In my search for another believer in the Champagne Life, I was led down the Napa Valley to the quaint environs of Yountville to Domaine Chandon. Here I was to meet with Wayne Donaldson, VP of Winemaking and Vineyards.

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Interview by Paul Donaldson

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The weather was dreary, rainy and cold. I arrived in the late afternoon to the main offices, a short walk from the restaurant and tasting room.

Waiting in the lobby I was impressed by the European country feel of the décor and the presentation of the grounds from the glass wall view. After a short wait Wayne entered the lobby, (a tall and fit fellow, well quaffed and all in black) and with a warmly accented greeting we were off through a courtyard to the restaurant. There we were greeted by (the most pleasant and congenial) Public Relations Manager Margie Goolan. She escorted us into the very warm and intimate restaurant half filled with early evening diners and through sliding doors into another vacant dining room. There in a wonderful presentation was a stand of champagne flutes and a separate table with bottles of champagne and still wines. Alongside it was a small plate of smoked salmon and bread.

I am thinking to myself, this is a great job. A classy presentation in a warm setting - this was going to be most enjoyable.

Quite obviously, almost the first question to me from Wayne was where in Scotland my family was from. He knew to a detail that his family came from the Orkney Islands at the North of Scotland and that some of his family ended up in Canada during the fur trading years.

We then went to his beginnings and what brought him to winemaking. We start in Australia. “When I was young I would travel with my father”, a contractor working on wineries outside of Melbourne, and see how wineries were put together as well as see how they were run. As early as high school he surprised his school councilor when he stated “I want to be a winemaker.” This desire may also have been accentuated by the reality that his mother was a painter, bringing the artistic influence to his upbringing.

1 st tasting – Classic tier - Brut Classic – California Appellation. Minimum 12 months on the yeast. Tastes of Apple and Pear.

A graduate of Roseworthy Agricultural College (the U.C. Davis of Australia), he honed his technical understanding of wines and vineyards. He worked at Brokenwood Winery for a few years in the late 1980’s before joining the winemaking team at Domaine Chandon Australia in 1988.  After achieving successes and experience, he was offered the opportunity to come to Napa. Being ambitious “I didn’t want to turn my back on an offer like this” and so in 2000 he made the move. A casualty of the move was his marriage, yet he does enjoy the pleasure of having his two daughters, 8 and 10 years old, living with him in nearby St. Helena.  He did somewhat wish that his kids could get some more real life experience, intonating that St. Helena was a place that does not nearly represent a cross section of the real world.

2 nd tasting – Classic Tier – Riche – California Appellation. Minimum 12 months on the yeast. Fruity and soft, extra dry.

With creative license given to him from the parent company, “LVMH is about creativity and luxury”, there are many avenues of creative exploration that he continues to travel. He described that within Chandon there is a large reservoir of talent available to lend advice and ideas from as far as Australia, Brazil and Argentina. This is a deep resource that he has used over the years to keep the creative juices flowing.

Another subtlety we discussed was many winemakers focusing on the high acid low sugars in the fruit. His approach is to allow the Brix to come up a few more percentage points before picking. This in turn allows for the creation of “a more expressive wine”.

Consistently in our conversation, conveyed was a strong and certain sense of his freedom to also innovate and design. One such new design, a creative small production, Sparkling Red, (a couple hundred cases a year) comes out once a year around the holidays and is a Pinot/Zin experiment. This endeavor was a spin off of his past experiences in Australia where the second varietal was Syrah instead of Zin.

Fantasizing about what he would do if he could, “I would travel throughout the country, (a U.S. appellation), and select the best fruit from multiple regions, California, Oregon, wherever … and create a vintage sparkling wine every year.” We discussed the non-vintage benefits, “Non vintage winemaking for sparkling wine allows freedom to blend for the best results” he stated.

He commented on the challenges of a vintage sparkling wine, that the different years characteristics would come more in to play, creating something unique each year and maybe so less consistent from year to year. The first vintage California Sparkling wine with Wayne’s winemaking hand lent to it will come out in 2007.

3 rd tasting – Reserve Tier – Blanc de Noirs – Sonoma and Napa County Appellations. Minimum 3 years on the yeast. Masculine. Beautiful color,  a delicious nose and full finish.

As we tasted, Wayne described the challenges he found with the region here as opposed to Australia.” When I first got here and it rained in the late summer, everyone was worried about a little rain and the potential for mold.” Having come from Australia and the climactic challenges, he wasn’t nearly as worried about the effects of rain. “We were very used to spraying for mold protection”, at least twice as much as done here in a normal season. “In Australia we were more trained for problem solving due to the many challenges we faced with the climate”. Here the challenges are different,  “Here, the bar for quality is set so high that we are all operating with some of the highest quality fruit and so the challenge is to raise the bar”

4 th tasting – Etoile – Brut – Aged sur lees since 1999, for a minimum of 5 years. Napa and Sonoma County Appellations. Deserving of the ‘star’ designation. Elegant.

Coming in new to the operation in 2000 and following a winemaker who had been at the helm for 25 years, he is taking his time in changing any of the programs, slowly over the years shifting some practices, keeping some the same and introducing new ones as well.

This is an approach that can be taken by someone with confidence in their abilities (in his 18 th year of making sparkling wines) and by someone who is also respectful of what has already been created by others before and thoughtful about what direction to build on. Only now this year, 4 years since his arrival, he is seeing some of his first creations come out on the market.

We concluded with still wine tasting of Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. These being the basic elements of the majority of the sparkling wines produced at Chandon, featured in their still form, providing an alternate expression. The still wine fruits are all of the Carneros Appellation.

The topic shifted to achievements and recognition from the industry and the reviewers. “Reviewers of wines in Australia are primarily panels, so the resulting ratings are of a broader representation of tastes, even in wine magazines.” Here it is different, where reviews are more done by individuals and therefore they have potentially more narrow opinions and palates. Nonetheless his team will be focusing on those palates in their winemaking to bring up the ratings of their California wines over the next years.  

Our time was up and begrudgingly, I did not want to get up and go. Still with some half full flutes left on the table of these delicious wines, I was tempted to ask if I could stay and revel a bit longer. Lest I should overcome my welcome, no sooner did we conclude that we had concluded, when Margie re-appeared with a parting gift, a bottle of the Etoile with a Domaine Chandon stopper. A classy touch from a classy producer of California sparkling wines.

For our readers delight, the website www.chandon.com is well done, informative and provides much more detail about Wayne and the winery.

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Paul lives in Northern California with his wife and three children. He was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. Early in his career he lived and worked in Paris, France before moving back to California, where he now is an executive for a homebuilder. His interests include being a Pinot Noir winegrower in the Russian River Appellation, learning to play the piano and (most importantly) loving his family and appreciating life every day.