I became an executive coach helping CEOs and their teams build the leadership skills they need to achieve top performance.

Getting into the wine business wasn’t exactly a plan. As I look back, I believe it was a dream that my husband Mike and I didn’t know we had and didn’t know we shared. When we started out together, we never knew we'd end up living in Sonoma's beautiful Dry Creek Valley surrounded by our own vineyards. From planting our first vineyard in Silicon Valley, to tasting our first “garage-made” wine out of the barrel with friends in our basement in New Jersey, to eventually moving to this beautiful property in the Dry Creek Valley, the creation of our winery, Amista Vineyards, unfolded over many years and in several locations.

Owning a winery has catapulted me into a leadership role that is both challenging and exhilarating. I love crafting our business strategy, meeting our guests, and nurturing the growth and development of our team. I also love living the wine country life – farm fresh foods, beautiful wines, good friends – all in a stunning setting surrounded by vineyards and rolling hills.

About Amista Vineyards

We are dedicated to crafting distinctive wines that inspire you to celebrate the special moments in life and experience the friendly spirit of wine country living. We are proud to produce the best sparkling wine and Rhône varietals in Sonoma wine country, the perfect collection of wines for making everyday moments special and special moments extraordinary.

We are Michael and Vicky Farrow, co-founders of Amista Vineyards. Since we released our first wine in 2005, our goal has been to provide an exceptional wine country experience of Sonoma County's Dry Creek Valley.  It is a dream come true to live in this special place and we’re excited to share it with you. We will remain small, and family operated, offering our wines through a personal connection with each guest, whether in person or on-line.

We are local. Our grapes come from our estate vineyards just outside the charming town of Healdsburg, California, and from our neighbors in Dry Creek Valley and Rockpile. We want to be able to walk the vineyards, taste the fruit and have a personal relationship with the people who grow our grapes.

We are sustainable. In August of 2018, our estate Morningsong Vineyards became Certified Sustainable by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance.  This certification is only one part of our commitment to our land and people. We were part of project to restore the incredible beauty of Dry Creek and at the same time recreate a vibrant habitat for endangered Steelhead trout and Coho salmon. We built our tasting room with energy efficient insulated concrete forms (ICF's) and constructed a solar structure that powers the tasting room and vineyard irrigation. We believe a vital part of our business is to provide extraordinary learning experiences to people on our team who aspire to be leaders and innovators in the wine business and to impact others in lasting and significant ways.

We are friendly. Amista, loosely translated, means making friends in Spanish and we want your experience to be welcoming, engaging and fun. If you visit us in person, you can look forward to a friendly welcome in a beautiful setting surrounded by vineyards. We are also known as the best dog friendly winery in Healdsburg, California.

 

How do you Press Syrah in Your Garage?

With just a little pressing and a lot of cleaning!

…and it’s all faster with friends

 

 

Our dear friend, Juergen, was visiting from Germany and got roped into helping press the Syrah grapes for the first wine Mike made from our Healdsburg vineyard. The grapes were crushed and then sat on the skins for 10 days in our garage. We used a basket press (seen at the right of the photo above) loaned by one of our neighbors. The press extracts the juice from the crushed grapes leaving behind the skins and seeds. The grapes are pressed gently to avoid crushing the seeds and releasing undesirable tannins.

It’s strange that this step in the wine-making process is called pressing, when much less time is spent pressing and a lot more is spent washing barrels! The importance and amount of time spent on cleanliness in winemaking is often a surprise to beginning winemakers.

Mike and Juergen did a great job! This 2002 Syrah turned out to be delicious. It eventually came to be called Garage Syrah and was responsible for seducing us into starting a winery. Like most things, we just didn’t know it at the time!

How do you Punch Down Syrah in Your Garage?

Make Sure You Have Friends Visiting!

…because it's a lot easier and more fun!

 

 

Mike had harvested 3 tons of Syrah grapes from our Healdsburg vineyard, and they were soaking in bins in our garage to develop color and flavors. While the grapes are soaking, a cap of grape skins rises to the top of each bin. That cap needs to be “punched down” daily to reincorporate it with the juice. Punch down is hard work, which why it’s best to entice friends to help. Enter our long-time friends Meg and Dale who came to visit from our home state of Colorado.

Dale helped Mike 8 years earlier with punch downs in another garage at our home in Silicon Valley when Mike made his first wine from Cabernet grapes. They had just as much fun then as they did in their long-awaited encore performance! Meg and I once again made sure we had something else to do – shopping, lunch, sipping a glass of wine.

That’s probably why I didn’t recognize that Mike was becoming captivated with making wine and that we would eventually find ourselves in the wine business with our friends cheering us on every step of the way!

How do you Crush Syrah in Your Garage?

With Help from Family & Friends!

…and a little help from John Deere

 

 

We were finally able to move to our Healdsburg vineyard in June 2002. We had replaced half of the Chardonnay vines with Syrah in 2000 and the young vines were just starting to produce fruit. A true viticulturist would have advised dropping all the fruit and letting the vines mature another year. This is so the fruit will not compete with the vine reserves needed to develop the vines and root system. Well, Mike had other ideas. He wanted to MAKE WINE!

He harvested 3 tons – which sounded huge to me – to make wine in our garage. Mike’s brother Bob and wife Anne came to help. Our neighbors also came to lend a hand and loaned us a small crusher/destemmer. Having a machine that crushes the fruit and removes the stems in one step not only saved us a lot of time but also results in better wine by making sure all the stems are removed.

We learned right away that Healdsburg is a friendly place and neighbors are always willing to pitch in. The friendly spirit of Dry Creek Valley turned out to be one of the most wonderful aspects of living in this special place.

5 Reasons for a Sparkling Wine Club

Why We Created Amista Sparkling Friends

Because sparkling wine is meant to be enjoyed with friends!

 

 

1. As a lover of Champagne and sparkling wine, I know that bubbles lovers want their bubbles. We already had a wine club for our red and white wines. But if you're like me, you want the choice to get only sparkling wines in your club.

2. We will use any excuse to share an extraordinary wine and food pairing. We launched “Sparkling Friends” in 2014 at Passport to Dry Creek Valley, the premiere wine and food event in the area. And we showcased our Blanc de Blanc with fresh shucked oysters! 

3. Winemaker Ashley Herzberg and I like to experiment with grapes that are not traditionally used in Champagne, especially our Rhône varieties. Having a wine club sort of pushes us to play with new wines to keep things interesting. We now have a collection of sparkling "gems”, and we want to keep creating more!

4. We want our Sparkling Friends to have first “pop” at our limited production, estate grown sparkling wines. We are a small “grower sparkling house", much like the small grower Champagne houses in France. Our production is extremely limited, and our sparkling wines often sell out before the next release.

5. Ashley and I say we make sparkling wines for ourselves, and we also love to share! That’s what friends do – share their discoveries with their friends! Amista means making friends, so it just makes sense.