Wind, Sand & Stars 2021

Type

Sparkling

Grape

Gamay

Region

Value

Vibe

Farming

Characteristics

Acidity

Body

Umami

Production notes:

Sourced from the granite-flecked Witters Vineyard — one of California’s highest altitude vineyards at 3,400 feet — near the small logging town of Camino in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To produce this wine, Josh pressed the grapes immediately after harvest, allowing them to settle overnight before initiating fermentation in stainless steel tanks. The wine was aged for two months in barrel and six months in bottle (a relatively short period, favoring freshness). Josh disgorged the wine (an extremely labor intensive process that involves ejecting the sediment from each bottle individually) entirely by hand. He skipped dosage (the common practice of adding sweet liqueur — typically sugary wine — to replace the liquid lost during disgorgement), opting for purity. The wine contains four grams per liter residual sugar (super dry). 12% alcohol.

Wind, Sand & Stars - 2021

This high-elevation sparkler has it all — imagine Champagne with the dizzying, cathedral-like beauty of Machu Picchu. Passionfruit custard and wet granite.

For Josh Hammerling, sparkling wine is more than an extravagant party favor. It's a front-row seat to California’s most exquisite and rugged terrain — specifically, its coast. It’s also, it turns out, a nearly impossible endeavor within the confines of American capitalism. Sparkling wine — even low-intervention sparkling wine — is highly labor intensive. (There’s a reason, aside from the enormous marketing spends, that champagne is so expensive). Josh overcomes such obstacles with fierce optimism, and the deranged stamina of a long-haul truck driver. Visit him in winter (when other winemakers are catching up on email and dusting off their Netflix accounts) and you'll find him hand-disgorging bottles by the thousand. Josh moved to Berkeley in 2017, precipitating back-to-back internships at Broc Cellars and Donkey & Goat — a crash course in natural winemaking that would kick-start his career. It also opened his eyes to California sparkling wine's untapped potential. A year later he started Blue Ox (which would later become Hammerling Wines). The winery's Berkeley address not only placed him within a community of like-minded urban wine pioneers, it granted him access to abundant sources of organically farmed, coastal vineyards, from Mendocino to Monterey Bay.