Boutique California Sparkling Wines from BXT
If you’re seeking the best of grower Champagne–inspired bubbles, look no further than the fascinating and truly excellent wines of BXT. I’ve written about these brilliant wines at length before, but here’s a quick recap. BXT (that stands for Bubbles by Tom) is a tiny project that comes to you from the aptly named “Crusher District” in the industrial part of south Napa. Proprietor Tom Sherwood has a day job in Napa making mostly big, powerful Napa Cabs. His wife Brittany is the longtime winemaker at Napa icon Heitz Cellars. So, in his spare time (ha ha), Tom decided to start a very small brand focused on extremely limited-production, entirely hand-made, traditional-method sparkling wines.
He sources fruit from several really interesting vineyards as far afield as McCormack Ranch out in the Sacramento Delta and Wheeler Vineyard down in San Benito County, but also personally farms a small “backyard” vineyard in Sonoma. The wines really draw inspiration from the grower-Champagne movement, where individual character of unique vineyard sites is more important than any specific house style. The wines are made in a meticulously hands-off method. I know that reads as an oxymoron, but very often to make high-quality wines in a non-interventionist method, the greatest level of attention to detail and precision is needed. The base wines are spontaneously fermented mostly in French and Austrian oak cooperage, with many large-format casks. After a long spell on the lees in cask, the wines then get 12-36 months resting on tirage before being riddled and disgorged entirely by hand! Each bottling run is truly a labor of love with Tom doing everything personally. Production of each wine is rarely more than 50 cases and we are one of the few retail stores anywhere that get a few cases of each release. So, if you want to taste what I consider to be the finest and most transparent sparkling wines made in California right now, I urge you to check out these wines before they become any more famous and are even harder to get your hands on!
2022 BXT "McCormack Ranch" Solano County Brut Blanc De Noirs $49.95 From a unique vineyard site right on the banks of the Sacramento River in Solano County. Perhaps not the most likely place for sparkling wine grapes to be found, but, to even his own surprise, Tom keeps being super impressed with the quality of fruit he gets from this site. The vines are planted to a sparkling clone of Pinot Noir that seems to thrive in the sandy soils and produces balanced fruit cooled by the daily breezes that funnel in from the San Francisco Bay. When I taste the wine I can almost taste the sunlight shimming off the river, golden raspberry, hints of pink grapefruit, Marcona almond, citrus blossom. Pure, bright, crystalline.
2022 BXT "Wheeler Vineyard" San Benito County Zero Dosage Blanc de Blanc Sparkling Wine $59.95 Probably my favorite wine yet from BXT, the Wheeler Vineyard Blanc de Blanc is just phenomenal. Sourced from 50-year-old Chardonnay vines down in San Benito County. Growing on AXR-1 rootstock, but still soldiering on in the granite and limestone soils that make this area so special. This wine could easily have made a super intriguing and powerful non-sparkling Chardonnay, that’s how much character and texture is in the fruit, even when harvested at the very low brix levels typical for producing sparkling wine. But therein lies the very essence of these wines: here in California we can get ripeness much more consistently than in Champagne. The fruit often has more density, concentration, and, to be quite frank, flavor than is typical for most sparkling wines. Wines with very lean, abrasive vin clair (the wine before secondary fermentation to give the bubbles) often must rely heavily on extended lees aging and dosage to build depth, complexity, and texture. The idea with BXT is to find the most interesting fruit possible, that achieves a compelling depth of flavor when the sugar and acid levels are appropriate for making sparkling wine, and then essentially allow the wines to make themselves (with careful guidance of course). Many of the BXT wines never see any sulfur in their lifetime and most are zero dosage.