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Sparkling performance

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Modeled on Chateau de la Marquetterie in the champagne region of France, the headquarters of Taittinger, the renowned champagne maker, the chateau is the home of Domaine Carneros, one of the valley’s signature wineries. The Taittinger family, which has mixed Irish and Austrian roots, started Carneros 15 years ago and Crane is its chief winemaker and president, overseeing the production of about 50,000 cases of wine every year from vineyards, which cover 138 acres. She was in New York at the end of October to present her wines at the New York Wine Exhibition.
Crane, who grew up in Bergen County, N.J., is something of a rarity in the winemaking business. She is of Irish American background — her grandparents came from Wexford — and is also one of only a relative handful of women involved in California’s wine industry. In 1890, she says, 10 percent of the state’s winemakers were women. A hundred years later, it was still 10 percent. Now, however, it is about 15 percent, though only 5 percent of those women hold leading positions in California’s 850 wineries. That’s progress, however modest.
A professor at University of California in Davis reflected the prevailing attitude when he actively discouraged her from going into the wine business, she recalls, by pointing put that women were too frail to lift wine barrels. But the male-only outlook is changing. Half of the 160 graduate and undergraduate students in the UC-Davis department of Viticulture and Biology, where she studied, are women.
“There is evidence out there that says women are better tasters than men,” she said.
Also, the fact that women’s experience in the kitchen exposes them to a wider range of smells, especially of herbs, gives them a distinct advantage when it comes to discriminating the complex perfumes exuded by good wine.
“I knew what nutmeg smelled like years before my brothers did,” she said.
Crane herself has been helping the wine industry’s gender transformation. Davis created a scholarship in her honor. Last year, it awarded a $2,000 scholarship to a young woman in the UC-Davis wine program.
If there is someone Eileen Crane can thank for it, it is her father, Nicholas. He worked all his life on Wall Street, heading Dean Witter’s international department, where he began in 1929. He gathered a wine cellar of some 500 bottles, having had his interest in wine whetted by his years in France during World War II. When Eileen was 8, he allowed her to taste her first wine.
“It was the labels that fascinated me at first,” Crane said. “The labels to me represented exotic places. By the time I was 8 he had allowed me to have wine at Sunday dinner. I had my own glass. But when I was 13, I realized it was a cordial glass. I was quite insulted. So I swapped it for a real wine glass.”
As a result, when Crane studied nutrition at the University of Connecticut, she was the only student in graduate school with wine knowledge. Friends would arrange to meet her at the local liquor store when they wanted to choose a special wine for, she said, “their seduction dinner.”
“On a Thursday night I’d have 10 or 15 people down there waiting for me to help them pick out wines,” she recalled.
Later, after meeting a winemaker in the Culinary Institute of America in New York who told her she could study winemaking in California at Davis, she set out for California. Her first wine-related job was as a tour guide at Domaine Chandon, where she graduated to pastry chef. In 1984, she became an assistant winemaker, making sparkling wine. After a brief spell with a Spanish company, she moved to Domaine Carneros in 1987.
“I’ve always been a sparkling wine maker,” she said. “It’s what I want to drink. There’s nothing that is so much fun as sparkling wine.” Though, she adds, sparkling wine “is the hardest wine in the world to make. There is no place to hide if it’s not good. You need to spend a lot off time babysitting sparkling wine.”
Domaine Carneros Brut sells at $16.99 a bottle, and has been listed by Decanter Magazine as one of the world’s 50 best value-for-money wines. The top-of-the-line Carneros sparkling wine, called Le Reve, sells for $55 a bottle. In recent years, Crane has been making a dry red wine — a pinot noir. The Carneros Pinot Noir sells for $27 a bottle and Crane produces about 8,000 cases of it every year. Both the pinot noir and the sparkling wine have one thing in common, however. They are both made from grapes that flourish best in a cool climate. It is no coincidence that the champagne is the northernmost winemaking district in the world. But according to Crane, the Carneros sparkling wines have one advantage over their French equivalents: every year is a vintage year in Napa Valley.
“In champagne you have great years and lousy years,” she said. “In Carneros, you have great years and very good years.” For this reason, she finds it hard to answer the question of which wines from which years might be her favorites.
Crane’s father visited Ireland many years ago to look up his relations. But she has only been there once — in 1969, when she was a student. One day soon, she said, she plans to spend a month or six weeks there. In the meantime, she is celebrating her 16th harvest at Carneros. Asked what she likes best about having winemaking in her blood, she replies without hesitation: “You are tied to the earth, you are tied to the seasons.”

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