Winemaker Notes
86% Chardonnay, 14% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Enticing aromas of toasted almond and pear tart lead to an equally seductive and complex palate that is dry but rich in feel. It has the complexity and layering of a wine aged a long time on the yeast, and shows excellent concentration that leads to a long, lingering finish. This is Schramsberg's top-of-the-line Chardonnay-based wine and it definitely lives up to its billing in this vintage. Best after 2023.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: Ever since I tasted the J. Schram Brut in the mid-1990s, I realized that this wine would become one of my favorite sparkling wines from anywhere in the world. The 2009 J. Schram Brut ranks as one the best I have tasted to date. TASTING NOTES: This wine shows outstanding complexities while retaining loads of beautiful fruitiness. Its aromas and flavors of ripe core fruit, creamy autolysis, and frisky citrus notes should pair it well with lobster noodles. (Tasted: February 22, 2019, St. Helena, CA)
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Wine Spectator
Dynamic and polished, with expressive Meyer lemon and cinnamon nut roll aromas and plush and luxurious baked apple and fresh ginger flavors that glide on a long finish. Drink now through 2019.
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Wine & Spirits
This is Schramsberg’s top selection of chardonnay (86 percent of the blend). A quarter of it fermented in oak, which seems to point up the wine’s gingery spice. With scents of orange blossoms and notes of tangerine, this is leesy and ripe, a rich style to pour with salmon roe in puff pastry shells.
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.