By Ben Dobbin, Associated Press, 12/20/99
HAMMONDSPORT, N.Y. - Can't afford the expensive French bubbly this New Year's Eve?
Then you might want to try the stuff they make in New York, one of America's oldest wine regions, which is well worth a swallow. Some of its sparklers, mostly priced under $20, even carry "champagne'' on the label - much to the annoyance of the French.
Winemaker Willy Frank sees no reason why he shouldn't, since he makes his vintage Bruts and Blanc de Blancs the same way the French do.
"If something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and tastes like a duck, do you really want to call it a crow?'' said Frank, 74, laughing heartily at his oft-repeated credo. "It's a challenge for me. Call it an obsession. It's not easy to produce excellence.''
That's precisely what scores of domestic wineries have been doing in recent decades, from California's Napa Valley to the Finger Lakes in west-central New York. Their sparkling wines may not be identical to French champagnes, but connoisseurs detect increasing similarities.
Champagne is best shown and appreciated in tulip-shaped glasses such as those in this photograph, or in narrow flutes. The old-fashioned, wide-rimmed coupes should be avoided; they allow bubbles and aroma to dissipate too quickly.
(AP Photo)
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"There are very distinctive styles and characteristics to both but there's great merit to both,'' said Craig Goldwyn of the Beverage Testing Institute in Chicago. "It's strictly a matter of style, not a matter of quality.''
By whatever label or production method, bubblies are pouring forth from about 30 of New York's 137 wineries in the run-up to 2000. Sparkling wine sales look likely to set records this year in wine regions everywhere, and Long Island, the Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes are no exception.
Just like his pioneering father, Dr. Konstantin Frank, a war refugee from Ukraine who proved in the 1960s that delicate European vinifera grapes could be grown in the eastern United States, Frank is leading the charge in New York to make classy sparklers.
He is one of the few American winemakers who grow all three grapes deemed essential for a genuine bubbly - chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier.
He follows the exacting "methode champenoise'' - the bottle-fermentation process refined in the French province of Champagne over hundreds of years.
In his stone-cellar farmhouse on the slopes above Keuka Lake, his French-trained winemaker uses solely French equipment, from oak barrels to riddling racks used to tilt bottles upside down so the yeast sediment can be disgorged after years of aging.
Chateau Frank vintages frequently outscore fine French champagnes in blind tastings. They're usually far cheaper. And Frank believes he has a strikingly similar climate to work in: The fjordlike, hill-framed Finger Lakes create a grape-friendly microclimate, and the warm days and chilly nights produce a vital balance of acid and sugar.
In America, sparkling wine can be called champagne as long as it is identified by place of origin, as in "Finger Lakes Champagne.'' But even some of Frank's high-end competitors, such as Glenora Wine Cellars on nearby Seneca Lake, shy away from the term "out of courtesy to the French,'' said Ray Spencer, Glenora's distribution chief.
Frank applies it only to top-notch products aged for up to seven years. It is "sacrilege for some of the American wineries making almost undrinkable sparkling wine to call it champagne,'' he said.
French law dictates that effervescent wine made outside the Champagne region is properly referred to as sparkling wine. Jean-Louis Carbonnier of the Champagne Wines Information Bureau thinks U.S. wineries that plunder the word are doing "a real disfavor to consumers because it creates the impression that everything that sparkles is champagne.''
Most U.S. sparkling wine, Carbonnier added, is made in the less sophisticated Charmat method, in which the second fermentation for producing the wine's bubbles takes place in large tanks rather than individual bottles.
Thomas Matthews, executive director of Wine Spectator magazine, thinks high-end French champagne "still proves its quality superiority, mostly because of this long aging and long experience of blending, but you pay for it. At the value end, I think they have been caught up and perhaps even surpassed.''
"Best value'' French champagnes cost $20 to $35 while California sparkling wines with similarly high ratings range from $12 to $25, the magazine found. In New York, top sparklers usually retail for between $15 and $20.
