Radiant makes the sparkling industry pop

Rusty Rae/News-Register##At Radiant Sparkling Wines, William Busch, left, and Shannon Gustafson upend bottles of young sparkling wine in a freezing bath before feeding them into a machine that will pop the top and release frozen yeast sediment. Behind Gustafson, Jay Gill monitors the bottles as they pass through another machine that puts in corks and adds wire cages to hold the bubbly. About half of Oregon’s sparkling wine makers send bottles to Radiant’s McMinnville plant for these steps, which are part of the traditional method.

Radiant Sparkling Wine Company has done as much for Oregon bubbles as the Lawrence Welk show did for Champagne on television.

The McMinnville company made it possible for winemakers to produce sparkling varieties close to home, rather than shipping them to California to be produced with traditional methods.

That popped the cork on the production of sparkling wine in Oregon. What was a handful of productions has increased to more than 100, many in Yamhill County. About half of those are now Radiant customers.

Thomas Houseman, who manages the company started in 2013 by Andrew Davis, recalled his efforts to make sparkling wine in about 2010 when he worked at Anne Amie Winery near Lafayette.

To use the traditional French method, he would have needed to send his young bottles to a company in Sonoma, California. That was the nearest facility that could carry out steps of dégorgement, or sediment removal, and dosage. The latter refers to adding a tiny, but critical, amount of wine and sugar to adjust the acidity balance.

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After dosage, he would have trucked the bottles back to Oregon to finish aging for a few months or years.

The opening of Radiant offered the traditional process a few miles from his winery, rather than in another state.

“This place saved my life,” said Houseman, who took over when Davis moved on to other projects.

It benefited many other wineries, as well, “allowing Oregon sparkling to grow,” Houseman said. “Otherwise, they couldn’t afford to do it.”

The company was acquired in May by Vinovate Custom Wine Services.

“This strategic acquisition brings together two of Oregon’s leading providers of custom winemaking services,” said representatives of Metis Advisors, which handled the transaction, in a May press release.

“Vinovate, known for its state-of-the-art full-service custom crush facility, and Radiant, Oregon’s premier specialist in traditional method sparkling wine, are joining forces to better serve the region’s dynamic and growing sparkling wine market.”

Customers send bottles of what will become sparkling wine to the plant near Alpine Avenue in McMinnville’s Northeast Gateway District. Or, Radiant sends its mobile bottling plant to the winery, where workers transfer the young wine from tanks to bottles; after time passes, the bottles arrive at Radiant in big wooden crates for the next step in the process.

Then it’s time for dosage, when the yeast rises to the necks of the bottle. A Radiant worker grabs the capped bottles one-by-one, upending them into a chilled bath that quickly freezes the sediment.

A second worker turns them right side up and feeds them into the next machine. It uncaps each bottle, tilts it slightly, and sends it spinning to force out the sediment. Bubbles emerge and the unwanted portion drips into a catch basin below.

The bottles are then transported by conveyor belt to a machine that shoots in a tiny, but ultra-important, bit of a wine and sugar mixture determined by the original winemaker. The mixture differs according to the characteristics the winemaker is seeking.

A machine presses a cork into the mouth of each bottle and drops a wire cage over the cork and neck. At the next stop, the wire is squeezed to make it secure and help contain the burgeoning bubbles.

Another machine can add a label and a mark identifying the bubbly as having gone through the traditional winemaking process at Radiant. Or, the bottles can be left blank and returned to the winery for labeling later.

The process may seem straight-forward, but it’s quite complex, Houseman said. Lee Beck, who manages and maintains the highly specialized equipment, noted it’s also expensive to set up.

The machinery makes the dosage process go quickly and maintains consistency, putting the same amount of sugar into each bottle. It’s key to have the workers there to lift and place the bottles and ensure each one gets a cork and cage, as well.

By the time a batch of grapes becomes a toast, Houseman said, each bottle is touched many times. It represents a combination of hands-on work, machinery, the growers’ and winemakers’ skills and Radiant’s dosage and bottling expertise.

“We just weren’t able to do it all here before Radiant arrived,” Houseman said. “This place is a huge blessing.”