Schramsberg Vineyards
Greetings from Schramsberg!
While it is still March at the time of writing, Napa has fully embraced the spring season. Budbreak abounds from Carneros to Calistoga and we’re all just trying to stay ahead of whatever is going to happen next. Sean, Katelyn, and I have been hard at work blending the base wines to create the cuvees that will mature into the sparkling wines you know and love. After evaluating all of the 2025 lots at the end of last year, we began to focus on our favorite lots and start to put together the puzzle pieces of our J. Schram Blancs, J. Schram Noirs, and J. Schram Rose blends.
Spring 2026 Camp Schramsberg has recently wrapped up and for those who have not had the chance to experience it, we cover base wine tasting and the concept of blending. It’s an opportunity for the campers to experience the diversity of sites that we work with and to experience the creative side of winemaking, putting together the puzzle pieces of lots together to create something greater than themselves. Inevitably, when we make the group choose their favorite blends, the camper’s first place and the winemaking team’s first place are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and when you think about it, it makes sense.
The campers, whether they are consumers or members of the wine trade, will typically only experience wine in its finished form in a glass, already blended, bottled, and aged for an amount of time that someone considered appropriate. It is a wine that is ready to drink, by most standards. The wines we are tasting with the campers are fairly raw and unfinished and for the most part, they’re being looked at from the perspective of “what tastes best today”. For our winemaking team, looking at the same wines, must approach from a perspective of “where is this wine at in its life and where does it need to go”. It’s a good reminder and something we often forget to communicate to the campers.
This difference in perspective allows for us to favor a higher presence of acidity, an abundance of barely ripe and unripe fruits on the nose and palate, and the edge of quinine-like quench on the finish that may not taste perfect today, but with the addition of effervescence to lift the nose and palate and the complexity of autolytic characters from the sur lie aging come together to create a perfectly balanced, fruit-forward, sparkling wine that will age for decades and speak to the vintage on which it was based. It’s a skill that we practice each year with the hopes that we’re getting better at it over that time. The only way for a winemaker to learn how to do what we do is to practice it vintage after vintage, tasting through the wines we’ve bottled and checking in on them as they age, taking copious notes and hoping that with this years-long practice, we are able to deliver better and better wines to you each year.
Davies Vineyards
Spring season has hit, and the early-early morning air at the cellar door is a rush of aromas… vanilla, marshmallow, chocolate, and Christmas spices, as steam gushes out of freshly emptied wine barrels getting their rigorous maintenance. At the same time the Davies Whiteboard task list is loaded with housekeeping, cleaning, light wine packaging, and the ongoing to-dos for Pinot and Cab barrels aging quietly in the din of the barrel room fans.
However, the tempo is going to pick up, because around the corner in April, the cellar crew will begin climbing the barrel stacks, wine thieves in hand, pulling close to 150 sample bottles representing all the 2023 Cabernets. The Winemaking team have the dates set aside to evaluate and classify these lots and in the following weeks and provide a roadmap to assemble initial blends. By months end, wines will be racked, blended, and put back to barrel to coalesce before our early-July bottling run.
And finally, with an eye toward the 2025 Vintage and crop estimates finalized, we are confirming the last few barrel orders for the season in anticipation of the new round of wines that will need a home come September and October.
