Crown Valley Winery blazes a trail with innovation and showmanship

From the first time I visited Crown Valley Winery’s Ste. Genevieve site, it was obvious that this was not your typical mom-and-pop type of winery. Indeed, for the first few years, there seemed to be more effort spent on making a splash with overall showmanship and stunning facilities rather than on the wines themselves. And when you hit the market with such a massive marketing impact, it might seem difficult to follow your own lead. Not so with Crown Valley, which is now definitely impacting the entire state’s wine industry, thanks to the talent of its new winemaker, Daniel Alcorso, and two new totally focused operations, one for port-style wine and the other for Champagne-style. The Crown Valley Champagne House, located in Farmington, and the Crown Valley Port House, located on CVW owner Joe Scott’s private resort, Tievoli Hills, near northern Missouri’s artist community of Clarksville, are now producing their respective wines and are open to the public. I had the opportunity recently to tour the Port House; to say that I was astonished would not adequately express my reaction when I arrived at Tievoli Hills, the 62-acre resort purchased by Scott in 2005. The Port House’s original basement garage has been converted to tank and barrel storage for several styles of port wines. Port is a fortified dessert wine, meaning that high-proof distilled alcohol (like brandy) is added during its fermentation, which results in a sweet after-dinner-style wine with an alcohol level typically about 18 percent for whites and 20 to 22 percent for reds. We tasted four different styles of port from the barrel: A white port made from Chardonel was very interesting and a bit in the drier style; another white port made from Malvasia grapes grown in California was sweeter and nutty; and two red ports, one made from Frontenac and one from Norton – the latter has about 4 percent sweetness and is very intriguing. We were invited to bottle our own port, which visitors to the Port House can do for the bargain rate of only $20. (Reservations are required, though.) Once we chose the shape of the bottle (many of which are handmade by a glass blower in Clarksville), we chose our port style and filled the bottle. We were then invited to dip the neck in red sealing wax, purportedly to protect the wine from air but actually to make it look really cool, and to customize CVW labels with our own wine name. After the “wow” of the port house, I could not wait to visit the Crown Valley Champagne House. Ever since the CVW 2006 Chardonel Brut was awarded a gold medal at the Missouri Wine Competition, I’ve been eager to taste the rest of the bubblies the winery is producing. Although the term “Champagne” is no longer allowed on American-made sparkling wine labels (only sparkling wines made in the Champagne region of France may be called Champagne), there is no such restriction on the use of the name on a building or business. CVW’s general manager, Bryan Siddle, thought through the naming issue and decided to use the well-known name on the new wine-making facility. Two methods of sparkling wine production will be used in Farmington. Traditional sparkling wines get their bubbles from a secondary fermentation in the bottle, which is called méthode champenoise, or traditional method. This is the process that the French use, as do the top sparkling producers anywhere in the world. CVW has not yet begun to use this process, but it does have reserve wines aging in barrels as a base for bottle-fermented sparklers in the near future. Everything that we tasted on this visit was tank-fermented, or made by the Charmat process. In this method, the secondary fermentation (which is the process that creates the bubbles) is done in large, heavily reinforced stainless steel tanks. These sparkling wines are bottled under heavy pressure and a traditional wood cork is then wired in place. Crown Valley’s new high-speed Italian bottling line can fill about 1,000 bottles per hour of sparkling, depending on style, compared with more than 3,000 per hour of still wine. We began the bubble tour with the Gold Medal-winning 2006 Chardonel Brut, crisp and very dry at about 0.2 percent residual sugar. The 2005 Traminette Sec came next, at 2 percent RS. Normally, under-ripe grapes are harvested for sparkling wine production – the higher acidity seems to work better with the carbonation – but Alcorso told me that CVW’s sparkling wines are made with grapes picked at normal brix (sugar) for each variety and the Chardonel was picked early. A 2006 Merlot Rosé, made from grapes grown in California’s Sonoma County, was just plain fun: At 2.5 percent RS, this is a wine I could drink before, during or after dinner. The other sparkling red was the Sweet Brachetto, at 6 percent RS. This grape is very popular in Italy, and CVW managed to locate a grower in California to supply the grapes. The finale was the Muscato 2006, at 8 percent RS. A mouthful of these bubbles, very sweet but light, will totally please Asti Spumante-lovers. Things should only get more interesting from here: CVW has planted seven acres of Viognier and seven acres of Syrah for potential sparkling red blends; six acres of Muscat Valvin have also been put in the ground for a sweeter, light and fruity-style bubbly. When I asked Siddle why the winery chose to have three different wine-making locations, he said, “We just keep trying new things to see if they work.” The investment and the time commitment for these two new additions to Missouri’s wineries are remarkable. Wine consumers will certainly be the beneficiary of Crown Valley’s continued growth and vision.