Limited-Production Sonoma Coast Sparkling Wines from Anonymous Wine Collective
Celebrating One Year of the Anonymous Wine Collective with Two Remarkable Sparkling Wines
This month marks the first anniversary of the Anonymous Wine Collective, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with how far we’ve come in just one year. We’ve partnered with legendary producers, sourced fruit from world-renowned vineyards, and, most importantly, delivered incredible quality and value to our customers. That’s what Anonymous is all about: leveraging our long-established relationships with some of the best winemakers and estates in the country to bring you exclusive wines at a fraction of what they would normally cost, all without cutting a single corner on quality.
The savings come from eliminating distribution tiers, not from compromising what’s in the bottle. We don’t have a luxurious tasting lounge or a multimillion-dollar tasting room. We’re not taking out full-page ads in magazines or spending a fortune on marketing. Everything you’re paying for is in the bottle. No fluff. So, to celebrate our first anniversary, what better way to raise a toast than with not one, but two new sparkling wines?
I first tasted these wines six months ago while they were still aging en tirage, non-disgorged and resting in plain, label-less bottles, quietly gaining complexity and depth by the day, week, and year. All that explosive, electric, mineral-filled potential was literally and metaphorically bottled up, just waiting to pop. After a very fun tasting session that involved hand-disgorging bottles à la volée, and somehow managing not to lose all the wine in the process, I narrowed my choices down to two wines that really spoke to me. In the end, I couldn’t choose a winner, so I thought: why not do both?
The producer behind these wines has been making sparkling wine for three decades, sourcing grapes from both their own estate and some of the finest vineyards in California. That long tenure in sparkling wine has also given them access to deep reserves of older base wines and bottles with extended tirage aging. The 2018 Anonymous Wine Collective "Extended Tirage" Sonoma Coast Brut Sparkling Wine $34.95 (Elsewhere $100) we’re offering today has spent a remarkable seven years on the lees. The crystalline 2021 Anonymous Wine Collective Sonoma Coast Blanc de Blancs Sparkling Wine $34.95 (Elsewhere $90) also saw an extended élevage, with six months in oak cask followed by four years aging sur lies. The quality here is absolutely spectacular and stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the best Champagne has to offer.
I’m so excited to get these wines into people’s glasses, and I really hope you enjoy them. Both are extremely small productions of fewer than 80 cases total, so don’t snooze or they’ll be gone before you know it.