A Hollywood insider puts American ‘grower Champagnes’ in the spotlight
“If you want to make sparkling wine good you’ve really got to put your mind to it,” says Rich Frank, owner of Napa Valley’s Frank Family Vineyards and a man who has tackled a few complex productions in his career. His résumé as one of Hollywood’s long-running inside players, still unscrolling at age 70, includes nearly a decade as president of Walt Disney Studios, president of Paramount Television, and leading roles as a mover behind familiar titles, from Cheers, Home Improvement and Entertainment Tonight to Pretty Woman, Good Morning, Vietnam, and The Lion King.
But Frank Family Vineyards, the winery he bought—almost by accident—in 1991, is Frank’s auteur piece, his brainchild from beginning to end.
Though primarily known for its cabernet sauvignon, Frank Family is playing a key part in an under-the-radar development in American wine: The green shoots, here and there, of a movement to make artisan sparkling wines similar to the French farmer-made Champagnes that have become the darlings of international connoisseurs.
Exactly how similar these homegrown sparklers might be is a matter for debate. Frank Family winemaker Todd Graff puts it this way: “The grower-producers have gotten hot in Champagne, but we aren’t trying to copy them. I’d say we are trying to be equal with them.” But the French inspiration, right down to the maverick sense of being a surprising one-off, is evident in the idea.
Until a few years ago, the notion of a small Champagne grower bottling his own wine carried the iconoclastic shock of the runner heaving the sledgehammer at Big Brother in the famous Macintosh ad. In France, nearly all the Champagne is bottled by big houses—the Möet et Chandons, the Veuve Clicquots—that buy their grapes from thousands of independent growers. The Enshrined Idea is that the best Champagne is created by blending, blending, blending all those grapes, to evolve a house style that will be consistent across vintages. This is not a bad idea, as far as it goes: After all, Roederer Cristal tastes pretty darn good, bottle after bottle, with its own identifiable weight and complexity.
“I figured I had kept a friend, and that would be the end of it. But Rombauer called me the next day at noon and said, ‘We own a winery’. And I said ‘That’s great. Now can I see the books?’ It turns out they were selling 100,000 cases a year in supermarkets, and for each bottle they were losing like $3.”
(This story appears in the 25 January, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)