Two Hot (and Brave) New Wineries

New winery openings these days amuse (and amaze) me.

Wine sales are down, nationally and internationally; huge surpluses are building up in both domestic and imported wines. So who needs another winery? With even established brands facing a tough market, is there any shelf space for new lines--even very good ones?

Still, new wineries continue to appear. In Northern California, two are about to open--one in Napa and one in Sonoma. Both are partially visible from the tourist track in the wine country and are still hustling to get roads and buildings completed in time to crush this year’s crop. Each nevertheless has a high-quality wine in the super-premium category already on store shelves, and neither wine is particularly expensive for what it is.

The larger and more extravagant of the new projects is Codorniu Napa’s massive 120,000-square-foot facility. It is set partially underground atop Milliken Peak, 750 feet above the valley floor in the Carneros District.

Codorniu Napa is the eighth California winery established by European money for making sparkling wine, and the second to be opened by a Spanish wine firm (Gloria Ferrer, a few miles west in Sonoma, opened its doors in 1986). The Codorniu project is one of the most energetic of all the foreign-owned California wineries. Some $23 million have already been spent here on an operation that will make sparkling wine exclusively.

This comes at a time when sparkling wine sales are horrendous--and analysts see no end to the slump. Barcelona-based Codorniu, well known for the sparkling wines it makes in Spain, is pushing ahead anyway.

The winery building can hardly be seen from the road because architect Domingo Triay designed a bermed building covered with sod. The canted sides and roof are just beginning to sprout a special grass planted there to make the building blend into the rolling countryside. It’s quite a contrast to the brassy Louis XIV style of Domaine Carneros, Taittinger’s easy-to-see sparkling wine palace, which sits on a hillock just below Codorniu Napa.

Up close, the Spanish project is breathtaking. At one entrance, channels of flowing water grace both sides of a staircase. When visitors finally reach an upper terrace, they see that the water flows from a reflecting pool. The equipment is state of the art.

Winemaker Janet Pagano, formerly assistant to Greg Fowler at Mumm Napa Valley, is fashioning a non-vintage cuvee just a tad richer and softer than some other wineries’ first efforts. The wine will retail for $15 a bottle, more than any of Codorniu’s Spanish-made sparklers but about what the other California sparkling wines fetch.

The second new winery is called Kunde Estate. Neither the name nor the name of the vineyard’s former owner, James Drummond, will mean much to anyone outside the Valley of the Moon, but there is a lot of history here.

The Kunde winery lies at the outskirts of Kenwood in the Sonoma Valley, on the property where more than 100 years ago the state’s first great Cabernet Sauvignon was made. The wine of Drummond ranch, called Dunfillan, was nationally acclaimed when it was first released back in 1884.

Drummond’s ranch was acquired by the Kunde family just after the turn of the century. The remains of Drummond’s house still lie on the ranch, near the Kunde family’s Wildwood Vineyard, which was made famous a decade ago when Chateau St. Jean produced a string of top Chardonnays and Cabernet Sauvignons from its grapes. The Kundes were just growers until 1989, when brothers Fred and Bob Kunde and their families decided to make their own wine off the 650 acres of vines that wind up and down the reddish hills of the 2,000-acre ranch.

As winemaker, the Kundes hired David Noyes, formerly assistant to Paul Draper at Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino. Noyes’ first wine, a 1990 Sauvignon Blanc ($7.50), is a gorgeous example of Sonoma Valley fruit. With melon, lime and a minty sort of spice, the wine is fine to sip, but better to match with food.

The Kunde winery is designed to look like an old white Sonoma barn, but it’s about twice as large as the actual old barn that existed here before the county declared it could not be made structurally sound for use as a winery.

There are only 12,000 square feet of space in the winery, but Noyes also has 32,000 square feet in an elaborate network of newly dug caves that already are partially loaded with new French oak barrels, where Zinfandel, two Chardonnays (including a Reserve) and two Cabernets (including a Reserve) are aging.

Both Codorniu Napa and Kunde make good wine. But both also admit that this may be the worst time since Prohibition to be putting a new label on already jammed shelves.