• 2013 Navarro Brut R.D.
    Gewürztraminer, Disgorged May 2019
    Anderson Valley, Mendocino
    • (750 ml) Sold Out!
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Bubbles up '13 Recent Press

The most nerve-racking part of sparkling wine production arrives about eight months following harvest. We select the final Brut cuvée during the summer, then add sugar and yeast to re-ferment the wine; bottles are filled with this ready-to-ferment potion and then sealed with crown caps. Alcohol inhibits yeast growth, so adding yeast to a wine with 11% alcohol requires ideal conditions to produce a reliable, slow re-fermentation. We once produced a 1989 Chardonnay cuvée but, being sparkling wine newbies, we didn't appreciate the yeast's reticence in re-fermentations and found ourselves in a jam in July of 1990. What's worse than all the bottles not fermenting? When some bottles have fermented and others failed to start. The sad solution was to un-bottle the wine. We aged the reclaimed wine in cask until the 1991 vintage, re-fermented the wine on fresh yeast, then blended it into a new and larger Pinot Noir-Chardonnay cuvée, our first—and hopefully only—non-vintage sparkler.

A pressure gauge pierces a crown cap on a bottle of sparkling wine. Bins of newly bottled Brut [right]. After bottling we tend to fret until we can affirm that the fermentation proceeded as planned. For several weeks following bottling we measure the pressure inside numerous randomly chosen bottles of Brut [left]. If all went well, each bottle has adequate pressure and the amount of pressure is uniform across all of the samples, indicating the fermentation completed in every bottle.
Julia and Tyler, Navarro employees, holding a bottle each of Navarro Brut Sparkling Wine

The 2013 and 2016 cuvées had no such problems and they display distinctive qualities from both the vintage and the pause before disgorgement. After five years resting en tirage, yeast autolysis has released mannoproteins and glutamates into the 2013 bottling, adding roundness and a sense of umami in this creamy, toasty cuvée. Only 92 cases are available.


Wooden bins in a wine cellar containing stacked bottles of newly bottled sparkling wine.

Specifications
  • Harvested: Sept. 2 to 4, 2013
  • Sugars at harvest: 20.0° Brix
  • Bottled: June 27, 2014
  • Cases disgorged: 92
  • Disgorged: May 2, 2019
  • Alcohol: 11.8%
  • Titratable acidity: 7.8 g/L
  • pH: 3.14