Chandon

In 1973, Moët et Chandon — the French champagne house whose name has been on bottles since 1743 — sent a market-development specialist named John Wright across the Atlantic to test a question its founders had never had to ask in Champagne: could the méthode champenoise be made to work, with the same exactitude, on Californian fruit? The answer, six harvests later, was the first sparkling wine ever produced by a Champagne house outside France. The winery in Yountville, Napa Valley, has been operating continuously since, and is now part of LVMH Moët Hennessy’s wines and spirits portfolio.

Chandon makes sparkling wine in the méthode traditionnelle from chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier grown across three estate vineyards in the Napa Valley — a 130-acre site at the Yountville winery itself, an 850-acre estate in Carneros (the largest in the firm’s portfolio), and a steep, high-elevation vineyard on Mount Veeder at around 1,600 feet. Production, blending, riddling, disgorgement, and bottling all take place at the Yountville winery; the firm’s reach is California-wide and its market is national.

Among Napa Valley wineries, Chandon’s distinguishing fact is that it remains the operating answer to the question its founders posed in 1973: a French Champagne house’s serious, sustained attempt to make traditional-method sparkling wine in California, in the way that house had been doing it for two and a quarter centuries in Reims and Épernay. As an LVMH Moët Hennessy property, Chandon also operates inside the production discipline of the largest luxury-goods conglomerate in the world — an unusual context for a Napa winery, and one that carries through into how the operation is run.

The practice has worked with Chandon at the Yountville winery on Lean process implementation across production and cellar operations.