If there’s one wine that articulates Michael Cruse, it’s Valdiguié.

The Valdiguié grape is a crucial part of Napa’s past. For most of the twentieth century — that less-exacting era of California viticulture — it was known as “Napa Gamay,” and provided the base for many wines mimicking (and often erroneously labeled as) the wines of France’s Beaujolais. Though 950 acres stood in Napa County in 1973, as of 2015 just 21 remain.

Cruse’s Valdiguié vineyards are among those survivors: Rancho Chimiles in Wooden Valley, planted in 1972; the Deming site in Calistoga, 1959. “The grape was in high demand then,” says Cruse, 36. Like Gamay from Beaujolais, Valdiguié is fruity and open-knit, but it’s often fuller and fleshier: In other words, more Californian. Cruse likes the grape because it’s delicious, and because he can sell it for a reasonable price ($29), but most of all for its historical significance in Napa.

Fruity, kooky and nostalgic throwback to the jug-wine era: That’s the epitome of Cruse.

“Valdiguié, for me,” Cruse says, “is the bottling that summarizes everything, if you’re going to talk about Cruse Wine Co.”

That is, if anyone were talking about Cruse Wine Co. Which they’re not.

Instead, everyone is talking about Ultramarine, Cruse’s label of Champagne-method sparkling wines. Ultramarine became the latest object of wine-industry fetish soon after its initial release in late 2014. Practically overnight, the sparkling wines became hoarded by buyers, showing up in restaurants for multiples of their wholesale price, flooding the wine industry’s Instagram feeds like trophies. And notably, the chatter proliferated without the support of traditional critical outlets: Wine Spectator, for example, gave Ultramarine’s 2011 Blanc de Blancs a mediocre 84 points out of a possible 100.

The Ultramarine phenomenon represents the story of California wine in the year 2016: how today’s hits are often made by social media, not magazine buying guides; how hungry our wine community is for a novelty story (grower Champagne in America!); and how insatiable our curiosity is for the perceived unattainable.

But it’s the Cruse Wine Co. wines that best express who Michael Cruse is as a winemaker. Against a landscape that often feels dominated by either top-shelf Cabernet or acidic European emulations, the Cruse wines aim to reimagine what “table wine” can be: fruity, quaffable, affordable. And more than anything, they’re intensely loyal to their California origins.

If Ultramarine is the wine of the moment, Cruse Wine Co. is a vision for California wine’s future. That’s why Michael Cruse is The Chronicle’s 2016 Winemaker of the Year.

Back to Gallery Winemaker of the Year: Michael Cruse 13 1 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 13 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 5 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 7 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 8 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 9 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 10 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 11 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 12 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle 13 of 13 Photo: Peter DaSilva, Special to The Chronicle

























Michael Cruse was born in San Francisco, to a deep-rooted California family he describes as “pretty blue collar-y.” He’s never lived outside the Bay Area; he calls himself a “gold star Californian.”

When Cruse was 10, the family moved to Petaluma to escape the city’s rising housing costs. He attended Catholic school. “Food was important, but never fancy,” he recalls. Together, he and his father would eagerly seek out sandwich joints or taquerias or Chinatown dives.

Cruse always wanted to be a scientist. At UC Berkeley, he studied biochemistry and got his first inkling of wine science when he heard a lecture by Terry Leighton, the Cal microbiologist who owns Kalin Cellars. But it wasn’t until after college, working in a UCSF research lab and growing increasingly interested in food and wine, that the notion of a career in wine occurred to him.

“If I’d stayed in science, I don’t think I could have operated in the sphere I’d wanted to,” says Cruse, who admits to a competitive streak. (His wife, Patricia Grob, a Cal biophysicist whom he met in a lab as an undergraduate, does operate in that sphere.) Having been rejected from some Ph.D. programs, he applied to the UC Davis master’s program in enology and viticulture, and was admitted. To prepare, he got a lab job at Sutter Home — as blue collar-y as Napa Valley gets.

Academia’s rat race had left him jaded; Cruse longed to create something tangible. “It was my competitive side,” he says. “I liked the idea of making a product, tasting it and deciding immediately whether you liked it or not.”

He never made it to Davis. He liked working at Sutter Home too much and was surprised that his favorite part wasn’t the lab but “the climbing,” as he puts it — the physical work of the cellar. After a year at Sutter Home, Cruse was hired at Starmont, Merryvale’s Carneros property. He eventually became associate winemaker.

Kevin Fox, who worked in the Starmont cellar at the time, noticed Cruse’s talents immediately. “Very early on it became quite clear that Mike is probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” Fox says. “His background at a chemical level, non-wine related, really spoke highly of his ability.”

“Michael would always pin my ears back on some arcane detail of wine chemistry,” says Craig Williams, then a consultant for Merryvale. “As I got to know Michael, I discovered that he was actually a very brilliant person who understood wine science, certainly a lot better than I do.”

As Cruse grew restless to launch his own project, he struggled to envision how he could contribute something new in a saturated field of upstarts. “All our buddies were starting Pinot Noir projects,” Cruse says. “But I felt like — does the world really need another bottle of $45 Pinot?”

In sparkling wine, on the other hand, he sensed a new frontier. Cruse admired the grower Champagne movement that had blossomed in recent decades — small producers who diverged stylistically and ideologically from Champagne’s long-established grande marque houses like Ruinart, Moët & Chandon and Louis Roederer. The major California sparkling houses had all adopted the grande marque model, along with its winemaking practices, often characterized by reduction, long tirage and autolysis.

Cruse saw an opportunity.

He found a book at the library, Jules Weinmann’s “Manuel du Travail des Vins Mousseux,” published in 1899. That’s how he learned to make sparkling wine.

“A lot of people assume that someone showed him how to do it,” says Hardy Wallace, owner of Dirty & Rowdy Family Wines and a current custom-crush client of Cruse’s. “But Michael’s self-taught. He just studied textbooks. In a foreign language.”

That resulted in some missteps. Two vintages of sparkling Chardonnay, in 2008 and 2009, did not turn out well. (Cruse has two partners in Ultramarine; he makes the wines by himself.) “In ’08 I used these terrible crown caps” to bottle the wine, Cruse says. “There was a hot spell, and they all exploded in my house.”

Each subsequent year, Cruse honed the Ultramarine style. Like the Champagnes from his heroes Jérôme Prévost, Marie-Noëlle Ledru and Jacques Selosse, Ultramarine is made by an oxidative rather than a reductive process; it tastes nuttier, spicier and more honeyed than, say, Roederer Estate or Schramsberg. Inspired by Vilmart’s “Coeur de Cuvée” bottling, Cruse focuses on bottling mostly the coeur — the highest-quality middle segment of the initial wine pressing. The Ultramarine wines are not inoculated with commercial yeast, not filtered, not cold-stabilized. Most important, Ultramarine emphatically rejects the grand marque ideals of house style and perennial consistency by bottling only single-vineyard and single-vintage wines, embracing whatever yearly variability that may give.

So far, all Ultramarine wines have come from Charles Heintz’s vineyard in Occidental, a site made famous for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay by the likes of Littorai and Williams Selyem. Heintz had never sold fruit to a sparkling producer before, but as soon as he met Cruse, he had a good feeling.

“I don’t care about money — I have to feel a connection with a winemaker in order to sell him fruit,” says Heintz. “I have a ‘no ditz’ rule. I met Michael, and we got along right away. I saw he was ambitious.”

In 2013, Cruse left Starmont and leased a warehouse in Petaluma overlooking Highway 101, across the street from Lagunitas Brewery. He equipped it with sparkling-wine equipment. He made his first vintage of Cruse Wine Co. that year, taking on custom-crush clients to pay the bills.

Scrappy as ever, Cruse ran down to the wire: He got his winery bond on Aug. 15, had his wine press delivered on Aug. 21, and got his first fruit on Aug. 26. For the next three years, he remained convinced he was going out of business.

From the outside, it might look like the Petaluma facility was designed to accommodate the growing production of Ultramarine, whose first vintage he would release the following year. But Cruse already had ambitions beyond California Champagne. “Ultramarine didn’t drive Cruse Wine Co.,” he insists. “Cruse Wine Co. drove Cruse Wine Co.”

Ultramarine might be the headline, but Cruse Wine Co. would be the story. Ultramarine looks to France; Cruse Wine Co. would be pure California. Ultramarine is bound by a script of prescribed techniques, grape varieties and stylistic antecedents; Cruse Wine Co. would freestyle. In Ultramarine, Cruse has partners; Cruse Wine Co. would be his own.

Most of all, Ultramarine is expensive at over $50, and, although Cruse couldn’t have predicted it in 2013, now unavailable. Cruse Wine Co. would be its blue collar-y California cousin.

California didn’t need another cult wine, after all. One virtue of Cruse Wine Co., whose wines range from $25 to $38, is that blue-collar spirit — it’s house wine, table wine, corner-store wine.

But its achievement is equally the wine style. In an era that favors angular, savory, European-inspired wines of restraint, Cruse Wine Co. is all about fruit.

From Heintz Vineyard Syrah, to Mendocino County Tannat, to Sierra Foothills Chardonnay, to a number of ancestral-method sparklings, called pétillant naturels (a.k.a. pet-nats), the Cruse Wine Co. wines all bear a signature profile. Though structured, the wines feel open and inviting, even when young. They often convey a chewy, chalky texture. More than anything, they’re exuberantly fruity.

To Cruse, that’s how you express California: sunshine and ripeness. He’s got a narrative, “classic California, but with a wart.” So the Tannat, for example, fills the Cabernet slot: still a full-bodied, tannic wine, but a fraction of the price of Napa Cab, and weird. His St. Laurent pet-nat is a Carneros sparkling wine — what could be more classic than that? — but it’s St. Laurent, not Pinot, and it’s pet-nat, not traditional method.

“Every wine has to pass the Mom test,” he says, “but still be kooky.”

His wines exist outside of culture wars, neither alienating nor indulging the low-alcohol champions or the hedonists. They appeal to the natural-wine set (for instance, his Syrah has no added sulfur), but still taste relentlessly clean. Maybe that’s the scientist in Cruse. “People look at what he does and say, ‘Oh here’s this minimalist approach to crafting wines,’” says Craig Williams, “but he’s intensely methodical.”

Though a technician at heart, he’s still capable of creating “emotional, minimally made wines,” says Hardy Wallace, a natural winemaker.

Cruse hopes to make traditional-method sparkling wine under Cruse Wine Co., too — but it won’t be like Ultramarine. He pictures a nonvintage, California-appellated sparkling, meant to sketch his vision of California beyond a single vineyard.

That vision is an inclusive one. Unlike Ultramarine, which will likely remain precious, expensive and scarce, Cruse Wine Co. has roughly doubled its production volume each year. Preciousness isn’t part of the narrative that Cruse Wine Co. is telling.

Is he getting it right? Cruse seems unsure. He swears he can’t figure out why Ultramarine gets so much hype, and Cruse Wine Co. so little. The way word of Ultramarine spread — over Instagram, among wine-industry circles — worries him. Could it fade from visibility as swiftly as it emerged?

Indeed, when he insists, “I don’t think I’m as popular as people think I am,” it may be out of fear of that precarious changing tide. “I don’t want to be popular in the sense of being hot and then not,” he admits.

That fear feels very much of the moment, born of the social-media era; it could hardly have existed at a time when wines like Ultramarine were made or broken by the long-standing support of traditional critics.

But if the story of Ultramarine is the story of 2016, then Cruse Wine Co. is looking forward. Its fruity style, its roots in history, its rejection of cultishness — that story seems poised to outlast trends. After all, the quintessential Cruse Wine Co. wine is Valdiguié, a survivor of Napa Valley changing tides if there ever was one.

In the end, it may be the dearth of other $25 artisanal California wines, rather than the dearth of grower-style domestic sparkling, that gives Cruse staying power.