Rhys sparkling wine offer July 16th

Anybody taste this yet?

From the email:

Greetings from Rhys Vineyards!
After years of hard work, patience and slow bottle aging in our Skyline cave, it is very exciting to finally have our first bottling of estate grown, Champagne-styled, sparkling wine to offer. This project began years ago, in our estate vineyards, with the planting of vines selected specifically for sparkling wine and farmed with this goal in mind. In order to achieve our vision in bottle we collaborated with one of the greatest producers of Champagne. The resulting wines offer stylistic aspects of great Champagne while highlighting unique California-driven character.
Please keep an eye on your inbox Tuesday, July 16th for a complete update on the Rhys sparkling wine project and the first offering of sparkling wine from our estate vineyards. Also, please note that due to our lack of allocation history with this wine, this first offering will be made on a first come, first served basis.

For the record, I prefer some sort of allocation for existing Rhys customers if it is a Rhys-branded effort. It sounds like it is. I will be interested to hear more about it and taste the wine when it shows up.

Mount Eden did a sparkling Chardonnay in 1995 that was fun for the people on the list.

Cheers,
fred

I got the email, I’m wondering about dosage, time on the lees etc, surely they’ll provide info prior to the actual offer, right?

Kevin talked about this on a visit last July.

I posted this:

Last summer they were playing with dosage, really fascinating discussion, and had narrowed it down. I would have killed to be sitting at the table with Rudolph Peters and Kevin/Jeff as they ran through the process.

We’ll have to wait and see the final verdict. Exciting!

Fred,
I understand your concern and I do not like First Come First Served offerings especially for long term customers. However with no purchase history, we do not feel that we understand the interest in these wines well enough to offer a guranteed allocation. The plan is to keep the number of bottles offered per customer quite low with a robust wishlist. We hope this will spread the wine around and after this we should have enough information to properly allocate the wines in the future.

If these are anything like their chards…
champagne.gif

CJ,
We have planted blocks specifically for sparkling wine at both Bearwallow and Mt Pajaro vineyards. We have been making these wines since 2015 and have several bottlings (single vineyard Blanc des Blancs, multi-vintage solera etc) aging “en tirage” (aging on the lees in bottle).
The first wine that we will release (July 16st) is the 2015 Blanc des Blancs from Bearwallow. It will be disgorged next month so it is still aging on the lees now. The dosage will be 1g/L. We evaluated 1/2g increments with Rodolphe and felt that 1g/L dose produced the best overall presentation in particular aromatically.

Excellent. Rodolphe Peters is a magician.

Any idea the cost per bottle?

what, i didn’t get the email.

I don’t think I did either.

The shipping cost to WA state won’t be worth it for you. Lol. I’ll be a friend and take them off your hands…::sigh:: [rofl.gif]

This is exciting!

Kevin, have you experimented with a rosé? I am always bothering Beau at Random Wine to make some more. Maybe you will beat him to the punch.

Hao and Chris,
Given the limited quantity, the plan is to send the offering first to people that have purchased in the last 12 months. If we have any remaining bottles we will open it up to all customers. In the future, we will have more wine and this shouldn’t be as much of a problem.
If you have purchased in the last year and didn’t receive the email pls contact us via email and we will track down the issue.

Charlie,
We did produce an experimental rosé about 10 years ago (not released) but we try to stick to wines that we are extremely passionate about for our long term focus. Even with that requirement, we are now making quite a few different varieties and styles of wine which is a lot of fun!
Also new at Rhys, in addition to the sparkling project, we will have small offerings of Chenin Blanc and Riesling (both dry) rolling out over the next year.

Thanks Kevin for adding more details - definitely looking forward to trying this. Can you share with us the price per bottle? I am also curious about the California-driven character that these sparklers will highlight - would you share with us your thoughts on what that means to you?

Greg

Greg,
The 750s of 2015 Bearwallow Blanc des Blancs will be $79 and magnums will be $169. We bottled 40% of this wine in magnums so there will be quite a few of that format available.

By California-driven character we are primarily referring to the specific vineyard character of our sites which differ from Kimmeridgian expression. While the wines might have the weight, balance and acidity of Champagne, they exhibit different aromatic elements and mineral expression that are specific to our vineyards. The Bearwallow Blanc des Blancs has the distinctive late mineral finish that the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir bottlings from Bearwallow also exhibit.

Thanks Kevin - much appreciated!