The short answer: Carboniste started as an experiment. I’d spent years making traditional-method sparkling wine at Schramsberg, and every year I watched special little lots disappear into big blends. My partner Jacqueline and I started Carboniste in 2017 to find out what those small lots could become on their own. Our first wine was a sparkling Albariño, and it’s still our flagship.
The lots that got blended away
At a big sparkling house, you make large lots. That’s how the business works. So every year, when we sat down to do the blends, the small experimental lots would get folded in and become part of something bigger. And every year I felt like something special was being lost.
I kept wondering: what would that lot be like if it were its own wine? What would it become if I just followed my instincts with it? I wanted to answer those questions. That’s where Carboniste started: seeking out small lots and finding the special little flavors and unique expressions that California can give you.
Not California Champagne
For a long time, the goal for most sparkling producers here has been to make “California Champagne,” which always seemed a little silly to me. If I want Champagne, I’ll buy Champagne. Champagne is a place in France. What we have in California is sunshine, ripeness, and an undeniable sweetness to the fruit, and I wanted to make wines that embrace that instead of imitating somewhere else.
A different kind of experiment
Our first wine wasn’t a small lot of Chardonnay, which is what you might expect from someone who came up making traditional-method wine. It was a different kind of what-if: what if we didn’t use Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at all? What if we used a different grape entirely?
That grape was Albariño. Jacqueline was working with an Albariño vineyard and making a still wine from it, and it was delicious. We decided together that it was worth trying a sparkling wine from the same fruit. It came from Gomes Vineyard in the Sacramento Delta, and it’s the same vineyard we still use today.
The first vintage was 2017: two tons of Albariño, about a hundred cases, fermented in the back of a winery where we’d borrowed a corner. We did everything by hand. Then I took it door to door to restaurants, everybody loved it, and we made more. That wine became the Octopus, and to me it’s still California sunshine in a bottle: juicy, unique, and a real expression of where it’s grown.
The name
Most wine brands use a last name, and honestly, nobody cares about “Person Wine.” I wanted something that said what we do. So I made up a fake French word, Carboniste: the person who puts the bubbles in the bottle. We’re not a still wine company with a sparkling wine on the side. Sparkling wine is the whole point.
From that borrowed corner we moved into a leased space, and in 2022 we moved into our own winery in Sonoma. That was the moment it felt real.
Still an experiment
We’ve kept that idea going. To me, wine is a work in progress. We don’t know all the answers, and I’m excited to keep playing and figuring out where we’re going. Life is a journey, and winemaking is a journey too. The question is always the same: what if we did this? Where would it take us?
That’s also why every wine we make is different from the others. I’d rather make colors of the rainbow than shades of gray.
The one thing to remember: Carboniste started as an experiment, and it still is one.
Meet the Octopus · Read the story of our sparkling Albariño
Quick answers
When was Carboniste founded? In 2017. My partner Jacqueline and I started it together.
What does Carboniste mean? It’s an invented, fake French word for “the person who puts the bubbles in the bottle.”
What was Carboniste’s first wine? A sparkling Albariño from Gomes Vineyard in the Sacramento Delta, which became the Octopus.
Where is Carboniste made? At our own winery in Sonoma, California, since 2022.