Winemaker Notes
Blend: 84% Chardonnay, 16% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Connoisseurs' Guide
This extraordinarily deep, explicitly champenized offering is a study in contrasts when it is compared to Schramberg’s 2007 Reserve, for, while both are nearing their tenth anniversaries, this one shows its autolysis in a more refined light and wears its age with more elegance. It is rife with crème brûlée richness but has retained a subtle, but very sure sense of slightly juicy fruit that has not faded with time. It is a complete and compelling package that reveals more and more with each sip, and it ranks among the very best sparkling wines to be made anywhere.
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Wine Enthusiast
This gorgeous, full-bodied and compelling wine is made from 84% Chardonnay and 16% Pinot Noir. It has a rich golden color, slightly earthy aromas, plus bread dough and white-peach scents that lead to very opulent, sophisticated and nicely aged flavors that range from toasted walnut to honeyed peach to white pepper. While it's already nine years old, this will easily age through 2022. CELLAR SELECTION
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Still another stunner is the 2007 J. Schram, which is roughly 84% Chardonnay and the rest Pinot Noir with about 35% barrel-fermentation and the balance in stainless steel. This shows loads of honeyed tropical fruit such as pineapple and mango, a touch of white peach, beautiful body, wonderful pinpoint bubbles that are persistent, and a dry, crisp, long finish. This was disgorged in March 2015, so it spent nearly eight years on its lees. Drink it over the next 5-10 years, if not longer. A tasting some of the older vintages, such as the 2004, 2001, 1999, 1996, proved just how amazingly well these can age.
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Wine Spectator
Sleek and refined, offering vivid aromas of fresh almond, cinnamon and ginger, with layered flavors of Meyer lemon, mineral and sweet anise. Drink now. 2,530 cases made.
In 1965, Jack and Jamie Davies founded Schramsberg and set out to make world-class sparkling wine in the true méthode traditionelle style on the property originally established in 1862 by German immigrant Jacob Schram. There were only 22 bonded wineries in Napa Valley and fewer than 100 acres of California vineyards planted to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Schramsberg was the first California winery to provide a Blanc de Blancs in 1965 followed by a Blanc de Noirs in 1967. Now their son, Hugh Davies, leads the winery’s management and winemaking team.
The Schramsberg estate in Napa Valley’s famed Diamond Mountain District is a registered historic landmark with Napa’s first caves, hand-dug in the 1880s, and its first hillside vineyards. Quality focus drives all aspects of wine production starting with access to over 120 cool-climate sites in Carneros, Marin, Mendocino and Sonoma, which result in over 200 separate lots. Unique among California sparkling wine houses, Schramsberg ferments about 25 percent of its juice in oak barrels to produce rich, flavorful, complex wines.
Most of Schramsberg’s viticultural and winemaking practices are carried out by hand: grapes are hand harvested, the wines are handcrafted, and the bottles are stacked and riddled in underground caves. The family and the winery embody excellence and innovation in winemaking, as well as preservation of their land, their history and their community.
Representing the topmost expression of a Champagne house, a vintage Champagne is one made from the produce of a single, superior harvest year. Vintage Champagnes account for a mere 5% of total Champagne production and are produced about three times in a decade. Champagne is typically made as a blend of multiple years in order to preserve the house style; these will have non-vintage, or simply, NV on the label. The term, "vintage," as it applies to all wine, simply means a single harvest year.
Reaching up California's coastline and into its valleys north of San Francisco, the North Coast AVA includes six counties: Marin, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake. While Napa and Sonoma enjoy most of the glory, the rest produce no shortage of quality wines in an intriguing and diverse range of styles.
Climbing up the state's rugged coastline, the chilly Marin County, just above the City and most of Sonoma County, as well as Mendocino County on the far north end of the North Coast successfully grow cool-climate varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and in some spots, Riesling. Inland Lake County, on the other hand, is considerably warmer, and Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel and Sauvignon Blanc produce some impressive wines with affordable price tags.