Schramsberg Vineyards

Schramsberg is the best cave tour in Napa Valley and the most atmospheric way to learn how sparkling wine is made. The estate sits up a wooded lane on Diamond Mountain, just south of Calistoga, where German immigrant Jacob Schram founded a winery in 1862. Chinese laborers dug tunnels into the volcanic hillside for him in the decades that followed, and Robert Louis Stevenson visited during his Napa honeymoon in 1880 and wrote about Schram's wines in The Silverado Squatters. After Prohibition the property drifted until Jack and Jamie Davies bought it in 1965 and turned it into a pioneer of American traditional-method sparkling wine, beginning with a Blanc de Blancs. That wine went to Beijing in 1972, when President Nixon raised a glass of Schramsberg in the famous Toast to Peace, and the house has been poured at the White House many times since. The public tour is the thing to book. A guide walks you through the gardens and the old winery and then into the caves, cool all year and lined with tens of thousands of bottles resting on their lees or tilted in riddling racks, explaining second fermentation, aging and disgorging as you go. The tour ends with a seated tasting of several sparkling wines, sometimes in the caves themselves. Tours are by appointment only, all guests must be 21, and the fee applies whether or not you drink. It books out well ahead, but it is the visit people remember from a Napa trip.

Why it is different. Most Napa tastings are about Cabernet and views; Schramsberg is about craft you can see. The caves, extended over more than a century, are a working cellar rather than a museum, so you walk past pallets of bottles at different stages, hand-riddling racks and the quiet machinery of a traditional-method house. Guides are excellent at explaining why bubbles take years, how the lees add texture and why the same grapes taste so different as Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs or rosé. The estate also makes J. Davies Cabernet from Diamond Mountain, which sometimes appears in reserve pairings.

Booking well. Public tours run every day from mid-morning to mid-afternoon and last about an hour and a quarter, with the last tour in mid-afternoon; they fill fastest on summer and harvest weekends, so book as soon as your dates are fixed. A reserve pairing with cheese and private tours for small groups are offered on a limited basis. Children and babies cannot be accommodated, and only service animals are allowed. The whole tour and tasting is wheelchair accessible. Bring a light jacket: the caves stay cool even in a heat wave.

Fitting it in. Schramsberg is a few minutes from Calistoga and close to Sterling Vineyards and Castello di Amorosa, which makes a natural north-valley day: caves in the morning, lunch in Calistoga, then a soak or mud bath. If you also want still wine, book a Cabernet house in the afternoon rather than the morning, so the sparkling comes first. Plan a driver; the lane up Diamond Mountain is narrow and winding.