Robert Mondavi – Domaine Chandon – Gundlach Bundschu

On an Adventure for Unusual Wine Exchanges and Requests - March 2006

My friend Mike Beltran and I head off on an early Friday morning to the wine country.  Mike has invited me to tag along with him on a very unusual mission to three wineries.  The main purpose is not to buy wine but to trade, barter, and ask for favors at these wineries.

Robert Mondavi Winery

The first destination is the Robert Mondavi Winery, where Mike has arranged a 9:30 a.m. meeting with Glenn Workman, V.P. of Productions at Robert Mondavi.  Mike is a wine consultant and has been a collector of fine wines for 35 years. Some months back, Mike discovered five bottles of Robert Mondavi 1966 Unfined Cabernet Sauvignon deep in his wine cellar.  Mike and Glenn have agreed to discuss a trade for these historic bottles. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Robert Mondavi Winery.

We meet Glenn in the offices of Robert Mondavi. After some chitchat, Mike and Glenn get down to business.  Mike puts a cash value on the Cab.  Then he rattles off the names of five cases of Mondavi wines he would like in exchange. Glenn agrees and moments later we are packing five cases of Mondavi wine into Mike’s SUV.

Domaine Chandon

We now head back down Highway 29 to Yountville and to Domaine Chandon for another crazy wine adventure. Mike has a most unusual request for the sparkling winemaker at Chandon. Mike has a bottle of 1990 Philipponnat Blanc de Blanc Champagne that he had acquired from Pacific Wines, a fine wine shop he worked at until it closed its doors in the mid 90’s. The bottle was used to demonstrate fermentation in the bottle, the main step in making Champagne,. Mike’s bottle is still capped and contains the residue of dead yeast cells. Mike’s request is to have someone at Domain Chandon disgorge the bottle and add a dosage and a fill to make it a finished Champagne wine. Mike had dropped off the bottle at the winery a couple of weeks before our visit.

We meet sparkling winemaker Tom Tiburzi and he is more than happy to accommodate Mike’s request. Ever since Mike delivered the bottle, Tom has been storing the wine upside down to move the yeast residue to the neck of the bottle. We work our way to the assembly line area of the winery where Tom places the neck of the bottle into a solution used to quickly freeze the residue in the bottles passing through the assembly line. Today, Mike’s bottle is the only bottle in the solution. The solution is not quite cold enough so while we wait Tom leads on a private half-hour tour of Domaine Chandon. This is an exciting adventure for both of us.

Now it is time to disgorge. We each are issued a pair of safety glasses and Tom disgorges the bottle by hand with a disgorging tool. Tom, Mike, and I taste the wine. It is bone dry. Mike and Tom discuss the correct dosage for this bottle to bring the wine to a desired level of sweetness. Tom adds the proper dosage to the bottle and caps it and puts it down to rest.

While we are waiting for the dosage to take its effect, Tom has another great surprise for us. He leads us to the tasting room to taste four sparkling wines.  Tom tells us how he has developed the characteristic of each wine. It is so enlightening to hear how he has done this and to feel the passion and enthusiasm that Tom has for making each of these sparkling wines. We head back to Tom’s lab and taste Mike’s Champagne. It is as good as it is going to get. It is a dry Champagne and one that will go with a good meal and better yet with the story of how it became to be.

We highly recommend a visit to Domaine Chandon. They have one of the better sparkling wine tours, magnificent gardens, and  they are the only Napa winery with a restaurant. The chef, Chris Manning, and the winemakers meet regularly to determine the best possible wine and food pairings.

We head back up Highway 29 to the intersection of the Oakville Grade and stop at the Ugly Corner Café for a quick bite to eat. It is nothing fancy but it is convenient and the food is good.

We head over the mountain on the Oakville Grade to the Sonoma Valley. The Oakville Grade is a beautiful curvy road with great vistas. The locals who travel from one valley to the other often use it.

Gundlach Bundschu

Our final adventure of the day is the Gundlach Bundschu winery in Sonoma Valley near the town of Sonoma. Mike has an empty bottle of a Gundlach Riesling that he found in an antique shop. It is a non-vintage bottle that is most likely pre-prohibition. Gundlach is one of the very oldest wineries in California producing its first vintage in 1861. The winery is in its fifth and sixth generation of ownership with Jim Bundschu and his son Jeff running the winery. Mike thinks they might be interested in making a trade for this antique bottle.

We check in at the tasting room to see if we can contact Jim Bundschu. Unfortunately, the staff cannot locate him. Jim is apparently off somewhere tending to the old-vines of the Gundlach Bundschu Rhinefarm estate.

The trade will have to take place on another visit. In the meanwhile, the tasting room is anxious to accommodate us by offering us some samples of their very fine wines. We are definitely fans of the Gundlach wines. On this day, the best of our tastings were the Gewürztraminer and the Pinot Noir.

For us, this has been a very fascinating and extremely enjoyable day in the wine country. It has been an experience that will long be remembered.