But, as so often in Scharffenberger's career, when one door closed, another opened on an even lovelier vista. His father had been hoping to sell a small New Jersey farm and use the proceeds to buy a larger ranch in California; after languishing on the market, the New Jersey property suddenly found a buyer. Almost coincidentally with the collapse of the Lee job, the elder Scharffenberger called his son and authorized him to buy a ranch in the next 60 days. Having explored the area for months for Lee, he was qualified to take on the task. For about $200,000, Scharffenberger bought almost 2,000 acres for his father, on a hillside overlooking Ukiah -- about an hour's drive from where he lives today in Philo, in the Anderson Valley -- and went to work there, at an annual salary of $12,000, constructing a vineyard. He began in 1974, and four years later, he had grapes to sell. He was learning about viticulture. Even more to his liking, he was educating himself about wine.
His sparkling-wine epiphany came shortly after he attended the wedding of a French friend, at which champagne flowed copiously. Scharffenberger brought some bottles of champagne to the wine club he regularly attended and heard the local winemakers criticize the French wine. He disagreed. He liked it. By contrast, when he tasted California sparkling wines, typically made from grapes grown in warmer Napa, he was underwhelmed. Always relatively chilly, Mendocino County in 1978 saw an unusually cold growing season. "The Pinot Noir wasn't good enough to sell, and the Chardonnay was thin," Scharffenberger recalled. "I talked to Barney Fetzer" -- the owner of Fetzer Vineyards, a leading Mendocino County winery -- "and said, 'Why doesn't anyone make sparkling wine here? It's just like the northern part of France.' He said, 'It's a great idea.' "
In fact, Mendocino County is not just like northern France. The most obvious difference is the terrain -- instead of the limestone of the Champagne region, the soil in Mendocino is sandy loam. "It's very different soil from Champagne," said Milla Handley, an Anderson Valley winemaker who was part of the tasting group. At one point, Handley had considered specializing in sparkling wine. In the end, it wasn't the soil that stopped her. She couldn't come up with a plausible business plan. The fermentation process of champagne-method wine requires a winemaker to hold on to a large inventory while the bubbles develop. What's more, it is typically sold in this country as a special-occasion product, often a gift, with a huge spike in sales at the holidays. "When I started, I thought I would do 100 percent sparkling wine," she told me. "I couldn't think of a way to break even."
But Scharffenberger was undaunted. He decided he would make wine the way a garage band makes music: as a low-cost, passionate improvisation. He invested the smallest amount possible in equipment. The crushing and pressing of the grapes was done at Fetzer. Because it would be five years before he had a product ready to market, he also made a small amount of still wine to produce some revenue. On the basis of his inventory, he was able to raise capital, starting in 1984. "I went to people in the Valley who had money, and I sold stock, about 25 percent of the company," he recalled.
In 1985, he decided he had to give up his job at his father's ranch near Ukiah and move. "I realized Anderson Valley was part and parcel of my brand," he told me. "I built a tasting room and storage facility here. It was all about the geography of the place." But he didn't own his own vineyards; he bought his grapes from growers in Anderson Valley. "I chose the Champagne model, not the Napa Valley model of the spoiled brain surgeon who wants a lifestyle," he said. "I wanted to be the proprietor, with a winery that was multivineyard, multigrower, multivintages, and multivarietals. It worked for 400 years. Why couldn't it work here?"
One of the most challenging tasks was the marketing and distribution of the wine. "The champagne business is much more like the perfume business than the wine business," Scharffenberger said. "It's about perceived value." His competitors were entertaining restaurateurs and distributors across the country or awarding premiums to distributors for new accounts. "It requires gobs of cash," he continued. "These people had it. I didn't. I had inventory and tried to use inventory to finance as much of my marketing as possible." He staged large bashes at the latest clubs in San Francisco. "I gave parties in ratty clubs for a thousand people and would invite wait staff -- in a few years, half of them would be buyers," he said. "We would buy really cheap caviar and cheap Brie. The budget was a bottle a person. It would be a thousand bottles of sparkling wine. These people still remember those parties." He was consciously crafting an aura for his sparkling wine that would associate it with fun, not snootiness. It didn't hurt that he was having fun himself.
But he increasingly felt the need to find a partner. Big French champagne companies -- Mumm, Roederer, Piper-Heidsieck, Taittinger, Moët & Chandon -- were starting or expanding their California sparkling-wine production. "I was the poorest person in the sparkling-wine business in California by the late '80s," Scharffenberger told me. "I was the only person without deep pockets or a French partner." He was looking for someone to help him build his own winery when John Fetzer, Barney Fetzer's son, invited him to a lunch for a representative of the beverage department of BSN (now Groupe Danone), a French food conglomerate best known in this country for Dannon yogurt and Evian water. Scharffenberger brought along some of his sparkling wine. "The guy really liked it," Scharffenberger recalled. "It was a done deal in four weeks."
For Scharffenberger, BSN was a dream partner. With BSN's money, he bought property in Philo for a winery and vineyards. Then, as so often happens with dreams, the reverie ended. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe suddenly presented a great opportunity for the French company to expand its core businesses of biscuits and bottled water. To raise cash, it sold its sparkling-wine operation -- in which Scharffenberger Cellars was, as its founder says, "a little blip" -- to the luxury conglomerate LVMH in 1991. Scharffenberger stayed with his company, of which he still owned about 10 percent, but he became increasingly restless. Temperamentally, he is better suited to starting a company than to running it day to day; now, even less to his liking, he had to answer to a boss. When LVMH made a decision in 1995 to buy out minority shareholders in all its myriad businesses, Scharffenberger was delighted.
