Korbel and the Russian River Sparkling Wine Tradition

The Korbel brothers arrived in the Russian River valley in eighteen seventy-six the same way a lot of immigrants arrived in Northern California in that period: following lumber rather than gold.

Francis, Anton, and Joseph Korbel were Czech, and they came to the Russian River canyon because the redwood timber was valuable and they had the capital to set up logging operations. They cleared the canyon, sold the timber, and then found themselves sitting on land that, stripped of its trees, had exceptional sun exposure and moderate temperatures. In eighteen eighty-two, they founded their champagne cellars in the same canyon they had just logged, building wine caves into the hillside in the spaces the felled timber had left.

What made Korbel notable technically was their commitment to the traditional method of sparkling wine production, the French technique in which a second fermentation occurs in the bottle, creating the bubbles, rather than in a pressurized tank. This method is labor-intensive, requires skilled cellar work, and produces wines with a complexity that the shortcut tank-fermentation method cannot replicate. Korbel was among the first California producers to commit to it at commercial scale.

Prohibition forced them to pivot to fruit brandies, which were legal. The twentieth century was spent building a market for sparkling wine among Americans who had not grown up with a sparkling wine culture. The strategy that worked was democratic: not a luxury product, but the bottle you open for birthdays and graduations. That positioning, affordable enough for a Tuesday, special enough for a celebration, turned out to be a durable idea.

The cellars and the surrounding redwoods are a California Historical Landmark. The trees Korbel logged are almost all gone. What replaced them outlasted the logging by a century and a half.