Bright pale lemon with a fine, energetic mousse. Aromatics jump from the glass: green apple, stone fruit, kumquat, and a spicy floral lift over the saline undertone that marks Delta-grown Albariño. The palate is extra brut and light on its feet — whole-cluster pressed, settled two days for purity, finished with crackling acidity and a citrus-pith snap. The 2024 reads fresh and linear, with the grape's character front and center rather than buried under autolytic weight.

This is the wine that started Carboniste. Dan and Jacqueline Person met at UC Davis, and after Dan's three years making traditional-method sparkling at Schramsberg, they decided California sparkling wine had a problem: it was all trying to be Champagne. Carboniste's answer is méthode traditionnelle technique applied to grapes nobody else sparkles, built to taste like California fruit instead of imitation brioche. The Albariño comes from the Gomes Vineyard on Andrus Island in the Sacramento Delta — dry-farmed, transitioning to organic, worked by a Portuguese family who've farmed that island since the 1800s. There's a quiet poetry in that: Albariño is the great white grape of Portugal's Vinho Verde coast, now grown by Portuguese hands in deep river-fed Delta soil. Crown cap, no pretense, and one of the most original sparkling wines in the state.