How Sparkling Wine Began at Amista

Serendipity: A Lesson Learned…

…to help guide our third decade

As we begin not only a new year but step across the threshold into our third decade, it is the perfect time to review our vision for Amista and how it will play out in the future. Most people know that my late husband and co-founder, Mike, and I created Amista largely through a series of unplanned opportunities and happy accidents.

What most people don’t know is that we crafted a vision for Amista at its very beginning. We reviewed it every few years to examine its relevance. We have made refinements along the way, although it has remained fundamentally the same. I am gratified that it has stood the test of time.

The centerpiece of our vision is what I call our core purpose. It is essentially the promise we make to our customers. Here is ours:

Amista Vineyards crafts distinctive wines and exceptional experiences – to make your everyday moments special and your special moments extraordinary.

The last two decades have been an exhilarating journey of opportunities, setbacks, surprises, and a lot of lessons learned. What I know from my previous work in leadership is that often the most growth and learning comes from two key types of experience: tackling things you are doing for the first time and dealing with adversity.

There have been plenty of firsts – from making our first wine, running a small business, building a winery, making sparkling wines, going solar, to achieving organic certification. And there has also been adversity in various shapes and sizes such as the two-year delay in getting a permit to build our winery, the theft of half of our Mourvèdre grapes one night during harvest, an extra seven tons of grapes picked and crushed that weren’t in the plan, evacuations for fires, and COVID shutdowns.

Both the firsts and the crises seemed daunting at the time. But they also generated energy that propelled creative solutions and decisive action. At those times, the importance of having a commitment to a clear purpose was vital. That and a good dose of humor! Once the first was accomplished or the crisis was dealt with, the final gift was the gift of learning. There is only so much you can learn from a book, a class, or from another person. The deepest learning is from experience.

Becoming Healdsburg’s Sparkling Wine House

Becoming the first sparkling winery in Healdsburg wasn’t part of our plan. Today, Amista is known as the sparkling wine house in Dry Creek Valley, offering a half dozen different sparkling wines, a sparkling wine club and a sparkling wine tasting flight. The spark that eventually led us to making our first sparkling wine was a happy accident—one that also provided an important lesson that will continue to guide us in the future.

Be Open to Serendipity

Embracing serendipity means recognizing that accidents and unexpected happenings present opportunities. Here is one example that led to the creation of a new wine and, eventually, our sparkling wine program.

In September 2005, we decided to try harvesting our Syrah by machine. Mike was in the vineyard at night (machine harvesting is typically done at night when it’s cool) supervising the pick. He was enthralled watching the machine go up and down the rows and got so excited that he kept asking the operator to pick more rows. He didn’t want to stop.

The next morning, he was still reveling over his midnight pick when he got a call from someone at the winery. They told him he had 10 tons of Syrah grapes in a 10-ton fermentation tank, and when the wine started fermenting, it was going to bubble over, go all over the floor, and he was going to have to clean it up.

He swiftly moved into action and had 200 gallons moved from the tank to neutral barrels. Neutral barrels have been used in prior years and impart no oak to the wine. His idea was that once the Syrah in the tank was fermented and moved to barrels, he would combine it with the juice he had removed.

In early January of 2006, we went down to the winery with our winemaker, Chris Wills, to taste all the wine in barrels. We decided to taste the wine that had been removed to avoid the spillover. It had spent very little time on the skins, so it was a rosé rather than a red wine. We tasted it. It was fantastic. We decided on the spot to keep it separate from the other Syrah and bottle it as our first Rosé of Syrah. This was step number one in the serendipity that would lead to our first sparkling wine.

As we move into Amista’s third decade, I’m inspired by the lessons of the past to embrace the opportunities ahead. This year, we’ll focus on how our vision continues to evolve and share more stories about the moments that shape us. Here’s to serendipity and the journey ahead!