Innovative Sparkling Wine Grape Varieties

Let’s pop a red cap and get into the bottle with CARBONISTE Winemakers, Dan and Jacqueline Person. These questions go deeper and get bubbly as they share more about CARBONISTE, winemaking, and wine drinking.

What Different Wine Grape Varieties Do you Plan to Use?

Every week we get questions from our sparkling wine fans about what we love about sparkling wine and how we make it. Our friends on Instagram @thedummeliers asked us if we will be using any different or unusual wine grape varieties this year.

Well, the short answer is YES! Part of our mission at CARBONISTE is to showcase the uniqueness of California terroir. To do that, we follow a winemaking process that is a combination of tradition and experimentation. Not only are we exploring the different varieties of California, but we are also branching out in how we process the wine grapes. We have some fun new varieties bubbling in the tanks and barrels. Watch or read below as Dan and Jacqueline share more about what we have in store at CARBONISTE.

Jacqueline: So Dan! We got a question from the @thedummeliers. Are we going to use any new varieties of grapes in the future and if so, what are we working on?

Dan: Ya. Absolutely. Thank you Dummeliers. That’s a great question. I love to work with all of them. I think there are some grapes that are probably best suited for making sparkling wine, but it all depends on how you make the sparkling wine. And so you make a great wine from any grape, you just have to figure out how to do it.

Jacqueline: And what story that grape tells.

Dan: Right. This past year we got a bit of Chenin Blanc, and some Primitivo, some Carignan, and some Gamay. We’re playing around with those as different components for the ROUGE BRUTE potentially. The Chenin Blanc would be its own wine. Primitivo.

Jacqueline: Primitivo.

Dan: Primitivo. We’re getting ready to keg up right now for a keg of wine. Which will be a full carbonic Primitivo. It’s a really lovely expression of blood orange. It’s really citrusy with a grapefruit quality.

Jacqueline: But still with the bubbles?

Dan: An effervescent wine. We bunged it up in a beer tank to make a Pét Nat in a tank. A Pét Nat in a beer tank. We’re going to keg that. Which is pretty exciting for us.

Cheers!

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