Schramsberg

Jacob Schram was born in 1826 in Rheinhessen, reached the United States in 1852, and worked as a barber in Napa and at White Sulphur Springs before buying his hillside property in 1862. When most Napa planting followed the easier ground along the river, he took to the rough foothills. By 1870 he had thirty thousand vines and had hired Chinese laborers to excavate the valley’s first hillside wine caves. Their pick marks remain visible on the walls, a tangible connection between the work of that first generation and the bottles aging there today.

In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson, honeymooning above Calistoga, visited the estate and left a vivid portrait of Schram at work. The “penniless barber,” as Stevenson described him, poured sample after sample with anxious pride. Stevenson tasted eighteen wines. None had bubbles: Schram made still wines, and Schramsberg’s sparkling identity would come with the Davies family.

The estate’s presidential connections, however, began with Schram. A Schramsberg Riesling was served to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891, decades before the dinner that would make the Davies name internationally known. Schram died in 1905, and the winery ceased operating in 1912. The property declined, and the vines disappeared, but the tunnels survived, awaiting another purpose.

The Second Founding

Jack Davies was not a wine man by training. His interest developed well before he and Jamie considered buying a winery. “As my parents would tell the story, they developed an interest in wine and food during their single years living in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” Hugh Davies told me. “Dad went to Stanford. Mom went to UC Berkeley. They had both moved north from Southern California to attend college.”

Their first investment gave that interest a practical direction. “Shortly after marrying, they did make a small investment in the Martin Ray Winery, then based in Saratoga,” Hugh said. “That initial attachment to the industry inspired them to go further. They loved the fact that no one else in California had really made a go of making sparkling wine in the traditional method with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. There was an unfilled niche in the market.”

The opportunity came with the uncertainties of a fledgling industry. “Mind you, there were several unfilled niches in 1965, when only 20 wineries were up and running in Napa Valley, and only 200 acres of Chardonnay were planted in the whole state. With an idea that the industry would expand, they felt that if they went first, they would at least have that advantage.”

At Schramsberg, the cellars provided a foundation for the idea. “A realtor, Ned Smith, led them to the Schramsberg property, noted for its extensive, historic caves,” Hugh said. “Some 12,000 square feet of caves were dug into these hills with picks and shovels by the Jacob and Anna Schram family and their team. There was nothing else quite like Schramsberg, and it seemed the perfect fit for their concept, a century-old winery property where bottles could rest en tirage in cool underground cellars.”

They bought the property in 1965, moved from Los Angeles with their young sons Bill and John, and welcomed Hugh a month later. Securing Chardonnay for the first vintage required some ingenuity. With none available to buy, they purchased White Riesling and traded it to the Mondavi family for five tons of Chardonnay, which they fermented at Charles Krug before hauling the wine back up the mountain. That became the first Blanc de Blancs. A vintage-dated Blanc de Noirs followed in 1967, pioneering the commercial use of Pinot Noir for this style in the United States.

The breakthrough beyond the wine world came in February 1972, when the White House selected the 1969 Blanc de Blancs for Nixon’s state dinner with Zhou Enlai in Beijing. Jack drove the cases to Travis Air Force Base himself and forgot to collect payment. Every presidential administration since has served Schramsberg. His contribution closer to home was equally enduring: he helped spearhead the creation of the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve in 1968, protecting the farmland on which the region’s future depended.

The Coast and the Mountain

As the wines gained recognition, the family had to reconsider the role of its own vineyards. Diamond Mountain offered excellent conditions for Cabernet Sauvignon, but growing the fruit they wanted for sparkling base wines proved more difficult.

Jack and Jamie had planted their home slopes to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Yet the upper valley around Calistoga is among Napa’s warmest sectors, and the mountain fruit ripened with more weight than they wanted for a taut base wine. In 1987, the first vintage of the J. Schram tête de cuvée, they began using fruit from outside Napa and pursuing cooler coastal sites in earnest. In 1994, they began replacing the estate’s Chardonnay and Pinot Noir with Bordeaux varieties. The mountain could remain the home of Schramsberg without supplying the grapes for its sparkling wines.

That decision shaped the house’s approach to blending. Schramsberg’s sparkling vineyards now form an archipelago of more than seventy-eight sites across four coastal counties. They yield over 250 base wines each year, assembled into twelve to fourteen cuvées. The model has much in common with a Champagne house, drawing on the differences among vineyards to build a consistent range of wines.

 

As the sources expanded, so did the range. “Going back to the sixties, our wines have always been vintage-dated,” Hugh said. “As we entered the 1980s, we considered creating a tête de cuvée — the J. Schram. At the same time, we thought about creating an NV — Mirabelle. This is more modest in price, younger wines, and involves a lot more blending.”

The original wine remains the mainstay. “Our most popular wine, and the one we make the most of, is the vintage Blanc de Blancs.” Alongside it, changing tastes have reshaped production. “Now about 30% of our sparkling wine production is rosé,” he told me. “It used to be about 5%, but that’s where the market has gone.”

Time in the Caves

The work of bringing those vineyards together leads back to the caves. Expanded over the years from twelve thousand to some thirty-four thousand square feet, they provide the cool, stable conditions needed for extended bottle aging. About a quarter of the juice is fermented in oak, rising to forty percent in the J. Schram and Reserve wines, contributing breadth to the blends. A library of reserve base wines, held in barrel for as long as a decade, adds another dimension of age and complexity.

Hugh also allows some malolactic fermentation, describing it as “a little bit of MLF on the Chards and Pinots.” The tête de cuvée wines spend seven to eight years aging in bottle before release; the rest receive two or more. Many bottles are still riddled by hand. The caves give these laborious processes a permanent home, linking Schram’s practical solution for storing wine to the Davies family’s ambitions for sparkling wine.

The security of that underground world was thrown into relief in September 2020. The estate encompasses some 218 acres, with about 41 planted to vines and much of the surrounding woodland retained by the family. When the Glass Fire swept through the property and threatened its central buildings, earlier brush clearing helped firefighters defend them. The sparkling grapes had already been harvested, with the resulting wines safely in tank and barrel; much of the Cabernet crop was lost. The caves and the wines aging inside survived.

The Family on the Hillside

For Hugh, the connection to this mountain is personal, although joining the family business was far from inevitable. “While I never rejected the idea, I didn’t develop a committed interest in joining the family business until I reached the age of 24 or 25,” he said. He studied US history at Bowdoin and spent semesters in Madrid and Lima (“learning Spanish turned out to be a good idea”), then worked for a congressman in Washington and a land trust in San Francisco. “Towards the end of a few years living in an urban environment, I started to consider seriously career paths in a rural environment.”

Chemistry classes at Santa Rosa Junior College led to a master’s in food science and enology at UC Davis. “That turned out to be a great idea, and I haven’t looked back since.” He became head winemaker in 2000 and president in 2005, taking on the business as the second generation of the Davies family.

Returning also meant raising his own family where he had grown up. “I have been quite fortunate not only to have grown up as one of three brothers on the Schramsberg property, but to have also raised, with my wife Monique, our three sons here,” he told me. “As much as the world has changed over the past 61 years, life among the vines, bottles and trees on Diamond Mountain is in many ways much like it was six decades ago. Our life on the wooded hillside is uniquely attached to nature’s pace and seasonality. There is a certain quiet and calm that I have always found nourishing.”

He describes the year through the changes in the surrounding forest and vineyard: budbreak in the trees and then the vines, the ripening of grapes, harvest in late summer, and the return of rain around the holidays. “That’s always been a special time of year.”

Making wines that may spend much of a decade in the cellar requires planning well beyond the next harvest. Hugh takes a similarly long view of the family business. “We are excited to carry on with our family’s wine business and to contribute to a healthy, positive industry for future generations to run with.”

The vineyards above the caves have been replanted, and the fruit for the sparkling wines now comes from far beyond this hillside. Below ground, the promise Jack and Jamie recognized in 1965 still holds. The mountain gives each vintage a place to take its time.