Korbel and the Sparkling Wine of the Russian River
Near Healdsburg, California
Deep in the redwoods along the Russian River near Guerneville, three brothers turned a logged over hillside into one of the oldest sparkling wine houses in America. Francis, Anton, and Joseph Korbel were immigrant brothers from Bohemia, part of what is now the Czech Republic, who came to California in the middle of the nineteenth century. Redwood lumber was part of their early business in this valley.
When the great trees were mostly gone, they planted grapes on the cleared land instead, and in eighteen eighty two they founded their winery. Korbel produces its bubbles by the traditional method known as methode champenoise, in which the second fermentation that creates the bubbles happens slowly inside each individual bottle. That painstaking bottle by bottle approach differs from the faster Charmat or tank method, invented later, where the second fermentation takes place in large pressurized steel tanks before bottling.
During Prohibition, when most wineries died, Korbel endured. Still family associated for much of its history and later expanded to well over a million cases a year, Korbel helped make the Russian River Valley one of California's premier regions for cool climate sparkling wine, prized because the fog and the river keep the grapes crisp and bright.
