A new sparkling wine captures the California coast
When Courtney Humiston set out to create a sparkling wine label, she didn't quite know how to describe her vision. Unlike many California wine producers, she was not trying to emulate the rich, long-aged style of Champagne. But she was certainly not making a fizzy, lighthearted pet-nat either.
What Humiston had in mind was a wine that was bright and fruity but still had the precise bubbles of the Champagne method. Then she realized that there was a French model for the style she hoped to produce: crémant, French wines that are made in the Champagne method but not in the Champagne region. 'California crémant' is how she now refers to her project, Delphinium Wine Co., named for an endangered species of larkspur flower native to Sonoma and Marin counties.
Crémant wines incorporate the signature grapes of their places of origin: Instead of defaulting to Champagne's typical roster of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, a Crémant de Loire might be made from Loire Valley standbys like Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc.
The category encompasses a range of styles, but broadly speaking, crémant tends to taste less toasty and complex than Champagne, largely due to the fact that it spends less time aging on its lees — the dead yeast cells that, over time, impart those nutty, brioche-like notes that Champagne has become known for. Whereas Champagne must by law age on its lees for at least a year — and vintage Champagnes for at least three years — the minimum aging time for crémant is nine months.
'I wanted methode Champenoise, disgorged, but more following the laws of Crémant de Loire,' Humiston said. 'Shorter time on lees, more freshness.'
Humiston has a long career in Bay Area wine. She's the former wine director at Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg and Petit Crenn and Maybeck's in San Francisco; until last year, she was the director of hospitality for Healdsburg's Idlewild Wines. She is also a writer, a onetime wine columnist for 7x7, and as of this month a critic for JamesSuckling.com, where she will review wines from Sonoma County, Mendocino County, Oregon and Washington.
The drive to start Delphinium came during the pandemic, when she was living in the coastal Sonoma County town of Jenner and had a moment to take a break from 'the constant grind of restaurants,' she said. 'It was pretty draining, and I felt like I kind of lost myself after years of running other people's projects.'
She could already taste the wine she wanted to make. She wanted to capture the flavors and aromas that she experienced while sitting on her porch in Jenner: salty sea air, tiny spring wildflowers, heady lupine.
Now she just needed to find grapes that could do that. 'I was almost manifesting terroir,' Humiston said. Starting with the 2021 vintage, she experimented with a range of different grape varieties and vineyards, everything from Riesling to Tocai Friulano. It wasn't until last year that she felt like she actually got it right.
The current Delphinium blend, which Humiston produces at Brick & Mortar Wines in Healdsburg, is 60% Sauvignon Blanc and 40% Chardonnay, both from Mendocino County vineyards. The Sauvignon Blanc is the musque clone, an increasingly rare planting in California that is extra-aromatic. It tends to smell more tropical, and less grassy and citrusy, than the prototypical Sauvignon Blanc. The wine spent 10 months on the lees.
Despite the fact that it is bone-dry — there's no dosage, a sugary solution added to most Champagne-method wines — the 2023 Delphinium ($45, 12.8%) has a sweetly fruity side to it, reminiscent of candied grapefruit. It's crisp, with bubbles that taste creamier and softer than what you'd expect from Champagne. I can't say I've ever had the pleasure of inhaling a delphinium flower, but the wine does smell resoundingly floral.
Humiston is ramping up. She made 1,500 cases of Delphinium in 2024, a big hike from the 500 cases she'd made the year before. She's trying to grow her presence by hosting special, intensive events, like an early-morning seaweed foraging lesson at the Sea Ranch Lodge and an excursion to the Rancho Meladuco date farm in the Coachella Valley.
'Something that I learned during COVID living in Jenner was just how to live with all your senses engaged,' said Humiston. 'That's why Delphinium exists.'
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The frequent Trump epithet losers would be a suitably pejorative modern equivalent. This despised underclass is pitted against a punitive regime that honors bullies, sycophants, and plutocrats. They are not the sort of people who might expect compassion and understanding from the current administration. I find the gaudy, mass-market musical's appeal to Trump ironic but not surprising. Since it premiered on London's West End in 1985, the show, with its rousing anthems and its tear-jerking tale of victory over oppression, has thrilled more than 100 million people. We know that Trump has a weakness for bombastic 1980s musicals, and Les Mis is certainly that. Having spent four years writing a biography of Hugo, I can't help but find it a sweetened, antiseptic version of his weird, digressive underworld of moral and literal sewers. The original book would surely bamboozle and exasperate Trump if he ever undertook the journey through its 1,500 pages. The author himself wouldn't seem to hold much appeal for the leader of the MAGA movement. The president mentioned Hugo in 2018 at a White House dinner for Emmanuel Macron and the French delegation: 'This is the divine flame, which Victor Hugo wrote that 'evil can never wholly extinguish,' and which 'good can make to glow with splendor.'' Trump was referring to the shared military glories of France and the United States from the American Revolution through the Second World War. In fact, the words were taken from a description of the central character of Les Misérables, destitute following his conviction for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children. The narrator wonders whether Jean Valjean's soul has been destroyed, or whether an immortal 'spark' (not 'flame') has survived his dehumanization by a vindictive justice system. When Les Misérables was published in 1862, Hugo was an outcast. The founder of two distinct periods of Romanticism, he was the world's most famous living writer and an international symbol of freedom and democracy. By then, at the age of 60, he had spent 10 years in exile after opposing the coup d'état led by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-crowned emperor of France who reigned as Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870. Hugo, as a refugee in the Channel Islands, was an embarrassment to the British government. The intelligence services of France and the United Kingdom considered him a socialist menace. Spies reported his dealings with suspected immigrant terrorists. His diatribe against ' Napoléon le Petit ' was smuggled across the English Channel in walking sticks, sardine tins, and women's underwear. Miniature copies were concealed in souvenir plaster busts of Napoleon III. The exiled poet was criticized for his arrogant attempts to influence British and American foreign policy. He was mocked for his poor English and his wild appearance, as he recalled in his notebooks: 'To the English, I am shoking, excentric and improper '; 'I oppose the death penalty, which is not respectable'; 'I am an exile, which is repellent, and on the losing side, which is infamous.' I would venture to say that Hugo would not be made welcome in the Oval Office today: 'I look like a workman,' he wrote, and 'I fail to wear my tie in the correct fashion.' Les Misérables is one of the last universally read masterpieces in Western literature. In its own day, it was as popular as its musical adaptation would be in the next century. In France, it was bought even by people who had never learned to read. It was devoured by soldiers in the trenches of the American Civil War. Like all great works of art, it has a mind and momentum of its own. This ostensibly simple tale contains labyrinthine complexities and contradictions. Hugo had been a monarchist in his youth and then became a moderate liberal. At the time of the 1832 revolt, which takes up almost one-fifth of Les Misérables, he was a property-owning family man firmly opposed to violent protest. 'We should not allow barbarians to bespatter our flag with red,' he wrote in his diary. The barricade at the heart of the novel and the musical is actually a scene from the savagely repressed uprising of June 1848. Hugo had just been elected to the National Assembly as a right-wing moderate. When the rioting broke out, he fought with the forces of law and order against the insurgents, whom he considered innocent but misguided. These were the starving unemployed of the Paris slums, the malodorous and degraded masses that polite society called ' les misérables.' He took prisoners and was directly responsible for deaths and deportations. Tormented over his culpability, he had a crise de conscience and joined the socialist opposition to the dictatorship of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Hugo became the mascot and inspiration of liberation movements in Greece and Italy and throughout Central and South America, so it is fitting that the musical's opening and concluding song, 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' has been chanted in this century by antigovernment protesters in China, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Belarus. Less obviously appropriate is the adoption of Les Mis by Trump and the MAGA movement. No artistic genre is the exclusive property of one faction. As the Trump administration demonstrates, forms of moral discourse evolved by left-wing thinkers can serve the purposes of right-wing ideologues. The novel and the musical both have roots in popular 19th-century entertainment—vaudevilles, comic operas, and newspaper serials. Both were sneered at by middle-class reviewers and adored by the public. The MAGA reading of Les Misérables is just the latest example of its populist appeal. It also typifies the volatile nature of political buzzwords. Misérables was an insult that French insurgents picked up and brandished as a banner. By the same process, after Hillary Clinton called Trump's supporters 'deplorables' during the 2016 election campaign, her dismissive term inspired the digital backdrop of a Trump rally in Miami: Under the words les deplorables, a doctored image from the musical showed a crowd storming a barricade, waving the French Tricolor and the Stars and Stripes. That evening, the crowd sang a MAGA version of 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' In 2025, the U.S. Army Chorus sang this appropriated anthem of popular revolt at the White House Governors Ball. Hugo would likely have been repelled and fascinated by Trump's demagoguery, his rambling mendacity, his grammatically illogical but easy-to-follow oratory. The writer might have been reminded of Napoleon III, who hovers in the background of the novel as a sinister, clownish figure. Two significant differences are that Napoleon III had a long-standing interest in justice, and that he was never envious of Hugo's fame. After granting him and his fellow outcasts amnesty in 1859, Napoleon III lamented the great man's decision to remain in exile. In 1862, he allowed Les Misérables to be advertised and sold in France, leading his government to review its penal and industrial legislation and to concern itself with the exploitation of women and orphans, as well as the education of the poor. Trump's attacks on universities, the arts, and free expression increase the likelihood that any future American equivalent of Les Misérables will also have to be written in exile. But none of this knotty history need spoil Chairman Trump's triumph when he sits in the royal box at the Kennedy Center and hears the people sing for his pleasure.
